Forging New Instruments of Mass Social Control from Traditional Materials: The Disciplinary Role of Catholic Church Personnel in Franco's State Prison System of the 1940s and 1950s

Abstract

Francoism's repression of its civilian population was based on a massified prison system and parallel system of punitive parole. At their core were religious personnel who fulfilled key disciplinary functions for the new state. By the latter stages of the civil war (1936–1939), church and lay Catholic personnel had already produced the legal justifications to underpin the repression. They blended older quasi-theocratic and anti-egalitarian philosophy to meet the disciplinary needs of the new moment where a politically mobilized society was challenging older forms of traditional order and hierarchy (before and during the war). This church–state symbiosis in Spain was already explicit by the early-twentieth century. After World War Two, as before it, Franco's ‘National-Catholic’ dictatorship deployed religious personnel speaking an antiquated language of ‘re-Christianization’ and ‘religious conversion’ to impose a modern, state disciplinary project – i.e., the sculpting and close surveillance of its population. Given the Church's full participation in this ‘divine totalitarianism’, it was paradoxical that by the time of Cold War ascendancy in the mid-1950s, it would be the same Church providing an alibi for Franco's state – in which judicial and penal systems remained militarized, and the everyday lives of its population closely controlled – to reassure Western interlocutors, who were themselves mostly socially conservative and/or Christian-Democratic, of Francoism's ‘non-totalitarian’ nature.

Introduction: Franco's ‘Divine Totalitarianism’

The civil war of 1936–1939 transformed civilians across Spain into war workers, enemy combatants on the battlefield, and often, into perpetrators behind the lines. The result was a thoroughgoing process of mass mobilization – physical, political and psychological – from whose radicalizing effects there was no going back. Knowledge of this, and of the many ways it could be used, would combine with the rarefied atmosphere generated by war, to sculpt, intensify and accelerate the repression which the Francoist victors took to its limits during the 1940s, maintaining a formal state of war in Spain until 1948. Those targeted were the large sectors of Spanish society whom the victors associated with the defeated Republic – not only with its war effort but also with the relatively less hierarchical and more pluralistic political project it had represented. The huge explosion of political prisoners which Francoism generated between 1939 and 1943, and the ensuing prison regime of the 1940s and early 1950s constituted the core of a more extensive state disciplinary project through which Francoism sought to enmesh Spaniards, inside and outside prison, in a web of surveillance. ¹ This ‘total control’ was to be established and maintained not only by the military and police but also, crucially, by the personnel of Spain's Catholic Church who were tasked with overseeing nothing less than the total ‘re-education’ of Spaniards by establishing comprehensive tutelage over the daily life of the mass of the population. This tutelage began inside the gaols, with the educational supervision of the vast number of political prisoners – drawn from different social classes, but with a preponderance of lower-middle-class and worker constituencies. ² But the Church's tutelage extended far beyond to supervise prisoners’ families and also poorer neighbourhoods in general, through forms of welfare work which had a clear disciplinary function. Church personnel ran the numerous powerful state entities (patronatos), the most important of which, ‘Our Lady of Mercy’ would administer the highly punitive forms of parole conferred by the mid-1940s on a proportion of political prisoners. ³ The power of this patronato extended from inside the prisons to deep inside local neighbourhoods all across Spain, as reports were sought from the local authorities in prisoners’ home towns on whether or not parole should be granted. In the same way, Church personnel in localities all over Spain provided intelligence to other state agencies, including the police, as well as giving (or withholding) ‘character references’ for scarce jobs, or signatures for travel documents without which individuals were not allowed to move freely in 1940s Spain.

For Spain's Cardinal Primate, Isidro Gomá, the way the new Francoist state had co-opted the Church, investing it with unprecedented levels of social and political power, came temptingly close to realizing the ‘divine totalitarianism’ Gomá had conceived of earlier in the 1930s. ⁴ That he could have thought in such terms indicates the long and virtually uninterrupted historical process in Spain of convergence between authoritarian state and ultramontane Church. Their common ideological ground lay in profoundly anti-egalitarian thinking and values – Spain's Catholic hierarchy being easily the most conservative in Europe. By the early-twentieth century the Church was already conceived of as legally part of/protected by the Spanish state. ⁵ As such the Church was also symbolically interwoven with Spain's socially powerful and conservative military establishment – a connection clearly displayed during state ceremonial. It was precisely this organic/integral connection between Church and state that the reforming and laicizing Republic of the 1930s had sought to dissolve, just as it had sought to reduce the power of the military.

