Traditionally, in the month of December, the libertarian movement
remembers all the prisoners who are locked up in the prisons of the
Spanish state, and even organizes marches to penitentiary centers in
support of the group of prisoners. In the state there is a population of
approximately 55 thousand inmates, and on the occasion of the end of the
year we wanted to do a brief review to learn about the history of the
prisons that have existed in Madrid over several centuries where the
presence of authoritarian power has imposed an implacable domination.
The anti-prison memory is an aspect that revolutionaries cannot ignore,
because confinement and punitivism is one of the forms of brutality that
another possible world must eliminate. A world of freedom,
self-organization, social and regenerative justice must consider
different ways to eliminate those spaces that for so many centuries have
served to legitimize systems of domination and cruelty, whether they
were prior to capitalism or in current neoliberalism.
Since the official founding of Mayrit (in Andalusian Arabic, "land rich
in water") in the 9th century, we can perfectly intuit that there must
have already been prisons in underground dungeons next to the citadel or
militarily fortified walled enclosure in Islamic Madrid. An aspect that
must not have changed too much in Christian Madrid from the 12th century
onwards with the fortress of the Alcázar of the town and the appearance
of the Old Charter of Madrid of 1202, which established an open council
and met in the Plazuela de San Salvador, today's Plaza de la Villa. In
front of the old medieval church of San Salvador, demolished in the 19th
century, a motley group of municipal buildings arose in the 15th
century: the courtroom, the leather warehouse, the wheat market, the
councillor's house and, of course, the town prison, officially founded
in 1514. Some of these institutions, including the prison, would later
continue to be located in the building known as Casa de la Villa, built
at the end of the 17th century. As early as the 14th or 15th century,
the noble and aristocratic mansions such as the old Palacio de los
Vargas, the Palacio de los Lasso or the Torre de Lujanes included rooms
used as private prisons by the nobles of those houses.
Santa Cruz Palace or Court Prison.
This building, located in the current Plaza de la Provincia, was built
by order of King Philip IV in 1629 and housed the offices of the Mayor's
Hall of the House and Court of the town of Madrid, which had already
been named the capital of the Court of the Spanish monarchy in the
previous century. This same building was also the location of the
so-called Court Prison, which was dependent on this royal institution.
In 1767 the prison was moved to an adjacent building, but the fire in
the Plaza Mayor in 1791 even affected this building of the Santa Cruz
Palace, where the historical judicial archive of Madrid was burned. The
architect Juan de Villanueva was in charge of rebuilding the building,
and from 1793 it was converted into the Palace of Justice, officially
known as the "Palace of the Audience", that is, where the Courts of
Madrid were located, and also with prison facilities.
In the traditional and traditional culture of Madrid there was once an
expression called "sleep under the angel", a synonym for going to
prison, since the building of the Santa Cruz Palace was once crowned by
the figure of the Archangel Michael on its façade. In addition, the
streets that flanked it were known because depending on which way the
prisoners left, it was known what their sentence would be. Those who had
been acquitted or physically punished were let out through Salvador
Street, while prisoners sentenced to death by the courts were let out
through the adjacent Santo Tomás Street, which is why this place was
colloquially known as Verdugo Street. According to archive documents, it
is mentioned that in this building until 1674 prisoners were only fed
once a day, and that from that year onwards dinner was also offered to
poor prisoners.
It is not clear historically when it officially ceased to be a prison
facility, because in the 19th century it is still claimed that José de
Espronceda, Rafael Riego, Pascual Madoz and the bandit Luis Candelas
passed through this building as prisoners. Apparently, it was an
outbreak of typhus in this prison that led to the decision to move the
prisoners to an enclave further away from the city centre. Later, this
same building was the Ministry of Overseas Affairs and is currently the
headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Crown Prison and dungeons of the Inquisition in Madrid.
Since the capital of the Spanish monarchy and later of the Spanish state
was established in the city of Madrid, there was no lack of a
multiplicity of powers and complex relationships between them with their
own institutions and a legal corpus that was difficult to decipher.
