Prison leave in Spain

Art. 154 RP sets three requirements that must all be met together:

To that must be added the mandatory report from the Equipo Técnico, without which the application cannot be decided.

Once the requirements are met, the limits are these: maximum length of each period of leave, 7 days; second grade, up to 36 days a year spread over the two calendar half-years with a maximum of 18 per half-year; third grade, up to 48 days a year, with a maximum of 24 per half-year.

Two points with real practical consequences. First: days not used in one half-year do not carry over to the next, so an application filed late can lose allowance irreversibly. Second: these are maximums, not automatic entitlements.

The route is set out in arts. 160 and 161 RP and has four stages.

1. The prisoner's application. It is submitted to the prison management. It must specify dates, the address where the leave will be spent, a contact person and the reason.

2. Report from the Equipo Técnico (art. 156 RP). This is mandatory. The team gives an assessment of the likelihood of absconding, of committing further offences, or of the leave having a negative effect on treatment. If the report is favourable, it also proposes the conditions and controls for the leave.

3. Decision of the Junta de Tratamiento. In light of the report, the Junta grants or refuses. If it refuses, art. 162 RP requires the reasoned decision to be notified to the prisoner with express mention of their right to complain to the prison supervision judge.

If the person is in a prison in Catalonia, there is an additional factor that does not exist in the rest of Spain and that can prove decisive: RisCanvi.

It is the risk assessment and management protocol that the Catalan prison administration has applied since 2009. It works with two scales: RisCanvi-S, for screening, and RisCanvi-C, the full version, which assesses 43 risk factors shared among different professionals on the team. The tool produces a risk level, low, medium or high, across five criteria: self-directed violence, violence within the institution, general reoffending, violent reoffending and absconding.

That last criterion is the one that bears directly on leave, because it matches exactly what art. 156 RP asks the Equipo Técnico to assess. Its use is mandatory in classification, leave and parole decisions, and an assessment remains current for around six months.

Officially, the administration maintains that RisCanvi accompanies the decision rather than determining it. But academic studies of how it is actually used record that a high risk score creates clear friction when leave is being considered. There are technical criticisms too: some factors are ambiguously defined, there is variation between assessors, and there is little transparency about how the scoring is weighted. And there is an imbalance of information that matters a great deal: the prisoner rarely knows their own result.

Every file is different and every supervision court has its own criteria. We cannot tell you in advance what the outcome will be, and nobody honest can, but we can look at your case rigorously, tell you frankly where the problem lies and work on every argument and every document that counts in your favour.

Call us on +34 696 967 181 or +34 937 490 708, write to us from our contact page, or come to C/ Aribau 205, 2nd floor, Barcelona. You can also look at our prison law section and our page on prison lawyers in Barcelona.