The Republican challenge – above all in the civil war of 1936–1939 – reinforced the ideological convergence between Church cupola and the emergent Franco coalition on the basis of the profound desire of both to defend rigid forms of social and political hierarchy, a desire that was so intense as to bring about for a time an apparent total identification of purpose between Church and Francoism. From 1938, we see criminological and theocratic concepts which had been coalescing in conservative ideology inside Spain since the late nineteenth century being turned to serve the new socio-political imperatives of the emerging Franco state. The new state would deploy military courts to punish ‘Republican’ prisoners for transgressing established social and political hierarchy which Francoists deemed consubstantial with ‘Spain’ itself. But at the same time, the prisoners’ ‘crimes’ against the ‘nation’ were also being punished as a ‘sin against God’ – because this ultra-hierarchical concept of Spain was held to be God-given and immutable. In this amalgamation, something new was being born. This was no longer merely the defence of the Church by means of a conservative state apparatus, as earlier in the century, but the making of a Catholic nation (‘National-Catholic Spain’). Moreover, this nation-building was also being achieved bottom-up by forms of mass mobilization begun during the battlefield war of 1936–1939 and now being completed through the military trials against prisoners who were constructed as the ‘anti-nation’.

‘Divine totalitarianism’ was also impelled by the Franco state's immediate and urgent operational needs for willing personnel to carry out the work of repression. The processes of wartime mobilization had created some new political cadres to help undertake this, for example, the ranks of the fascist movement, Falange, massively expanded during the war, and, overlapping with Falange, Franco's new non-commissioned officer class, the alféreces provisionales, who would from 1939 be given preferential access to prison service jobs. But the ‘demands’ of this state repression (i.e., the scale and speed required) far outstripped this ‘supply’ of new, war-mobilized personnel. The escalation of mass summary military trials Spain-wide from 1939 saw the dictatorship scrambling to find and train army personnel to run them. Similarly, the tens and tens of thousands of guilty verdicts handed out by these courts meant there was a need hugely to increase prison personnel in very short order, as prisoner numbers rose exponentially to levels unprecedented in Spain's modern history. In deploying religious personnel to fill this huge gap, Franco was making use of plentiful and willing ‘local material’. There was an older tradition of Spain's religious orders offering service inside gaols. But from 1939, the instrumentalization of religious personnel at the hub of state repressive mechanisms looked forwards far more than it did backwards. From 1939, leading Francoists, including Church figures in state roles or otherwise, would claim that the work of punishment would enable a return to an older, traditional form of social and economic order in Spain. But the mass orchestration of repression by the new state, and the mobilization en masse of Francoism's own grassroots supporters to achieve it, constituted an acceleration forward. ⁶ This singular surveilling function performed by Church personnel is at the core of Francoism's specificity as a new, mass mobilizing phenomenon of the European post-war period.

By 1939–1940 the prison system was already at breaking point as tens and tens of thousands of detainees, civilians as well as former Republican army combatants (initially held as PoWs), were transferred from their holding places in the camps covering Spain's land mass, to the prison system ‘proper’ to await processing by the military courts. This direction of travel, from camps to prisons, would go against the general trend across wartime continental Europe in the 1940s, but it was scarcely less brutal for that– first, because conditions in the swamped prisons were themselves potentially lethal (endemic torture, institutionalized abuse and epidemic disease), but also because by moving these populations from internment camps to prisons the dictatorship was in effect criminalizing them. Thousands of buildings all over Spain – factories, schools, seminaries, convents, many near-derelict or dilapidated, were pressed into service as temporary prisons, while all over Spain there were also forced labour battalions run by the army. Even so, it was the excruciating overcrowding afflicting the prisons themselves, and soon perceived by the authorities as a security risk, which primarily explains the Franco state's decision from 1943–1944 to release some categories of political prisoner into a highly controlled and punitive form of parole called ‘conditional liberty’, discussed later in the article.

