For two years, I was a volunteer at the Modelo prison in Barcelona. Every Tuesday, I went to teach a Journalism class. The class was held in a basement without natural light, a large space compartmentalized by partitions forming cubicles for different activities. About 20 inmates usually attended my class.
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The first thing I learned is that asking them why they were in prison was extremely bad manners. So you never knew who you were dealing with unless the person spontaneously told you. If I have to give credit to everything that was spontaneously told to me, I ended up having among my students a hitman for the Italian mafia (very offended at having been convicted of counterfeiting, a crime he claimed he never committed...), a former right-hand man of Pablo Escobar, a poor boy from Terrassa who, in a bad economic moment, made the mistake of smuggling drugs on a plane and, of course, got caught (he made me meet his girlfriend to console her and assure her that prison wasn't so bad...) and a multi-bank robber with I don't know how many years of sentence ahead of him, whose wife had just asked him to renounce their common child so that her new partner could adopt him and give him his surname. Etc.
It was an enormously formative experience, especially for me. I always addressed them as "gentlemen," something that had the double virtue of expressing respect and maintaining distance. I remember one day when the electricity failed in the middle of class. We were left completely in the dark in that basement. A formidable instant silence formed. Broken a few seconds later by yours truly: "don't be scared, gentlemen, the light will be back on shortly." I will never forget the laughter that followed. Their laughter. Unexpectedly endearing.
Seen in perspective, I suppose that having a prison in the middle of the Eixample was always a complete monstrosity. The yard was very visible from many balconies, which exposed the prisoners to a certain indignity of fairground monkeys. Otherwise, as a model, La Modelo had nothing: designed for 800 inmates, it almost immediately tripled that ratio. It was ugly, dirty, and depressing, with that panopticon structure that, ominously, some newspaper newsrooms have ended up copying. The eye that sees everything and forgives nothing. The fact that Salvador Puig Antich was executed there by garrote vil, and that it was also in the 80s the scene of a famous riot led by El Vaquilla, well, that added more fuel to the fire of the black legend.
As a model, La Modelo had nothing: designed for 800 inmates, it almost immediately tripled that ratio; it was ugly, dirty, and depressingThe news that La Modelo was finally closing in 2017 provoked in me, I remember it perfectly, mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was glad that that filthy den was closed and that the prisoners, if there have to be prisoners, were relocated to more humanitarian and modern facilities. On the other hand, I thought that taking prisons out of urban centers to industrial estates, or directly to very remote open fields, has a point of social sleight of hand. Of hiding reality.People who have never set foot in a prison tend to trivialize what it means to be inside, everything that can happen to a person who is in there, not merely deprived of liberty, but vacuum-packed. Put into a dystopian pressure cooker.
A notable urban feat will be the announced recovery of the prison space, so intensely suffered and lived, for housing, social facilities... even a full-fledged green lung, I have read right here, in The New Barcelona Post. It says a lot about the vitality of a city its ability to turn itself inside out like a sock, to regenerate its most sensitive tissues, to convert bullrings and even prisons into... something else.
Would you go to live in what was once a cell in the fifth gallery? I couldn't stop wondering what would have become of my "gentlemen" every night, when turning off the light...
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