While the Cárcel de la Villa was for social crimes that concerned the
Madrid council, the prison of the Court was for civil or common crimes
of non-privileged classes but under royal jurisdiction; and those who
were initially linked to the Royal Crown in some way had their own
prison, located on the current Calle de la Cabeza in the Lavapiés
neighborhood. Although its purpose was also the imprisonment of
ecclesiastics who had committed civil crimes, during the 18th and 19th
centuries, it began to be used as a prison for the Inquisition and later
the Juntas de la Fe, until its abolition in 1834.
The building was converted into housing in the 19th century and later
into a tavern; but the dungeons were renovated in 2011, and are
currently in the basement of the Antón Martín Senior Citizens Centre,
according to its official name, and they look like the cells they had
from the beginning, a metre and a half wide and three metres deep,
joined together by small barred windows. The rings that were formerly on
the walls to chain prisoners and the doors that closed the cells
individually are missing. In May 1821, according to the chronicles in
the middle of the Liberal Triennium, in those same dungeons the priest
Matías Vinuesa, an absolutist priest and conspirator sentenced to that
prison in those years, was killed with hammer blows to the head.
Although the Inquisition has been mentioned above, and although it is
known that some Autos de Fe took place in the Plaza Mayor, such as the
macro trial of 1680 reflected in a canvas by the painter Francisco Rizi
in the Prado Museum in Madrid; the Council of the Supreme and General
Inquisition, or Tribunal of the Holy Office, was located very close to
the current Plaza de Santo Domingo. The headquarters of the Tribunal of
the Inquisition of the Court, which was a split from the archbishopric
of Toledo, was established in the Convent of Santo Domingo el Real, due
to the particularities of Madrid as a town that housed royal power. In
the current street of Isabel la Católica, was located what was formerly
called the street of the Inquisition because these institutions were
located. The dungeons of this convent, later demolished, were used as a
prison for the inquisitorial courts, although these had some secret
prisons spread throughout the city of Madrid. And in the current
Glorieta de San Bernardo is where the remains of the Inquisition's
burning ground in the town of Madrid were found at the end of the 19th
century.
Saladero Prison in Madrid, confinement and liberal repression for
political purposes in the 19th century.
Although at the beginning of the 19th century the military barracks in
the city of Madrid such as the San Gil Barracks, the Artillery Barracks
or the Guardia de Corps Barracks were also penitentiary centres, the old
pig salting house in Madrid located in Plaza de Santa Bárbara and built
by Ventura Rodríguez in the 18th century was converted into a political
prison from 1831. The life of the prisoners in this prison is recorded
in numerous articles as being completely miserable, and that even minors
were locked up there, who had their own area. Only those who had money
could pay to have a cell in the so-called 'noble area', known as the Salón.
In the first years of operation, the Madrid chronicles assured that
"dozens of prisoners were crowded into filthy dungeons and relegated to
the class of the most filthy animal." Towards 1840, Madrid prisons were
managed by the City Council, and the "Society for the Improvement of the
Prison System," which was responsible for giving prisons a new meaning
in times of consolidation of liberalism, ensured that the conditions of
stay were improved. After some bureaucratic obstacles and transfers of
powers between various prison commissioners, a series of reforms were
carried out in 1848 inside the building. The republican journalist and
writer Roberto Robert described this prison in 1863 as "a prison made of
waste, destined for common prisoners; without the attractions of the
unknown, without the charm of tradition." Without a doubt, this shows us
the malice and contempt of liberalism towards the prison population
regardless of their condition; That liberal political class came only to
readjust a system of brutal domination.
Some anarchists such as Joan Oliva and Francisco Otero, both
internationalist workers who attempted to take the life of King Alfonso
XII, passed through this prison. They were sentenced to death and their
sentence was carried out in the old Campo de Guardias, an esplanade next
to a powder magazine located in the current Canal de Isabel II Depot in
Ríos Rosas. This Saladero Prison remained in operation until May 1884,
when its prisoners were transferred to the new Model Prison in Madrid.
Women's prisons in Madrid, repression specifically due to gender issues.