But whether running the parole system or the prisons, the scale of repressive need, which is to say the state's desire to exert a total, enveloping form of control over its population, was such that religious personnel remained key. Francoism shared many facets with the other mass-mobilizing totalitarian regimes, both fascist ⁷ and otherwise – notably in treating all of its opponents as ‘criminals’. Francoism was, however, unique in being first a fascist and then, post-1945, a non-fascist form of totalitarianism. In both phases the enduring Church-state symbiosis remained key, in that it allowed the systematic co-option and deployment of Church personnel, structures and networks to perform repression for the state. After 1945 there was a significant extra benefit in the arrangement, too. For the Church's continuing participation also served as a mask, or shield to ‘manage’ official Western perceptions of Francoism as ‘not totalitarian’, even though its penal system (extending far beyond the gaols), its prison authorities and the dictatorship's desire to exert ‘total control’ over its population remained unchanged from the 1940s through the 1960s.

The rest of the article is divided into five sections. In the first we consider the ideological legitimation/elaboration of prisoner re-education from the end of the 1930s, and in the second the building of Franco's penal system/devising of policies. The third section discusses implementation from 1939, focusing on two aspects: (i) the mass transportation of internment camp inmates to the prisons; and (ii) the implementation by the Church of the Franco state's highly punitive parole scheme. In the fourth section we underscore the notable continuity of this penal system beyond the mid-1950s, despite the discursive spin necessarily applied by Franco once Spain had fully entered the Western bloc and formally accepted UN norms on prison reform/governance. The fifth section is the article's conclusion.

Ideologically Legitimizing/Elaborating Mass Prisoner Re-Education

Right from the start of the war in 1936, Church and lay Catholic elites worked with the Francoist authorities to elaborate the ideological basis of punishment, through law and jurisprudence. They blended older quasi-theocratic and anti-egalitarian philosophy to meet the disciplinary needs of the new moment where the politically mobilized society of the 1930s was challenging older forms of traditional order and hierarchy (already before the war of 1936–1939, but especially during it). By 1938 key portfolios in Franco's wartime government and among high-ranking ministerial staff were filled by members of Spain's powerful lay Catholic organization, the ACNP (Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas), which was tasked with elaborating the new system for prisoner re-education. ⁸

The dictatorship would legitimize mass imprisonment, and the later long-term mass surveillance/supervision of released political prisoners by reference to Catholic conceptions of guilt, expiation and atonement, which were held as common currency among the various components of the Francoist coalition. Anti-egalitarian values had already become powerfully explicit in opposition to the Second Republic's social reforms from 1931. But the Church hierarchy as well as the upper echelons of the lay Catholic organizations had also become more intransigent as a result of the outbreak of anti-clerical violence in the opening phase of the war in those areas of (mainly urban) Spain where the military coup against the Republic was successfully resisted. It was the Francoists’ ensuing ‘crusade’ to reimpose iron control and political/social hierarchy on those areas which would keep all sectors of the Franco coalition together, notwithstanding Church and ACNP concerns about the ‘pagan’ or statist outer edges of fascist totalitarianism internationally. This was mainly a concern about Nazism – even though Hitler was a major contributor to Franco's war machine – and it strengthened especially after the condemnatory papal encyclicals of 1937, Mit Brennender Sorge and Divini Redemptoris. ⁹ (Such ‘pagan’ fears were less of a concern to the fascist Falange whose own Catholicism was inextricably linked to its worship of a hierarchical nation.)

