Beyond the great political transformations that the process of transition from dictatorship to democracy led to, lately the importance of a multitude of changes and less relevant processes that occurred in parallel, but are fundamental to contextualize the outstanding operations of institutional change. Apparently secondary elements led by groups and people outside the front pages of the newspapers and the heads of list of candidates, but without the active concurrence of which – not only letting do and following the slogans from above, as some voices have wished make believe – the process of transition can not be captured in its full magnitude.
One of these aspects is the prison situation. The passage from a dictatorial regime in which the prison occupied a preeminent place as a repressive form, to a democratic regime in which this institution must serve for “reeducation and social reinsertion (art. 25.2 CE) as well as the retention and custody of detainees, prisoners and prisoners” (art. 1 LOGP) It was convulsed, traumatic and uneven: traits that were antonym to consensus, peaceful serenity and moderation that have both been publicized as key elements of the Spanish transition. The study on the change of one model to another, particularly on the forms of resistance that prisoners carried out in demand of a rupture with the Francoist prison model that starts from the granting of a measure of generalized freedom and an in-depth reform of the penal apparatus and penitentiary, constitutes the center of this work.