In the past there were houses-colleges that served as real prisons for
women, and some of these may have been recorded, such as the College of
San Nicolás de Bari, an institution located on Atocha Street whose
mission was to lock up women who had committed adultery or disrespected
paternal authority. This entity was run by the Archconfraternity of San
Nicolás de Bari, and was created in 1669 by the Council of Castile with
private funds from the stone dealer Juan Antonio Landazuri, disappearing
at the end of 1840. The treatment of women and the rules within it were
reputed to be implacable.
The Hospital de la Pasión, also located on Calle Atocha, was an old
hospital for women in Madrid, and when we think of hospitals in the past
we do not think of a space where women were properly cared for, but
rather a place where single, elderly women (formerly known as
"carracas") and other women who were determined to be mentally insane
were taken and were offered degrading and humiliating treatment.
In the 16th century, male prisoners began to be punished by rowing in
galleys for the ships and navy of the Crown; however, for women, an
institution called Casa Galera was created. The lady of the Court,
Sister Magdalena de Jerónimo, was linked to royal power, and in 1605,
she founded the "Casa Pía de Arrepentidas" in Valladolid, an institution
that would also be moved to Madrid. These were prisons for women
considered to have gone astray, and who received severe punishments and
repression for not complying with moral (and sexual) norms under a
specifically gender perspective. Beggar women, those who had to steal to
survive, or prostitutes were locked up in them, to whom the obligation
to pray, exploitative work and physical violence were applied. Gags,
stocks, ropes and shackles were common instruments in this Casa Galera,
which had various locations in Madrid. Over time, women's participation
in social life, such as riots and revolts, the practice of abortions or
infanticide after rape or not being able to support their children, were
also reasons for which they were locked up and condemned. In the 19th
century, with liberalism consolidating, these women began to be seen as
degenerate and sick, another category of gender distinction. The last
known location of this Casa Galera was in the Montserrat convent on San
Bernardo street in Madrid from 1837 until the mid-19th century.
In the 20th century, specifically in 1933, the Ventas Women's Prison was
founded as a merger of the Provincial Women's Prison of Madrid and the
Central Women's Prison of Alcalá de Henares. Founded by the Republican
Victoria Kent, it has always been promoted by the left as a humanist and
rationalist prison for women; however, from an anti-punitive and
anti-prison feminism, it makes no sense to sugarcoat the reality of the
brutality of a prison. It has gone down in history mainly in the first
Franco regime, where hundreds of women were locked up there under
sentence, or were taken to the walls of the Eastern Necropolis to be
shot, among them those known as "The Thirteen Roses". However, it is not
the only women's prison in the 20th century, as the Yeserías Prison in
the Arganzuela district served as a women's prison between 1969 and
1991. It is currently called the "Victoria Kent Social Integration
Centre", a mixed open-regime prison. Yeserías was initially built in the
1920s as a homeless asylum, then a prison for political prisoners during
the Franco regime; and when it was closed as a women's prison in the
1990s, its five hundred inmates were transferred to the prisons of
Carabanchel and Alcalá Meco.
Madrid Model Prison and Carabanchel Prison; Republican or Francoist, a
prison is a prison.
The old Saladero Prison still represented the vestiges of the absolutism
of the first half of the 19th century, which it wanted to leave behind
and throw itself into the arms of a hygienic and regenerationist liberal
movement, but no less repressive or brutal. The penitentiary system
wanted to adapt to the new cycle, a twist for a monarchy of Alfonso XII
that intended to break ties with the Isabelline period and make
concessions to progressive tendencies in the political rotation that was
being established. The Model Prison of Madrid began to be built in 1877,
beyond the Pozas neighbourhood, next to what would later be called
Moncloa, and was inaugurated in 1884 as the Cellular Prison, as it was
known at that time because it had a cell for each prisoner, although it
was also known as the Model Prison, because it was intended to serve as
a penitentiary model for other provincial prisons. Inspired by the
Englishman Jeremy Bentham's idea of a panopticon prison, that is, one
of detailed control of each prisoner in its various galleries, in June
1906 the republican and anticlerical journalist José Nakens passed
through cell number 7, condemned for having covered up the anarchist
Mateo Morral in his attack against King Alfonso XIII and his wife
Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg. He wrote an article from the inside
denouncing the inhumane conditions in which they lived inside.
