Life row: what is left of a prisoner after isolation?

Our first meeting with Diego and Rafael takes place in a makeshift gym deep inside module 13, where the few machines (an exercise bicycle and a rusty bench) are bolted to the floor like beds in the cabin of a ship. Nor is there any way that the weights and dumbbells could be removed from a harness anchored to the wall. There is a ball, a punching bag and a jump rope, as well as bunches of old plastic bottles filled with water and bound together with duct tape, which the prisoners use to lift more weight. Other than that, the room is miserably bare, devoid even of any smell. There is not a single piece of furniture, scrap of paper or cigarette butt to be seen. Nothing that could (conceivably or otherwise) be turned into a weapon in this high-security prison designed to house inmates with the heaviest sentences. In order to reach the isolation ward, we had to go through four heavy doors and a walk-through metal detector, where we handed over all metal objects, lighters and cellphones to a security guard. Before we leave, he will ask us: "Are you missing anything that you had on you?"

The first conclusion is that it would be impossible to escape, as warden José Vidal Carballo noted before we went inside. A doctor from Andalusia, Carballo joined the company 25 years ago and has run this prison since it opened in 2008. If an inmate did manage to escape the isolation ward, he would still have to get past the surveillance tower, the night-vision cameras, the alarms activated by infrared motion sensors, the walls crowned with razor-sharp concertina wire and the police patrols. And even if he did all that, he'd still have to get through a desert of dust, thistles and olives trees in the middle of nowhere.

The heat is suffocating under the ruthless Sevillian sun that beats down on the roof of module 13, transparent in order to make it easier for the special police to storm it by helicopter in the event of a riot. After going through another half a dozen doors with bars and glass two fingers thick (one doesn't open until the previous one has clanged shut), activated by a prison worker from a shatter-proof control room lined with screens, we finally reach the two prisoners in the modest workout room. They are young and fit, but their skin has a sickly pallor to it. You can hardly make out the pupils in their large, dark eyes, which have an absent look: after months in isolation, they're not used to focusing on anything beyond their two-meter cell. Diego and Rafael are wearing athletic shorts and sleeveless shirts that reveal strong biceps, crude tattoos made with makeshift prison instruments and deep scars on their forearms that are the result of old self-inflicted injuries.

We are in their territory: in the isolation ward of Penitentiary Sevilla II, in Morón de la Frontera, in the depths of an underworld that few people have ever seen. Here, inmates are locked up alone in their cells for 20 hours a day; their everyday horizon is a three-by-four-meter rectangle of grayish-white with a window that faces a thick wall. The cells have double doors; one has bars and the other is a remote-control activated steel door with a peephole in it for roll call and a little hatchway used to pass meals through. First thing each morning, they are given the stick that goes with their broom, a safety razor and a toothbrush that they must return after using them. Except for when the inmates are entitled to time in the prison yard (three to five hours, depending on their category), the guards are forbidden to open their cells. When someone does come to visit, the inmate must go to the back of his cell, show his hands and prepare to be frisked.

The key to the isolation system is that inmates leave the ward as little as possible. It has its yards, a telephone center, an infirmary and rooms for conjugal visits. And when they do leave, it is only for as long as is absolutely necessary, surrounded by prison workers with strict security protocols. Inmates in this ward aren't allowed to go to the prison shop or the swimming pool. And they can't work. They can only access the phone through a slit in the bulletproof glass that separates it from the courtyard. Their mattresses are fireproof, and the whole place is full of fire alarms. They are frisked before and after every time they leave their cell, which is searched every day, and if the guards deem it necessary, they can be stripped naked, according to Article 93 of the penitentiary code, the bible of the sector.

The chances of rebellion are minimal. If an inmate provokes a serious altercation, he is subdued by as many as seven prison guards, handcuffed and tied down to a bed. Then he is sent to the isolation ward of another prison. The prison workers are not permitted to use violence of any kind. "When it comes to subduing inmates, you can be more or less severe, but we don't beat them; we're not trained for that. Most of us are career prison offers, and it's just not worth it," says Javier, one of the guards in module 13. When we ask the inmates about this, they speak of beatings, nights spent handcuffed and psychological torture, but all of this always occurs in other Spanish prisons. According to one of the prisoners: "In the isolation ward at the Huelva penitentiary, I discovered what fear was. They beat me every day. The doctors covered up the beatings and the prison officers said: 'One night, we're going to hang you and say that it was suicide.' I would wet my pants when I heard them coming."

Rafael and Diego observe us with curiosity. They're not machacas , the inmates on the bottom of the convict hierarchy. They're considered to be cabecillas , or ringleaders in prison lingo. "I've been gored more than anyone," Rafael says. When you enter isolation, you become a person who gets respect. They are popular in the prison world for their conflictive nature and criminal career, with heavy sentences under their belt; people who don't give in and who have seen the inside of just about every prison in the country. Why are Rafael and Diego buried alive? The prison officers refuse to give us the details. "Let them tell you."