All the coalition's components remained united in their belief that the new Francoist state must give no quarter to the political enemy, indeed had to annihilate it. Extrajudicial and quasi-judicial killing by state forces continued in the 1940s. But the work of annihilation should be understood principally in terms of the eradication of a political culture and ways of thinking. ¹⁰ Not only would there not, in practice, be any incorporation of Republican personnel or ideas into the new Francoist political sphere, but neither would there be an ‘amnesty’ for those large sectors of the Spanish population – including large numbers of demobilized soldiers – deemed to be socially or politically associated with the Republic. Franco himself described amnesty as the ‘rotten fruit of liberalism’ – and here there would be no subsequent finessing or readjustment to acknowledge that elsewhere in Europe policies of amnesty became part of the political exit strategies deployed from the Second World War. ¹¹ Instead, the new massified Franco prison system, combined with extramural regimes of control, would be used to re-educate the defeated. Prison routine and especially religious tutelage therein, was intended to destroy the previous selves and values of the political prisoners, something its Catholic architects described as a conversion project to ‘re-Christianize’. ¹² Here, a language of old-style moral crusading was being deployed, against amnesty, to annihilate what a prisoner had been and to enforce the absolute submission of the self to the new Francoist national community. For Francoism, the reintegration of the ‘defeated’ into the new society could only come via their admission of, and redemption from, their sins/crimes through this disciplinary process.

This legitimation of Francoist power, and its right to punish, was borrowed from the work of traditionalist (i.e., quasi-theocratic) Catholics jurists, such as Balmes or Donoso Cortés. According to its tenets, punishment was a heavenly right, and therefore necessarily a legal measure, against those who had violated the sacred order. ¹³ All of this was already deeply rooted in counterrevolutionary ideas inside Spain. But while, other than a generic anti-communism, there may seem no ostensible Francoist borrowing from fascism or Nazism with their state- and racial-based, justifications, there was important common ground here, because of the centrality to ultra-right-wing thought in Spain of extreme anti-egalitarianism, and which informed a belief in hierarchy that was no less extreme. In this sense, even before the outbreak of the civil war, significant parts of the Spanish right, especially their youth movements, looked admiringly to the strength of fascism as more effective than social Catholicism as a means of controlling the ‘chaos’ of mass society. ¹⁴ And even though fundamentalist Catholicism put some limits on how radical social-Darwinist policies could be implemented, in prisons or elsewhere, the Spanish right, and Francoism thereafter, fully embraced the segregationist thrust of such policies, and indeed embraced racialized conceptualizations of their political enemies, which justified and reinforced their core belief in their right to impose an innately unequal order. ¹⁵

Building the System of Prison Re-Education

The plan to ‘morally regenerate the defeated’, as it was termed by Cardinal Primate Gomá, was to begin in the prisons as a close collaboration between the Church and the Army, and was formally set in motion at the beginning of 1939. ¹⁶ The gaols themselves would be militarized and run by secret decree for the duration of the Franco regime. Within this, the linchpin of the Church's prison re-education programme, which connected the gaols to the parole system, was a scheme called the ‘redemption [i.e., remission] of prison sentences through work’ (Redención de Penas por el Trabajo) run by the powerful patronato of ‘Our Lady of Mercy’. This scheme, probably better than any other, encapsulated the symbiosis of Church-state action. Prisoners granted access to the scheme could perform work which would reduce the time to be served as sentence. But access to the scheme was controlled: only those deemed contrite/displaying repentance were eligible, so from the beginning it inculcated dependence. Aside from endemic brutality, this inculcation of dependence was the other guiding principle of prison management: prisoners were to be made to understand that those of them who had access even to basic survival, did so by the grace and favour of their captors. The choreography of prison space and prison routines was all geared to achieving this sense of inferiority.

Conversely, the foremost shared element in the mindset of the victorious Franco coalition was its belief in a superior ‘moral’ class – one as if coincidentally congruent with existing elites, whose ‘charity’ would thus become another way of re-establishing previously-threatened hierarchies. Neither was it coincidental that those charged with shaping the post-war penal framework came from the lay Catholic ACNP, which had always conceived of itself as ‘the chosen few’. Owing its spiritual allegiance to the Society of Jesus (SJ) in Rome, the ACNP's mission since its founding in 1909 had been precisely to bring together powerful socially conservative Catholics in public life in Spain – whether from army, Church, judiciary, politics or business. In the new conditions of the post-war, and under Francoism's National-Catholic canopy, the ACNP was once again the ‘junction box’ and was now charged explicitly with extracting older penal thinking to serve the needs of the new massified prison system.