During the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, many anarcho-syndicalist
fighters and strikers from Madrid were imprisoned, along with common
prisoners for social reasons. However, during the first months of the
Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, it was a prison that held hundreds
of Falangists and soldiers. On the evening of August 22, 1936, a fire
broke out in a woodshed in the gallery where many fascists were
imprisoned, causing chaos in the prison. Many of its officers fled and
revolutionary militias had to come in, resulting in thirty deaths. When
Juan García Oliver was appointed Minister of Justice in November 1936,
he declared all criminal records in Madrid null and void, and appointed
Melchor Rodríguez, a well-known CNT member, as director of prisons to
apply the justice of the popular courts and to stop the actions that
Marxist sectors were carrying out in the prisons. The idea was to
establish a popular and not a state justice system. There was a
revolution and the physical elimination of the fascist enemy was
necessary, but the aim was to lay the foundations for a justice inspired
by the people and anarchism against prison punitivism.
This Madrid Model Prison was in the middle of the urban war front in
those weeks of November, so it was practically empty and, of course,
very damaged by artillery fire and fascist bombings on the city of
Madrid. The building was demolished after the Spanish Civil War and the
Air Force Headquarters would be built on its site, in relation to the
Arch of Victory and other monuments of Francoist exaltation in the
Moncloa area. During the first years of Francoism, many urban prisons
were built in educational, religious or administrative centres;
approximately twenty spread throughout the city. Among others, the
Porlier Prison stood out, a building that belonged to the Piarist
school, and in the 40s housed some five thousand political prisoners.
Also the Torrijos Prison, just opposite the previous one, an old convent
of nuns where, among others, the poet Miguel Hernández was interned.
Although, without a doubt, the prison par excellence of Francoism was
the Carabanchel Prison, the great repressive project in the city of
Madrid and a necessary space of anti-fascist memory that is trying to be
made invisible to this day after being demolished in October 2008. Its
construction began in 1940 as a real and symbolic representation of the
fascist and inquisitorial inspiration of Francoism; and a systematic
repression against the defeated for a question of belonging to the
working social class. Inaugurated just four years later, it was built by
about a thousand prisoners who were slaves of the regime, and the works
were directed by some of the private companies and construction
companies linked to Francoism.
A fight against oblivion, against repression and against prison walls.
In a month when the six union comrades from Gijón are about to go to
prison, or when half a year has passed since Abel's imprisonment in
Catalonia, it is impossible for us not to remember those who have
suffered within the walls of prisons, and those whose bars threaten us
in our present. The spaces of deprivation of liberty are multiple; from
police stations, cells in courts, psychiatric hospitals, juvenile
prisons, or CIEs for migrants.
Every January 2nd is also the anniversary of the death in 2005 of Xosé
Tarrío, an anarchist and anti-prison activist who spent 17 years in
prison, of which 12 years were in total isolation, without having a
single permit or third degree due to the problematic behavior that the
penitentiary institutions attributed to him. He wrote the essay "Run,
man, run", published in 1997 by Virus Editorial. And in 2009, in front
of family and friends, the Xosé Tarrío square was inaugurated in a
tribute in Madrid in an urban space located at the intersection of
Calvario and Ministriles streets, in the Lavapiés neighborhood. His
mother, Pastora González, continued fighting against prisons all her
life until her death in April 2019.
The idea of the prison has served throughout history to isolate and
punish by the dominant coercive power. Whether for organized subversive
reasons, social or moral issues, the authorities have always locked up
those who did not comply with the guidelines established by that
conception of domination. Current neoliberalism imposes that power
through the State and other international super-organizations,
consolidating the crime and theft that the mere existence of capitalism
as a system of terror and exploitation implies. Any strategy that faces
and wishes to overcome this regime of capital will have to approach it
from the idea of a libertarian socialist ethical code. The fight
against jails and prisons today must raise this fight against oblivion.
Angel, Liza activist.
