P108. Sustainable punitivism? Trying to understand what is happening with criminalization and punishment enforcement in Spain

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Abstract

In the last 25 years, Spain quadrupled criminal convictions. The explanation is not to be found in an increase in ‘traditional’ recorded crime, but rather in criminalisation processes (domestic and gender-based violence, road safety-related crime…). Nevertheless, the outcome is a significant rise in the number of criminal sanctions imposed. Among these, imprisonment -despite losing its status as the modal primary sanction, falling from 70% to 30% of main imposed penal sanctions- continues to hold a fundamental symbolic role. In these 25 years, imposed prison penalties in Spain almost tripled.
Nonetheless, Spanish prison population increased from the start of the century till 2010 and afterwards decreased. Short-term imprisonment, conditional release, sentence substitution, and extra-prison enforcement with telematic home controls are the technical mechanisms employed to increase the number of sentences imposed while simultaneously reducing the prison population.
The aim of this contribution is to demonstrate this phenomenon using official statistics and to reflect on the underlying reasons for a punitive approach centred on imprisonment, alongside a reduction in the effective prison population. A punitivist rhetoric -characterised by rigorism and firmness in the face of crime, fundamentally centred around the prison sentence as the flagship- is combined with an economistic approach. Consequently, fines become the modal response, and imprisonment is often transformed into its execution -though not always, nor for everyone, and maintaining the threat of selective prison entry- ensuring that its symbolic function and potential for control do not entail an unsustainable economic cost.
This research has been made under Grant PID2021-123441NB-I00 funded by MCIN /AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF A way of making Europe.

Author

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