By early 1938 the Jesuit, José Agustín Pérez del Pulgar, High Representative of the Church for everything relating to prisons, started drafting the ‘redemption of prison sentences’ scheme. He worked in close collaboration with three key Franco ministerial personnel, all ACNP members: the Justice Minister (Count of Rodezno ¹⁷ ) who was formally responsible for prison-running; the Director-General of Ecclesiastical Matters in the Justice Ministry (Mariano Puigdollers, a law professor who was also heavily involved in Franco's purge of university staff); and thirdly, Máximo Cuervo Radigales, an army officer and military lawyer, who served as Director General of Prisons, 1938–1942. From the last skirmishes of the gargantuan Battle of the Ebro in autumn 1938 all the way to Franco's military occupation of Catalonia in February 1939, this ACNP triumvirate would not only legislate the organization of the penal system, but also write about it. ¹⁸ At the start of 1939, Pérez del Pulgar explained that their project would make work the key element through which the guilty would redeem their sin/guilt – and plans were already in train to impose forced labour. ‘Penance’ was an integral part of the process, and the observing and certification of each prisoner's ‘remorse’ thus became the key disciplinary function of prison chaplains. Pérez del Pulgar's programme for prison chaplains was based on the strict observance of the phases of penance – first, the identification and acceptance of the sin(s) committed; second, the prayer of conversion; and third making amends and a new project of life. Additionally, confession was prescribed, but also control of a prisoner's family (also overseen by the ‘Our Lady of Mercy’ patronato). Nor was it coincidental that this same tripartite choreography would soon shape the state sentencing format itself.

Much of this programme was rooted in authoritarian social-Catholic thought traceable to at least the 1920s. The ACNP was well-versed in Italian social legislation of the Fascist era, some of which had been drawn on during Spain's own 1920s dictatorship under General Miguel Primo de Rivera. There was a direct link here in the remarkable role played by Eduardo Aunós, Primo's Minister of Labour and then Franco's Falangist Minister of Justice from 1943 to 1945. The ‘sentence redemption’ scheme drew on these previous ideas and experiences, as well as on others from the 1930s, which had come to unite the mass Catholic right-wing party CEDA's advocacy of Christian Law with a spectrum reaching to those who would be Falangist ministers in the 1940s, such as Aunós and Raimundo Fernández Cuesta. In essence, all of this harked back to the powerful organizational model long deployed by Spain's influential lay Catholic association, Catholic Action (Acción Católica), which conceived of itself as a ministry to protect workers – especially in urbanizing areas and larger towns – from what was deemed the threat of ‘insidious communists’. ¹⁹

The combination of religious, political and social principles encoded in the ‘sentence redemption’ scheme became law on 23 November 1940. After the core principle of work, came religious and patriotic instruction, and cultural education, on all of which other ACNP luminaries collaborated. They were also able to deploy much prison labour power here, in the many artists and intellectuals of left or liberal persuasion who were incarcerated during the 1940s. ²⁰ One of these prisoners’ duties was to run the newspaper Redención (Redemption), created by the authorities and destined for both prisoners and their families. The ACNP's often abstractly expressed ideas were disseminated to prison populations through one small book written by the chaplain of Barcelona's Model Prison, Martín Torrent. Entitled ¿Qué me dice usted de los presos? (What do you have to say of the prisoners?), it repeated del Pulgar's ideas colloquially. Once Torrent became Chaplain-General of Prisons in 1946, he conducted his inspections of political prisoners with only one goal in mind: to ‘know’ them in order to classify them. Torrent himself explained that it was a matter of separating the different types: ‘some happily willing to accept the evangelizing seed; others, reluctant, having lost, or ignorant of faith; others, incredulous, out of ignorance or resentment, and others, inveterate materialists capable of resisting and denying the spiritual possibility’. ²¹ These basic rules as formulated by del Pulgar, and following the papal maxim of ‘justice with crime and benevolence with the mistaken’, inspired the Francoist penal regulations of both 1948 and 1956. But while the language was abstract and often antiquated, what was at stake here – and very much the goal of ACNP endeavours as codified in Torrent's widely-disseminated book – was a fear-based project designed to change prisoner behaviour, which was then recorded as ‘religious conversion’. This underlying goal was apparent in the importance these same spiritual authorities placed on breaking up solidarity among political prisoners, often through the use of solitary confinement (punishment cells); and also in the way the authorities sought to intensify their control by explicitly connecting a prisoner's fate with that of their family.