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/12/30/entre-muros-barrotes-y-grilletes-historia-de-las-carceles-en-la-villa-de-madrid/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
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A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
remembers all the prisoners who are locked up in the prisons of the
Spanish state, and even organizes marches to penitentiary centers in
support of the group of prisoners. In the state there is a population of
approximately 55 thousand inmates, and on the occasion of the end of the
year we wanted to do a brief review to learn about the history of the
prisons that have existed in Madrid over several centuries where the
presence of authoritarian power has imposed an implacable domination.
The anti-prison memory is an aspect that revolutionaries cannot ignore,
because confinement and punitivism is one of the forms of brutality that
another possible world must eliminate. A world of freedom,
self-organization, social and regenerative justice must consider
different ways to eliminate those spaces that for so many centuries have
served to legitimize systems of domination and cruelty, whether they
were prior to capitalism or in current neoliberalism.
Since the official founding of Mayrit (in Andalusian Arabic, "land rich
in water") in the 9th century, we can perfectly intuit that there must
have already been prisons in underground dungeons next to the citadel or
militarily fortified walled enclosure in Islamic Madrid. An aspect that
must not have changed too much in Christian Madrid from the 12th century
onwards with the fortress of the Alcázar of the town and the appearance
of the Old Charter of Madrid of 1202, which established an open council
and met in the Plazuela de San Salvador, today's Plaza de la Villa. In
front of the old medieval church of San Salvador, demolished in the 19th
century, a motley group of municipal buildings arose in the 15th
century: the courtroom, the leather warehouse, the wheat market, the
councillor's house and, of course, the town prison, officially founded
in 1514. Some of these institutions, including the prison, would later
continue to be located in the building known as Casa de la Villa, built
at the end of the 17th century. As early as the 14th or 15th century,
the noble and aristocratic mansions such as the old Palacio de los
Vargas, the Palacio de los Lasso or the Torre de Lujanes included rooms
used as private prisons by the nobles of those houses.
Santa Cruz Palace or Court Prison.
This building, located in the current Plaza de la Provincia, was built
by order of King Philip IV in 1629 and housed the offices of the Mayor's
Hall of the House and Court of the town of Madrid, which had already
been named the capital of the Court of the Spanish monarchy in the
previous century. This same building was also the location of the
so-called Court Prison, which was dependent on this royal institution.
In 1767 the prison was moved to an adjacent building, but the fire in
the Plaza Mayor in 1791 even affected this building of the Santa Cruz
Palace, where the historical judicial archive of Madrid was burned. The
architect Juan de Villanueva was in charge of rebuilding the building,
and from 1793 it was converted into the Palace of Justice, officially
known as the "Palace of the Audience", that is, where the Courts of
Madrid were located, and also with prison facilities.
In the traditional and traditional culture of Madrid there was once an
expression called "sleep under the angel", a synonym for going to
prison, since the building of the Santa Cruz Palace was once crowned by
the figure of the Archangel Michael on its façade. In addition, the
streets that flanked it were known because depending on which way the
prisoners left, it was known what their sentence would be. Those who had
been acquitted or physically punished were let out through Salvador
Street, while prisoners sentenced to death by the courts were let out
through the adjacent Santo Tomás Street, which is why this place was
colloquially known as Verdugo Street. According to archive documents, it
is mentioned that in this building until 1674 prisoners were only fed
once a day, and that from that year onwards dinner was also offered to
poor prisoners.
It is not clear historically when it officially ceased to be a prison
facility, because in the 19th century it is still claimed that José de
Espronceda, Rafael Riego, Pascual Madoz and the bandit Luis Candelas
passed through this building as prisoners. Apparently, it was an
outbreak of typhus in this prison that led to the decision to move the
prisoners to an enclave further away from the city centre. Later, this
same building was the Ministry of Overseas Affairs and is currently the
headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Crown Prison and dungeons of the Inquisition in Madrid.
Since the capital of the Spanish monarchy and later of the Spanish state
was established in the city of Madrid, there was no lack of a
multiplicity of powers and complex relationships between them with their
own institutions and a legal corpus that was difficult to decipher.