One thing is clear: the fact that they are in isolation (the strictest regime in the Spanish penitentiary system) means that Diego Gil López, alias "Marrajo," a 28-year-old man from Murcia, Rafael Hidalgo Castro, alias "Rafi," a 31-one-year-old from Córdoba, are considered to be aggressive, antisocial, extremely dangerous criminals. And they're prone to causing trouble.

Apart from the violent crimes that got them sent to jail in the first place, behind bars Diego and Rafi (and their fellow prisoners from the isolation ward) have earned themselves all kinds of disciplinary measures, made weapons and attacked prison officers. They have injured themselves, destroyed and burned their cells; they have tried to escape, led riots, dealt drugs and killed (or at least have tried to kill) other inmates. As adolescents, they were locked up in juvenile detention centers, and their whole existence has been dictated by a sinister jail culture - a parallel universe ruled by its own laws, where the big fish eat the little ones; where in order to be respected and boost your self-esteem, you have to be more formidable than anyone. And that means entering a vicious cycle fueled by delusions of grandeur and adrenalin where the only thing to aspire to in life is another prison.

Prisoners who end up in isolation have spent their entire lives behind bars; they have conceived their children in bare conjugal rooms; between these walls they became addicted to heroin or caught HIV, and learned to kill. The state's role is to rescue them from the clutches of that prison culture, and to not give up on them. To give them the social, psychological and educational skills they need to face the future and learn to empathize. As it says in the Constitution: "Sentences that deprive individuals of their freedom and security measures are to be aimed at reeducation and reinsertion."

Isolation is a prison within a prison. A concrete bubble. Just over 900 inmates (of a total of 70,000) are serving time in Spain in isolation. Around 50 of them are women. Half of them belong to terrorist groups; the vast majority of them to ETA.

The closed regime represents the failure of the penitentiary system; the failure to reeducate and reinsert the prisoner into society. Inmates who spend long periods of time in isolation develop disorders that are hard to cure. They lose control of their life, their ability to relate to others, family ties and self-esteem; they become apathetic, anxious, disoriented, irritable individuals who are afraid of the future and lack any willpower. They are men with an altered sexuality, which is then reaffirmed in prison culture. In short, people who are unable to live in ordinary society.

According to the prison warden, the penitentiary system has come a long way in the last 20 years. When he started working for the prisons back in 1987, they were houses of horrors run by old prison officers with scant training, consumed by the marginal nature of their jobs. The good, the bad and the worst were all mixed up in big, crowded halls, with a lack of privacy and a lot of sexual violence. The inmates had no doctors, teachers, psychologists and educators; they were decimated by heroin and AIDS and ruled by mafias. According to Carballo, the turning point came when the Socialist Antoni Asunción (1988-1994) took over the prison system. Two decades later, Spanish penitentiaries have much better resources and a very different philosophy. They are much more dignified, livable places where there is a better classification system for the inmates, to start with.

In recent years, the focus has been more on inmate reeducation - on what is known as treatment - rather than on the systematic application of the disciplinary regime. When Mercedes Gallizo (a veteran left-wing activist) became head of prisons in 2004, she started introducing programs that had been successful in one prison in the rest of the penitentiaries. And for most inmates the experience has been positive.

The big unresolved issue was isolation. In 2005, Gallizo introduced an action plan. In June 2009, the penitentiary in A Lama (Pontevedra province) began a revolutionary closed regime program for prisoners in isolation, with the goal of rescuing them through a combination of activities, sports and education designed by a multidisciplinary team (made up of a psychologist, a lawyer, an educator, a doctor, a sports monitor and an occupational monitor and a prison guard). The idea was to work with them until they were ready to be transferred to a regular ward where they could live in dignity (go to the pool, watch movies, play sports and even get permits to leave the prison on weekends) for the remainder of their sentence. The goal was to keep these people, locked up for years like animals in the catacombs of the system, from going straight from the solitude of their cell to the jungle of the street.

In 2010, this program was implemented at the Morón de la Frontera penitentiary. Less than a year later, two inmates from isolation (Félix Medina and Óscar Sierra) have graduated to a regular ward; Diego Gil is about to do the same, and four more are on their way (Rafael Hidalgo, Mohamed Larbi, Aarón Fernández and Jesús Fernández Mallén). But the project also has its flaws. Last March, two inmates in the program took their educator hostage with improvised shiv knives. The incident lasted an hour and they ended up surrendering before anyone got hurt. Days later, they were sent to other prisons.

The following day we have our first interview with one of the participants in the program at Sevilla II, Diego Gil. According to three members of the team that is working on recovering him, "he represents the best evolution of an inmate in isolation. After being in this ward for 10 years, in a matter of months he has gone from the bottom of the pit to the verge of leaving it behind." They weren't exaggerating: on the last day of our stay in Morón, Diego was notified that he would be allowed to spend several hours a day in a regular ward until he is ready to take the big step when he will leave the pit for good.