Implementing the Penal System

From Camp to Prison

By the time of Franco's wartime victory on 1 April 1939, an internment camp archipelago containing well over half a million people was spread out across Spain's landmass. ²² In it were soldiers from the Republican army and a large population of captured civilians, all of whom had been confined for investigation, categorization and punishment. Some would be sent directly to forced labour brigades. Larger numbers of both ex-soldiers and civilians would pass before summary military courts charged with ‘military rebellion’ or ‘aiding military rebellion’ – the dictatorship's newspeak for having supported the legal Republican government of Spain against the July 1936 military coup. Many others never made it out of the camps at all, whether through extrajudicial execution in or around the perimeters, or because they died of neglect. In mid-October 1939, the concentration camp of Castuera (Badajoz, Extremadura) in southern Spain, with an estimated population of 5000 detainees, started to be shifted into the prisons ‘proper’. On orders from Madrid, between 2 and 6 December, a large chunk of the prisoners were transported in trains to Orduña gaol in the Basque Country at the other end of Spain. Of the 1891 thus transported, only 300 were still alive one year on. The regime's medical verdict opined: ‘most of the deceased died from diseases acquired prior to their internment; or from loss of their natural physical defences because of the conditions prevailing in Extremadura, especially in the concentration camp of Castuera’. ²³ But in reality, conditions were also disastrous in the receiving prisons, where Church personnel constituted an integral presence in each prison's governing body (most importantly on executive and disciplinary committees). Conditions in the prisons were further exacerbated by the incoming mass transfers from the camps. While across the rest of Europe, concentration camps were becoming the prevailing means of massive internment, Francoism was tacking its own course. Tens of thousands of camp inmates were moved to prisons, and then often also moved around between different prisons, from north to south and east to west, in overcrowded trains, devoid of food, water or any information on their final destination. The Francoist authorities engaged in this repeatedly with captured populations virtually throughout the years of battlefield war of 1936–1939, i.e., as their territory expanded with military conquest and they took more and more prisoners, and always with the consequent problems of gaol overcrowding. ²⁴ But the transportation process would continue at full tilt for nearly five more years, until late 1943, leading ultimately to an untenable situation. For women who were imprisoned the situation was equally acute. While they were, and would always remain throughout Francoism, a small fraction of male incarceration, nevertheless the figures are staggering: by 1940, some 23,000 women were in gaol – when Spain's pre-war female prison population had been well under a thousand. ²⁵ The Corts women's prison in Barcelona, held 5000, when the facility, which was formerly a convent school, had a capacity for 300. In Madrid's women's prison there were 2500 incarcerated women and children. In women's prisons of this time, the presence of religious personnel was proportionally even greater than in male prisons. But as in the men's gaols, sanitary conditions were atrocious, with resulting high levels of mortality. ²⁶ Overall, in Spain's prisons ‘proper’ – i.e., excluding the camp network and forced labour brigades – there were by 1939 more than 300,000 prisoners. ²⁷

Beyond the prisons, were the forced labour camps and brigades. The country was thickly spread with them in the 1940s and early 1950s, but some of them lasted into the 1960s – such as the Canal del Bajo Guadalquivir – originally a state enterprise to build irrigation for the large landed estates of Andalusia, while other camps were newly created in the 1950s, such as Tefia on Fuerteventura (Canary Islands), which confined different kinds of prisoner, including gay men detained under preventive detention. ²⁸ In terms of the 1940s, the names and functions of the various labour brigades would shift kaleidoscopically in a complicated exercising of state control. But in sum, the brigades, and in some cases their related camps, dealt with sentenced prisoners – political detainees and others – and also with those still awaiting trial. Most of this forced labour universe was army-run, with military chaplains incorporated among the personnel. Specific forced labour brigades were created for those young men doing military service who had been designated desafectos (‘disaffected from the regime’), which was deemed a lesser category of ‘political dangerousness’ than those being tried and gaoled, but one still in need of segregation and close control. ²⁹ Some categories of sentenced prisoner worked as forced labourers for the state without receiving wages – erecting military fortifications in border areas, rebuilding port and railway infrastructures, doing other public works, or labouring in mines or heavy industrial production. ³⁰ But large numbers of prisoners were also hired out to the private sector, especially the construction industry. All of this was also organized through the ‘redemption of sentences’ scheme, run by Church personnel on the state's behalf, whereby days worked counted to reduce the sentences of those prisoners selected to perform the labour – entry to the scheme being conferred by the prison authorities as a privilege. Private contractors got cheap labour and a system which functioned en masse well into the 1950s, and in some cases was still going in the 1960s. For each prisoner, private employers paid the state half the market rate for a worker.