While the Cárcel de la Villa was for social crimes that concerned the
Madrid council, the prison of the Court was for civil or common crimes
of non-privileged classes but under royal jurisdiction; and those who
were initially linked to the Royal Crown in some way had their own
prison, located on the current Calle de la Cabeza in the Lavapiés
neighborhood. Although its purpose was also the imprisonment of
ecclesiastics who had committed civil crimes, during the 18th and 19th
centuries, it began to be used as a prison for the Inquisition and later
the Juntas de la Fe, until its abolition in 1834.
The building was converted into housing in the 19th century and later
into a tavern; but the dungeons were renovated in 2011, and are
currently in the basement of the Antón Martín Senior Citizens Centre,
according to its official name, and they look like the cells they had
from the beginning, a metre and a half wide and three metres deep,
joined together by small barred windows. The rings that were formerly on
the walls to chain prisoners and the doors that closed the cells
individually are missing. In May 1821, according to the chronicles in
the middle of the Liberal Triennium, in those same dungeons the priest
Matías Vinuesa, an absolutist priest and conspirator sentenced to that
prison in those years, was killed with hammer blows to the head.
Although the Inquisition has been mentioned above, and although it is
known that some Autos de Fe took place in the Plaza Mayor, such as the
macro trial of 1680 reflected in a canvas by the painter Francisco Rizi
in the Prado Museum in Madrid; the Council of the Supreme and General
Inquisition, or Tribunal of the Holy Office, was located very close to
the current Plaza de Santo Domingo. The headquarters of the Tribunal of
the Inquisition of the Court, which was a split from the archbishopric
of Toledo, was established in the Convent of Santo Domingo el Real, due
to the particularities of Madrid as a town that housed royal power. In
the current street of Isabel la Católica, was located what was formerly
called the street of the Inquisition because these institutions were
located. The dungeons of this convent, later demolished, were used as a
prison for the inquisitorial courts, although these had some secret
prisons spread throughout the city of Madrid. And in the current
Glorieta de San Bernardo is where the remains of the Inquisition's
burning ground in the town of Madrid were found at the end of the 19th
century.
Saladero Prison in Madrid, confinement and liberal repression for
political purposes in the 19th century.
Although at the beginning of the 19th century the military barracks in
the city of Madrid such as the San Gil Barracks, the Artillery Barracks
or the Guardia de Corps Barracks were also penitentiary centres, the old
pig salting house in Madrid located in Plaza de Santa Bárbara and built
by Ventura Rodríguez in the 18th century was converted into a political
prison from 1831. The life of the prisoners in this prison is recorded
in numerous articles as being completely miserable, and that even minors
were locked up there, who had their own area. Only those who had money
could pay to have a cell in the so-called 'noble area', known as the Salón.
In the first years of operation, the Madrid chronicles assured that
"dozens of prisoners were crowded into filthy dungeons and relegated to
the class of the most filthy animal." Towards 1840, Madrid prisons were
managed by the City Council, and the "Society for the Improvement of the
Prison System," which was responsible for giving prisons a new meaning
in times of consolidation of liberalism, ensured that the conditions of
stay were improved. After some bureaucratic obstacles and transfers of
powers between various prison commissioners, a series of reforms were
carried out in 1848 inside the building. The republican journalist and
writer Roberto Robert described this prison in 1863 as "a prison made of
waste, destined for common prisoners; without the attractions of the
unknown, without the charm of tradition." Without a doubt, this shows us
the malice and contempt of liberalism towards the prison population
regardless of their condition; That liberal political class came only to
readjust a system of brutal domination.
Some anarchists such as Joan Oliva and Francisco Otero, both
internationalist workers who attempted to take the life of King Alfonso
XII, passed through this prison. They were sentenced to death and their
sentence was carried out in the old Campo de Guardias, an esplanade next
to a powder magazine located in the current Canal de Isabel II Depot in
Ríos Rosas. This Saladero Prison remained in operation until May 1884,
when its prisoners were transferred to the new Model Prison in Madrid.
Women's prisons in Madrid, repression specifically due to gender issues.
