Prisoner resettlement in Spain; Good practices for early-released prisoners and prisoners lost in transition that fully serve their sentence

The Spanish Constitution establishes that prison sentences should be aimed at rehabilitation and resettlement. According to this principle, the Spanish prison rules provide a progressive system of enforcement of prison sentences that promotes supervised early release as a way to facilitate reintegration in the community. The process of reintegration should start in prison – where criminogenic needs should be tackled – and continue in the community, addressing financial, family and job settlement issues. This ideal system seems to work effectively with prisoners that are early released. These prisoners benefited from the professional supervision of the probation system and from the help of third sector organizations that work in partnership with the penitentiary system. However, there is an important shortcoming of the Spanish system, because a relevant number of prisoners are only released after having served the full sentence and therefore are excluded from this transitional return to the community.