The disparate prision. Inquiring the evolution of prison telos.

After the introduction of the rehabilitation model, 35 years ago, new threats and new security demands have arisen, along with new crimes that have substantially changed the reality in Spanish prisons. Many of these recent changes seem to respond to foreign trends and discourses rather than to a purely interior process. The current article summarizes the development and conclusions of the research called: “¿Resocialización o incapacitación?: Sostenibilidad del Sistema Penitenciario español ante las nuevas realidades delictivas y demandas de seguridad”. It is about a comprehensive study on the Spanish prison system, from 1995 to the present day. It was a three-year project produced by a multidisciplinary team with the help of a team of collaborators. The study includes three different kinds of cross analysis: criminal-legal, political-discursive, and empirical analysis. From the results of the investigation, it is worth highlighting these 6 points: the existence of three evolutionary stages in the Spanish penitentiary system in the last 20 years; the deficit of rehabilitating intervention and less possibilities for social reintegration; the advent of risk management actuarial philosophy; the psychological approach is taken into consideration rather than the legal procedure; the enforcement of predictive tools for decision making; coexistence of rehabilitating, managing, actuarial and incapacitating rhetoric; and the need for a global rethinking of the current criminal and penitentiary policies by orientating them from the logic of the respect to Human Rights.