In the past there were houses-colleges that served as real prisons for
women, and some of these may have been recorded, such as the College of
San Nicolás de Bari, an institution located on Atocha Street whose
mission was to lock up women who had committed adultery or disrespected
paternal authority. This entity was run by the Archconfraternity of San
Nicolás de Bari, and was created in 1669 by the Council of Castile with
private funds from the stone dealer Juan Antonio Landazuri, disappearing
at the end of 1840. The treatment of women and the rules within it were
reputed to be implacable.
The Hospital de la Pasión, also located on Calle Atocha, was an old
hospital for women in Madrid, and when we think of hospitals in the past
we do not think of a space where women were properly cared for, but
rather a place where single, elderly women (formerly known as
"carracas") and other women who were determined to be mentally insane
were taken and were offered degrading and humiliating treatment.
In the 16th century, male prisoners began to be punished by rowing in
galleys for the ships and navy of the Crown; however, for women, an
institution called Casa Galera was created. The lady of the Court,
Sister Magdalena de Jerónimo, was linked to royal power, and in 1605,
she founded the "Casa Pía de Arrepentidas" in Valladolid, an institution
that would also be moved to Madrid. These were prisons for women
considered to have gone astray, and who received severe punishments and
repression for not complying with moral (and sexual) norms under a
specifically gender perspective. Beggar women, those who had to steal to
survive, or prostitutes were locked up in them, to whom the obligation
to pray, exploitative work and physical violence were applied. Gags,
stocks, ropes and shackles were common instruments in this Casa Galera,
which had various locations in Madrid. Over time, women's participation
in social life, such as riots and revolts, the practice of abortions or
infanticide after rape or not being able to support their children, were
also reasons for which they were locked up and condemned. In the 19th
century, with liberalism consolidating, these women began to be seen as
degenerate and sick, another category of gender distinction. The last
known location of this Casa Galera was in the Montserrat convent on San
Bernardo street in Madrid from 1837 until the mid-19th century.
In the 20th century, specifically in 1933, the Ventas Women's Prison was
founded as a merger of the Provincial Women's Prison of Madrid and the
Central Women's Prison of Alcalá de Henares. Founded by the Republican
Victoria Kent, it has always been promoted by the left as a humanist and
rationalist prison for women; however, from an anti-punitive and
anti-prison feminism, it makes no sense to sugarcoat the reality of the
brutality of a prison. It has gone down in history mainly in the first
Franco regime, where hundreds of women were locked up there under
sentence, or were taken to the walls of the Eastern Necropolis to be
shot, among them those known as "The Thirteen Roses". However, it is not
the only women's prison in the 20th century, as the Yeserías Prison in
the Arganzuela district served as a women's prison between 1969 and
1991. It is currently called the "Victoria Kent Social Integration
Centre", a mixed open-regime prison. Yeserías was initially built in the
1920s as a homeless asylum, then a prison for political prisoners during
the Franco regime; and when it was closed as a women's prison in the
1990s, its five hundred inmates were transferred to the prisons of
Carabanchel and Alcalá Meco.
Madrid Model Prison and Carabanchel Prison; Republican or Francoist, a
prison is a prison.
The old Saladero Prison still represented the vestiges of the absolutism
of the first half of the 19th century, which it wanted to leave behind
and throw itself into the arms of a hygienic and regenerationist liberal
movement, but no less repressive or brutal. The penitentiary system
wanted to adapt to the new cycle, a twist for a monarchy of Alfonso XII
that intended to break ties with the Isabelline period and make
concessions to progressive tendencies in the political rotation that was
being established. The Model Prison of Madrid began to be built in 1877,
beyond the Pozas neighbourhood, next to what would later be called
Moncloa, and was inaugurated in 1884 as the Cellular Prison, as it was
known at that time because it had a cell for each prisoner, although it
was also known as the Model Prison, because it was intended to serve as
a penitentiary model for other provincial prisons. Inspired by the
Englishman Jeremy Bentham's idea of a panopticon prison, that is, one
of detailed control of each prisoner in its various galleries, in June
1906 the republican and anticlerical journalist José Nakens passed
through cell number 7, condemned for having covered up the anarchist
Mateo Morral in his attack against King Alfonso XIII and his wife
Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg. He wrote an article from the inside
denouncing the inhumane conditions in which they lived inside.
