The civil servants’ unions are tense with the Generalitat and maintain the blockade of the Quatre Camins prisons, the youth penitentiary center and the Wad-ras women’s prison. In all these centers, a total of 1,200 prisoners remained locked in their cells this Saturday, in some cases without being able to leave since the protests began last Thursday. The usual weekend family visits and trips abroad were also prevented due to the lack of officials. The situation is “especially worrying” in the Wad Ras women’s prison, where a hundred inmates have not left their cells since Thursday afternoon. In Quatre Camins, the inmates were able to leave their cells on Friday but on Saturday they remained locked up due to lack of staff.
Late on Friday, the workers decided to end the protest in most centers and return to ordinary life. However, this Saturday there were three prisons that continued with the blockade and the unions assure that the protest will extend tomorrow to all prisons if there is no agreement with the Generalitat. The prison workers continue their protest after the murder of the cook at the Tarragona prison last Wednesday and demand the resignation of the Minister of Justice, Gemma Ubasart, and the Secretary of Penal Measures, Amand Calderó.
The situation is of maximum tension. The inmates are increasingly pushed to the limit and denounced their situation in a video posted on the networks and disseminated by the digital newspaper El Nacional. “We are not going to let them cut off our communications. We are locked in. The officials are doing us injustice. “We are paying the righteous for sinners,” they lamented. The video was recorded by two young people who appeared with their faces covered from module 2 of the Quatre Camins prison. “In the rest of the prisons, except in Mas d’Enric, we have done nothing,” the prisoners stated. Suddenly, the video is interrupted by the roar of the rest of the prisoners hitting the bars of their cells in protest. “Now the module begins to bounce,” the inmates announced. “There are many prisoners with withdrawal, many prisoners without psychiatric care. They must stop this because it is not fair to anyone. The officials are aggressive. They speak badly to us. For breakfast they gave us two apples per inmate and half a liter of coffee. Those of us who are smokers have only been given four cigarettes,” they denounced.
The officials are taking their protest against the Government to the limit, which they accuse of leaving them defenseless and attribute the murder of the cook to the growing escalation of attacks they suffer due to the policies promoted by the Ministry.
The Generalitat has organized a crisis committee with positions from the Presidency, the Interior and Justice to follow the evolution of an increasingly tense conflict. The Minister of Justice, Gemma Ubasart, in an emergency appearance, refused to resign and called on the unions to end the protest to guarantee that confined prisoners can leave their cells after more than two days without doing so. “It is an especially delicate situation that can generate tensions” especially in the women’s prison, where inmates have not been able to leave their cells since Thursday. Ubasart stressed that an information file will be opened to clarify the circumstances of the murder in Mas d’Enric and if something needs to be changed it will be changed.
Vice-Minister Sergi Sabrià acknowledged in El Suplement de Catalunya Ràdio that something had gone wrong if a prisoner convicted of stabbing a woman had “had access to knives” in the penitentiary centre. For her part, the vice president of the Government, Laura Vilagrà, stated that the resignation of Ubasart was not being considered and assured in an interview on Via Lliure of RAC1 that “what we have to do is sit calmly and find solutions. At a critical moment like now in prisons, what we have to do is overcome the moment and then we will see what measures should be taken.”
