The Department of Justice announced this Friday the dismissal of the director of the Figueres prison, Puig de les Basses, after he offered his resignation. According to penitentiary sources, the context of the dismissal is that the prison has been the scene of three of the five suicides that have occurred in Catalonia’s prisons so far this year, an increase compared to previous years.
The Secretariat of Penal Measures and Reintegration, dependent on the Department of Justice, has thanked in a statement “the years of dedication” of the former director and has announced the appointment of his replacement in the coming days. The department led by Ramon Espadaler initiated the replacement process this week, after the resignation was submitted.
This Monday, a 28-year-old inmate serving a three-year sentence who was not under any suicide prevention protocol took his own life in his cell, located in the Special Closed Regime Department of Puig de les Basses. The operation of that DERT, as the service is known by its acronym, was under suspicion, according to some sources linked to the prison environment, due to its results. The five suicides recorded in Catalan prisons in four months approach the six of 2026 and, if the trend continues, almost triple the results between the two years.
At the end of 2025, the Ministries of Justice and Health sealed a protocol to improve the treatment of mental health problems in Catalan prisons. And a year earlier, Justice alone presented a shock plan to address the problem of suicides in Catalan prisons, which came as a review of the program started in 2019 with the specification of 10 action measures. The first of the measures was to create a permanent table per prison capable of assessing suicide risk with monthly meetings, and another was to develop an alert system for “critical events,” as Espadaler mentioned in the presentation.
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Suicides in prisons are seven times more frequent than in the general population, and so far this year the number of suicides has increased by 30% compared to last year’s data.
Iñaki Ribera, director of the Penal System and Human Rights Observatory and spokesperson for the Xarxa Drets i Presó, denounced this Friday that, given the results, the shock plan announced in 2024 is “a failure” and lamented that the Puig de les Basses prison was not able to detect the suicide risk of an inmate who had already tried to take his own life previously. “The risk indicators do not work,” he lamented, after calling for the need to hire psychiatrists to strengthen the care of Catalan penitentiary centers. “We demand an urgent appearance by the Minister of the Interior,” he demanded.