During the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, many anarcho-syndicalist
fighters and strikers from Madrid were imprisoned, along with common
prisoners for social reasons. However, during the first months of the
Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, it was a prison that held hundreds
of Falangists and soldiers. On the evening of August 22, 1936, a fire
broke out in a woodshed in the gallery where many fascists were
imprisoned, causing chaos in the prison. Many of its officers fled and
revolutionary militias had to come in, resulting in thirty deaths. When
Juan García Oliver was appointed Minister of Justice in November 1936,
he declared all criminal records in Madrid null and void, and appointed
Melchor Rodríguez, a well-known CNT member, as director of prisons to
apply the justice of the popular courts and to stop the actions that
Marxist sectors were carrying out in the prisons. The idea was to
establish a popular and not a state justice system. There was a
revolution and the physical elimination of the fascist enemy was
necessary, but the aim was to lay the foundations for a justice inspired
by the people and anarchism against prison punitivism.
This Madrid Model Prison was in the middle of the urban war front in
those weeks of November, so it was practically empty and, of course,
very damaged by artillery fire and fascist bombings on the city of
Madrid. The building was demolished after the Spanish Civil War and the
Air Force Headquarters would be built on its site, in relation to the
Arch of Victory and other monuments of Francoist exaltation in the
Moncloa area. During the first years of Francoism, many urban prisons
were built in educational, religious or administrative centres;
approximately twenty spread throughout the city. Among others, the
Porlier Prison stood out, a building that belonged to the Piarist
school, and in the 40s housed some five thousand political prisoners.
Also the Torrijos Prison, just opposite the previous one, an old convent
of nuns where, among others, the poet Miguel Hernández was interned.
Although, without a doubt, the prison par excellence of Francoism was
the Carabanchel Prison, the great repressive project in the city of
Madrid and a necessary space of anti-fascist memory that is trying to be
made invisible to this day after being demolished in October 2008. Its
construction began in 1940 as a real and symbolic representation of the
fascist and inquisitorial inspiration of Francoism; and a systematic
repression against the defeated for a question of belonging to the
working social class. Inaugurated just four years later, it was built by
about a thousand prisoners who were slaves of the regime, and the works
were directed by some of the private companies and construction
companies linked to Francoism.
A fight against oblivion, against repression and against prison walls.
In a month when the six union comrades from Gijón are about to go to
prison, or when half a year has passed since Abel's imprisonment in
Catalonia, it is impossible for us not to remember those who have
suffered within the walls of prisons, and those whose bars threaten us
in our present. The spaces of deprivation of liberty are multiple; from
police stations, cells in courts, psychiatric hospitals, juvenile
prisons, or CIEs for migrants.
Every January 2nd is also the anniversary of the death in 2005 of Xosé
Tarrío, an anarchist and anti-prison activist who spent 17 years in
prison, of which 12 years were in total isolation, without having a
single permit or third degree due to the problematic behavior that the
penitentiary institutions attributed to him. He wrote the essay "Run,
man, run", published in 1997 by Virus Editorial. And in 2009, in front
of family and friends, the Xosé Tarrío square was inaugurated in a
tribute in Madrid in an urban space located at the intersection of
Calvario and Ministriles streets, in the Lavapiés neighborhood. His
mother, Pastora González, continued fighting against prisons all her
life until her death in April 2019.
The idea of the prison has served throughout history to isolate and
punish by the dominant coercive power. Whether for organized subversive
reasons, social or moral issues, the authorities have always locked up
those who did not comply with the guidelines established by that
conception of domination. Current neoliberalism imposes that power
through the State and other international super-organizations,
consolidating the crime and theft that the mere existence of capitalism
as a system of terror and exploitation implies. Any strategy that faces
and wishes to overcome this regime of capital will have to approach it
from the idea of a libertarian socialist ethical code. The fight
against jails and prisons today must raise this fight against oblivion.
Angel, Liza activist.
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/12/30/entre-muros-barrotes-y-grilletes-historia-de-las-carceles-en-la-villa-de-madrid/
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