Three professors talk about their both rewarding and difficult experience teaching inmates and drug addicts and how to improve the way Spanish prisons re-educate and provide them with skills to integrate back into society.
“This work is not obligatory, it’s voluntary,” says María de los Ángeles Rodríguez Morilla of her job teaching in a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. “Just like those people who teach in prisons, I love my job.”
Teresa Velasco, a professor for the inmates in the prison Seville-1, says the same. “Like the other teachers, I’m capable of working elsewhere, but I don’t wish to.”
The appeal for these two women comes from the human aspect of their jobs. Both Mari Ángeles and Teresa enjoy teaching, but it is the opportunity to truly help people in need of self-reform that motivates them.
As Spanish law dictates that no person may be kept in prison longer than 30 years, regardless of the crime allegedly committed, all inmates will be re-entering society at some point. The purpose of the educative system within jails is to prepare for this re-entry.
Article 25.2 of the Spanish Constitution, approved in 1978, states that “privation of liberty and security measures will focus on re-education and social rehabilitation” of the convicted person.
This re-education very often includes teaching inmates to read and write. Mari Ángeles describes this illiteracy as a problem of marginalization, adding that many adults and older people feel shame at their inability to read and write. The chance to learn such essential skills while in prison gives inmates a second opportunity to have a new life when they become free.
Teresa has worked as a teacher in Seville-1, a prison of approximately 1,500 inmates, for 19 years. She teaches a class about general culture to two different groups of students every day who range in age from 19 to 60 years old. The students need to apply to be accepted into the classes, but virtually all of them are, excluding those few in isolation. Inmates are motivated by the possibility to obtain a scholarly certificate, which will help them get a job when they leave prison.
As a worker in the rehabilitation center, Mari Ángeles encounters many drug addicts who have come directly from prison or have been in jail sometime during their lives. The center consists of approximately 60 people, the majority of whom have a cocaine addiction, but the addictions also include alcohol, heroin and various pills. She describes her work as helping addicts through “physical, mental and spiritual recuperation.”
Mari Ángeles, unlike Teresa, works with individuals, and her work is more therapeutic than educative, although it’s possible an individual will need help with reading and writing. The center utilizes psychologists and therapies to help addicts abandon drug use. She says that all the people she encounters in her work, of all ages and socio-economic status, are incredibly grateful for the help they are receiving. Their attitudes are always positive, and they are motivated to help themselves and others.
Teresa agrees, saying that it is essential to educate inmates so that they can successfully integrate themselves in society. “They’re able to better themselves, but they don’t know how.” However, she adds that not all her students are eager about learning. “It depends on the day,” she says. “They’re not used to doing work; they want immediate benefits.” Those who are learning to read and write, though, as well as foreigners who are learning a new language, are very enthusiastic about receiving an education, Teresa explains.
Bringing inmates together in a classroom or individually treating them is not the only way that Spain addresses criminals. The term “re-education” used in the Constitution is meant to imply the availability of a number of activities that will allow inmates to effectively recuperate. The opportunity to play sports is an example of these, and it is a healthy way to let inmates relieve pent-up emotions as well as learn sportsmanship.
José Bernalte, now a professor of physical education of the University of Seville, was an athletic teacher and coordinator in what is now Seville-1 from 1991 to 1999. His job included planning, organizing and putting into effect all the athletic activities in the prison. The prison provided two soccer fields, each with a track of 400 meters, one for the preventive detention area and one for the sentenced inmates center, as well as a weight room. Inmates were allowed to play soccer, basketball and volleyball.
“Going out onto the field to play sports was a form of liberation for the inmates,” he remembers. “They were able to alleviate their social tensions, both within the prison and with their families.”
He emphasizes that he and the other coordinators worked to give the inmates an athletic education, one that would instill values in them. Among the traits they focused on were respect for one another, responsibility for one’s actions, friendship and respect for the rules.
Additionally, beginning in 1993, José organized a program with the University of Seville that allowed students to come to the prison and play an organized games against a team of inmates five or six times a year. This, he says, gave the prisoners an opportunity to interact with their peers outside of these walls.
“They were able to demonstrate that they could integrate themselves back into society through sports,” he says. The games were also enjoyable and beneficial for the university students, almost all of whom returned a second time to play with the inmates. “It was a good experience for both sides.”
He also helped organized the first half-marathon of Andalusian penitentiaries, started in 1994 and celebrated ever since during the day of Our Lady of the Merciful, patron saint of prisons. The 21 kilometers that participants had to run were achieved by taking 20 laps around the two soccer fields that the prison had combined. “We even brought in official athletic judges to make the event all the more serious,” says José.
Although José, Mari Ángeles and Teresa all work in close contact with convicts, they say that a certain distance needs to be maintained from the people with whom they work. “You need to be able to separate the human aspect of the job from the professional aspect,” explains Mari Ángeles, adding that it’s often difficult to do so. “You have to be careful,” Teresa says. “It’s hard to avoid because a lot of them are great people, but it’s not a good thing to do.”
When asked about the effectiveness of the prison system, Teresa says that there are serious problems that are difficult to reform, such as the lack of professional psychologists, but that the obstacle also lies within the fact that her students don’t know anything about work. “It’s hard to know if the problem is the system or the society where my students come from.”
Meanwhile, José calls for a more intensive education within the prison. He says that the current opportunities to learn to read and write are adequate and that the teachers are excellent. However, he emphasizes that it is not effective enough, as there is still a good amount of illiteracy. “A person should be obligated to learn to read and write before they leave prison,” he recommends. “This should be an essential requirement so that they can adapt to reality when they leave.” He states that such a requirement would very much motivate inmates to become literate.
In addition to this intensified education, he insists that problems with drugs and violence can be eliminated by focusing on the youth of society and giving them more emotional and psychological attention.
The physical education professor credits society with a significant effect on the problems that lead to incarceration. He says that so many children grow up in households that lack affection and this inevitably leads adolescents to lose their way. Isolation during childhood, José stresses, quickly pushes them to drug usage and violence.
“If we don’t teach our children how to love it’s going to be difficult to find ourselves in a society that isn’t violent,” he says. “There’s a lack of love in our society, a true lack of love.”
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