Rafael Hidalgo, Rafi, shares time in the prison yard with ETA terrorists. I ask him if they're tough. He laughs: "There are some very tough individuals in here; real men who aren't afraid of death. The ETA guys don't have that prison cred; they might have killed, but they're scared to death of the commoners. They are far from what we'd call a tough guy."

Rafa is certainly tough. He has been in prison since the age of 18. His father was an alcoholic and his mother is in a wheelchair. He's got seven brothers and sisters. A mugger since his youth, in 2005, he escaped the justice system. In 2008, he shot a man point-blank in the head and killed him in a drug dispute; he escaped again and was arrested 19 days later; in 2010, he broke out of the old Seville prison through a tunnel with his current fellow inmate and program participant, Mohamed Larbi. One month later, they were both arrested in Lleida. He's been tried for dozens of crimes. But now, he's ready to start over.

Diego invites us into his cell. Its only furnishings are a chair and a few concrete shelves with clothing, bottles of water and a radio-cassette player on top of them. A barred window faces nowhere. I take a seat on his bed. The first part of his story is an anarchic spiel about the abuse he has endured in prison. The floor is strewn with letters, sentences, notifications and petitions: it's his résumé. Diego has been in isolation for nearly 10 years. He was born in Águilas (Murcia) 28 years ago. He started using drugs at the age of 10, by the time he was 13 he was doing heroin, and by the age of 17, he had moved on to crack. His father is in jail. Diego took to a life of crime early on. Just after his 18th birthday, he was sentenced to 10 years for armed robbery.

"From then on, I became the worst guy in the prison. I was a rebel in my own way. I cut myself up; I destroyed my cell; I swallowed batteries; and I took justice into my own hands with the rapists. We killed one of them in the showers. We all shaved our heads so they couldn't identify us, but I got caught. I smashed open the heads of every mole I could find. In 2002, I went into isolation in Murcia, and from there, I was sent to the bunker in Zaragoza. In 2006, I lost my head. I took some pills and stabbed the doctor in Azebuche, Almería, 62 times and got eight more years. Then I was sent to the pit in Castellón, where I burned my cell. I came to this prison on June 13, 2010. The warden came to see me and treated me better than anyone had ever treated me before. He offered me the chance to enter the program. It meant studying, going to see the psychologist, working out, watching movies. I thought that if they respected me, I could work toward my freedom. I started in August 2010. I'm doing it for my mother. You're nobody here in isolation. Let others do their time here."

Our next interview takes place on a bench in the yard of ward 10. Félix, alias 'Ito', is 29 years old, with a sentence that doesn't run out until 2036 and a nine-year-old son that he hasn't seen for six years. He has never met his own father; when his mother went to prison, his grandparents raised him. At the age of 16, he entered a correctional facility, and when he was 18, he went to prison.

"I thought: 'When I grow up, no one will ever hurt me again.' When I was a kid I joined a gang; we went around on mopeds and every night we'd destroy businesses in Seville... People respected me; I had money, drugs and girls. In 2001, I was sent to prison for armed robbery. I haven't been out since. The last 10 years have been full of riots, fights and attacks. I tried to hang myself; I stabbed a police officer in the lung with a shiv and destroyed another officer's face by headbutting him. I was a ringleader. I don't consider myself a bad guy, but I couldn't stop. If I did, the leaders would have called me a wimp and I would have lost my reputation. I couldn't back down. I had sworn not to. I had to go around with a shiv all the time. I thought: 'The sooner this ends, the better. And meanwhile, I'm going to do as much damage as possible'."

In 2010, after a riot in the Huelva prison, Ito says that he was beaten and sent here, where a prison officer told him about the program: "He looked me straight in the eye and gave me an inner peace that no one had ever given me. I said: 'Let's do it.' That's when the ringleaders started bothering me; they went around saying: 'Ito's lost his balls; Ito's a chicken; the prisoner workers are going to screw Ito in the ass.' I've learned how to take it. I was used to taking the easy way out; stabbing, killing, that's easy. What's hard is not to react if people talk shit to you, to choose not to be violent. I'm a new man.

I've got a lot of time left to serve, but I've got the guts to get through this."

On our way out Félix asks us: "Do you know about bamboo trees? When you plant a bamboo seed, nothing happens for six years. You start to think that it's died. But the seventh year, it grows 30 meters in six weeks. I'm like a bamboo tree. I've planted a seed, and it's going to take a long time to grow. If you try to rush the bamboo, it doesn't come up. You've got to fertilize it, water it and be patient with it because it's taking root. In seven years, my roots will be ready and in six weeks, I'll climb up over the walls of this jail and leave it all behind."