‘They Need to Like You to Get an Answer’: Prisoners’ Perspectives on Requests and Complaints in Spanish Prisons

The Spanish penitentiary legislation recognizes the right to present a request and complaint regarding treatment or regimental issues to the director, the penitentiary judge, and the Ombudsman. This chapter explains how the complaint system works. Through research carried out in four prisons, and the in-depth analysis of one prison it reveals the number of requests (55,000) lodged in one year in one prison and points to the lack of a specific differentiated procedure to deal with complaints. The second part presents the interviews with 21 inmates that experience the system mainly as ineffective and arbitrary due to the lack of answers or delayed and negative answers. The low trust in the internal system turns many prisoners to the judge. Unfortunately, in the analysis of one penitentiary judge’s 626 final decisions, we found out that 98.6% were denied. Although many complaints cannot be resolved by the prison director nor the judge, it also seems clear that setting a specific procedure for complaints inside prison, time limits to respond, providing reasons, and specifying the appeals that inmates have a right to, are all minimum standards that the rule of law should live up to inside prison.