In the wall-to-wall atmosphere of graft and corruption that dominated the 1940s, the prisoner labour scheme also opened up other opportunities for private companies to syphon off state supplies, predominantly the food intended for prisoner-workers, which was then re-sold on the black market. Prison governors/heads of services also engaged in this, even though they risked sanction if caught. But most were not and were doubtless encouraged in their activities by the prevailing climate in which prisoners were seen as infrahuman and disposable. Certainly this climate in the prisons, as much as in the camps, directly caused the deaths of thousands of prisoners from hunger and neglect, whatever the opinion in the earlier-cited official report on the causes of death in a Basque prison of many hundreds of those transported from Castuera camp. ³¹

The trail of death is difficult to quantify precisely with the institutional records available, but it has been estimated that some 140,000 prisoners died from hunger, sickness or were executed in the ‘post-war’ period of 1939–1944. ³² Torture and abuse would always be endemic in Franco's prisons, but before 1948 it was not even formally prohibited, indeed even the prison service recognized it was the norm until at least 1944. ³³ Many prisoners collapsed under the psychological pressure of systematized abuse, which made suicide another significant cause of death in custody. ‘Suicide’ did of course sometimes disguise extrajudicial killing, but suicides too were plentiful – often during police interrogation or immediately before or after summary military trial. Such was the case of Jenny Kehr Lazarus, a German Jewish deportee who, after being shunted between border police stations and between prisons, and after several failed attempts, hanged herself with a belt on 13 April 1940, the day after she was put into solitary confinement in Barcelona women's prison. ³⁴ A few days later, in the toilets of Madrid's Porlier gaol, 34 year-old Fermín Hernández did likewise, leaving his ‘alarm clock and his clothes’ to his cell mates. His body was left hanging for 36 hours, ostensibly because it could not be removed until the military judge attended, for which the gaol's Head of Services was disciplined, but only nominally. ³⁵ Religious personnel in the gaols were as implicated as other staff cohorts in the systemic abuse, both physical and psychological. At the end of 1943 in the Special Prison for ‘fallen women’ at El Puig (Valencia), two staff members, Sister Ana María of the Sacred Stigmata and Sister Alejandra of Saint Louis, punished one prisoner, Alejandra Albaneja, by locking her up in a basement room devoid of light, or ventilation, without access to water or toilet, and which was also the place (as all the prisoners knew) commonly used as the morgue. ³⁶

In the end, alleviation of a sort for prisoners came because the dictatorship realized that overcrowding was jeopardizing prison security itself, and thus endangering its own control. Overcrowding went critical from 1941, when, to the existing massive population of wartime political prisoners, were constantly being added further cohorts detained under the new state security legislation then starting to be rolled out (as it would be across the 1940s). Coinciding with this new influx, there was also an acute rise in those sentenced by the ordinary criminal courts for theft. ³⁷ The Francoist cupola took the decision to release certain categories of political prisoner into other forms of close surveillance outside the gaols, a scheme which was called ‘conditional liberty’ (libertad condicional). In the scheme's implementation Church personnel were integrally involved – including those from the powerful patronato, ‘Our Lady of Mercy’. Likewise weighing in the state's decision to release prisoners was the sheer cost of maintaining a vast incarcerated population over the longer term. Franco also had to compute the political implications of the Second World War turning against the Axis powers and in favour of the Western Allies from the end of 1942. But the dictatorship's own security remained the paramount consideration. A series of state pardons (indultos) were issued over successive years such that by June 1945 the vast majority of the prisoners who had been detained for their alleged political activities during the war years of 1936–39 exited gaol. But they did so under highly punitive conditions of surveillance, and as usual under the keen eye of Church personnel.

