The decision of the Catalan Department of Justice to accept this Wednesday the resignation of the director of the Mas d'Enric prison, in Tarragona, manages to put back on track the labor conflict unleashed after the murder of a cook at the center, at the hands of a prisoner who later committed suicide After two weeks of protests, the six unions sent a statement in the evening in which they finally agreed to sit at the negotiating table. The gesture of good will, however, is accompanied by the announcement of a two-day strike, coinciding with the electoral campaign.
The until now director of the prison, Paco Romero, made his position available to Justice after the events, on the 6th. The Generalitat did not accept it then, waiting to know the result of its internal investigation into what happened. The motive behind the attack of a man sentenced in 2016 to 11 years in prison for stabbing to death a prostitute, who had good conduct reports sustained over time and had a good level of reintegration, is still unclear. The unions had from the first moment requested the resignation of the Secretary of Penal Measures, Amand Calderó, as a precondition for sitting down to negotiate the lifting of the protests called as a result of the tragedy and which forced the confinement of the prisoners in their cells.
The decision of the Minister of Justice, Gemma Ubasart, to keep Calderó was very poorly received by the unions. With both parties castled, the conflict seemed to have no possible solution. The conversation was taken up by the Catalan vice president Laura Vilagrà and, after yesterday's announcement of the replacement in Mas d'Enric, the unions are finally now able to sit down with “valid representatives” of the Administration, although they believe that “a pawn” has been sacrificed and they insist in which they want the resignation of the secretary, whom they accuse of ignoring years of complaints about working conditions. The spokesperson for the socialists, Alícia Romero, has criticized through the social network X (formerly Twitter) that the change in the direction of the center has taken two weeks.
In a press release sent at two in the afternoon this Wednesday, Justicia explains that the now former director of Mas d'Enric and Calderó agreed on the movement and thanks him for the work done by Romero since 2005 – he then inaugurated the prison facility – and He explains that from now on he will occupy “new managerial responsibilities.” It is not known exactly when the substitute will arrive, but for now it has served to unblock the situation.
The complexity of the first case of a murder of a prison worker at the hands of an inmate in the recent history of Spain made Justice rule out accepting Romero's proposal and announced that responsibilities would be determined once the internal report commissioned was known. This call to act with a cool head did not sit well with the prison workers' unions, which automatically went on a war footing. After years of hardly any visibility, compared to other similar groups such as teachers and nurses, the tragedy allowed them to transmit the discontent that was accumulating due to the lack of responses to their complaints – the list of their working conditions has not been renewed since 2006 – and they chose to tighten rope.
Romero, a prison officer since 1988, directed the old Tarragona prison between 2005 and 2015 and was in charge of managing the transfer of the center to Mas d'Enric. Justice values his career and that is why it decides to keep him within the structure, in a position that will be announced shortly. There is no specific date for the Official Gazette of the Generalitat to publish the appointment of his replacement.
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The cessation of duties comes one day after the management teams of the Lledoners (Barcelona) and Ponent (Lleida) prisons decided to remove prisoners convicted of homicide from working in the kitchen. Since 2015, all the kitchens in the penitentiary centers depend on the Center for Reintegration Initiatives, the public company that manages the job pool for prisoners. However, the circular with the recommendations for choosing the profiles is from 2002, which does not take into account the specific risk of that activity.
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