Continuity and change in the Spanish penal system in the 21st Century

• In Event: Criminal Law Making Policy WG Panel 1. Criminal Policy Trends from a macro perspective

Abstract

The Spanish penal system has experienced, with the 21st century, an outstanding growth (quadrupling the number of convictions); but also important transformations, in the crimes -criminalisation of conducts traditionally excluded from the penal system, as is the case of domestic and gender violence and crimes against road safety (which went from being statistically residual to explaining up to 44% of criminal convictions)- and in the sanctions -implementation of community sentences (especially community work; experiments with discontinuous imprisonment or home confinement have had little impact) and a remarkable expansion of financial penalties. But all this without abandoning the punishment of ‘classic’ types of crime -property crime, surpassed only briefly by traffic offences, was and is the modal category- or renouncing imprisonment -which in absolute figures grew during the first decade of the century and has stabilised since, but without collapsing-. And by highlighting the importance of symbolic and moralising norms, often in tension with the principles of liberal criminal law (the right not to testify against oneself, proportionality...).
In these terms, it would be seriously misleading to believe that ‘everything remains the same’; but also misleading to assume that ‘nothing has changed’. This contribution explores the extent to which it is feasible to define subsystems of continuity and change in order to better understand the apparent contradictions of this phenomenon.

Author

• Javier Guardiola-García, University of Valencia (Spain)