On visits by lawyers to prisons

With direct knowledge of the subject, both as a lawyer and as an official of Penitentiary Institutions for many years – in addition to others as a judge and prosecutor – I am going to make some comments to complete and clarify the article published in these same pages by the great lawyer and dear friend Luis Romero, whom I deeply respect and frequently congratulate for his courageous articles on the difficult practice of law.

In this case, however, your article on visits by lawyers to prisons suggests some qualifications to me in order to clarify a reality unknown to most people, including legal professionals.

I understand Romero’s discomfort during his visits to prisons, since I have also experienced them, more or less the same as him, in my role as a criminal lawyer for several years.

First of all, to say – and he thus recognizes – that the normal thing is the respect of the civil servants to the lawyers, as it should be.

There may be some isolated exception, but that would be administratively punishable – if it is denounced and proven – due to the legal duty of all officials, including judges and prosecutors, to respect legal professionals.

This is ordered by the Organic Law of the Judicial Power and the Basic Statute of the Public Employee. But in turn, lawyers must respect officials, which is not always done.

There must be reciprocal respect, not cordiality, something different, and already a personal attitude.

So far according to the article.

I qualify, however, the treatment of other issues.

WHAT THE OFFICIALS DO NOT ESTABLISH

The officials do not establish the insufficient visiting hours, nor the norms of access security.

That comes from above, from the political command of penitentiary institutions, through instructions and circulars, evidently improvable, from the sometimes called General Directorate and other times FROM THE General Secretary of Penitentiary Institutions, which depends on the Ministry of the Interior.

Officials carry out orders and when it comes to passing arc control and other security regulations, there can be no exceptions, no matter how well known the visitor is.

There is talk of Anglo-Saxon countries, which allow direct physical contact between a lawyer and an inmate. Partially true, because in those countries there are also visits, through grilled windows.

The system can be improved and the National Court has recognized the possibility of visits without screens due to an excellent Order of June 5, 2013, of which the magistrate in special services was a speaker. Enrique Lopez, today Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Interior of the Community of Madrid and also authorized years later, the magistrate of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, Manuel Marchena, in the trial of the “process”, everything agrees with the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights of October 5, 2006.

It would always be desirable and in fact it is legally possible, with these precedents, but it collides with the difficulty of the lack of human and physical resources in prisons, which do not have, in general today, sufficient infrastructure for it.

There remains the challenge of doing it, but that is not the responsibility of the officials but of the competent state administrative political high level or in its case autonomous.

As for the delays in the arrival of the inmates to the phone booths for communication, the fundamental causes are the insufficient number of security officers. The calls of V1 and V2 to be able to attend frequently with the desired speed to the transfer of the inmates to the call centers, together with the usual difficulty of finding the inmate, who may be outside the module, in other departments such as workshops, culture, nursing or even eating now.

But the skilled attorney knows that meal times are early in prisons. To this is added the great distances, in most type prisons, from the modules to the communications booths.

Regarding the measures to prohibit the entry of mobiles and computers, they have their reason for being in security measures, such as avoiding unauthorized communications with the outside.

There is no presumption of guilt of the lawyers, as there is not with respect to those who access them to the courts or airports.

It is simply a security measure, without prejudice to lawyers convicted of various crimes such as against public health, but that is a separate issue, such as the recent authorization of mobile phones for inmates in the third degree, in social insertion centers.

In conclusion, there are deficiencies in the system of visits and communications of lawyers with inmates, prisoners or convicts in prisons, but in no way the fault of the officials except for a specific exception as happens in everything, who do a hard job not properly recognized and sometimes reviled.

By the way, his ideal professionalism has been recognized by the Basque Minister of Euskadi, Beatriz Artolazabal, a community that has assumed Penitentiary Institutions since October 1, 2021.