Prisoner Release Under ‘Conditional Liberty’

Rather than offering release into an open society, which did not of course exist, Franco's system of ‘conditional liberty’ would keep not only prisoners but also their families under close observation. At the system's core was the sentence-remission machinery, as designed by Pérez de Pulgar and his ACNP collaborators. A prisoner's ‘atonement’ depended on their work record and absolute obedience in gaol, together taken as evidence of the ‘repentance’ that eventually permitted access to parole. But any ‘error’ in the meanwhile did not just affect the prisoner – i.e., loss of sentence remission (the usual rate being two days for each working week). It could also affect their family ‘outside’ who risked losing the subsidy they were paid from the prisoner's wage. The family could also forfeit this if their own behaviour (as reported by the local ‘prison remission’ board) was found wanting, and then their ‘misbehaviour’ would redound to prejudice ‘their’ prisoner – whether by explicit sanction or by slowing their passage through the obligatory phases of sentence. Virtually from the start of sentence, then, the social control exercised by the prison authorities worked thus in both directions, tying the fate of a prisoner to their family and vice versa. Given the sheer scale of political imprisonment in the 1940s, the Franco regime was putting the experience of ‘doing time’ right at the heart of its broader strategies for controlling swathes of the ‘free’ civilian population. In a sense, they too became part of the prison, and thus was social segregation etched deep into the wider society.

Parole constituted the final stage of a prisoner's sentence. But actually obtaining it was a deeply fraught process. Not only did it require the support of the prison's disciplinary board – composed of prison director, the head of services, doctor, chaplain and the most senior religious sister (the latter had a presence in all gaols, male and female). It also required the support of the local ‘conditional liberty’ committee in the prisoner's home area – comprising mayor, police representative and the parish priest. But it was rare to get the backing of these local committees who saw the prisoners as the ‘political enemy’ and a potential source of local upset best kept away. Rarely did local committees approve parole, to the extent that, in order not to collapse the entire system, the prison authorities had to impose an additionally punitive condition of parole on prisoners – that they be ‘banished’ to living not less than 250 kilometres from their home, and thus in a place where they were unlikely to know anyone, which made it much harder for them to find any work whatsoever.

The local committees had considerable powers even after parole was granted. They could order the preventive detention of anyone who had previously been in prison, and they had the last word about almost anything relating to the prisoner and their life after gaol, from work to renewing a driving licence. For example, in April 1948 Francisco Martínez González, a labourer from south-eastern Spain who had been sentenced to twenty years for being part of a jury in a wartime People's Court in (then) Republican Cartagena, was released from El Dueso prison in northern Spain, where he had served as an office assistant for the Accounting Section. According to Sister María Ferrer Fernández, Abbess of the Daughters of Charity, Francisco's behaviour had been good and he had passed religious training and basic education successfully. His family had also demonstrated ‘unblemished’ moral and political behaviour, as certified by the police and the diocese of Cartagena. But one year on from getting parole, the local parole committee in Cartagena still considered ‘it was not appropriate to agree to the cancellation of his criminal record’ and refused to reissue his driving licence or permit him any freedom of movement. ³⁸

A great many prisoners had been channelled into the parole system by the end of the 1940s, via which they emerged into a society virtually unrecognizable to them. Fear, bewilderment and a blue paper on which were written each individual's legal obligations and prohibitions, was everything they were given when they stepped out of the prison gates. A single mistake meant return to prison and the first stage of the sentence cycle. To guard against this, and to allow prisoners to ‘acclimatize’, the authorities implemented mechanisms for direct oversight and control of all parolees. The first of these was the police, to whom they had report regularly so that the police could file reports back to the prison authorities. Second was the close supervision of work. Frequently this work was provided by private sponsors, individuals with close regime contacts, who oversaw and reported back on ex-prisoners’ work attitude. Third, there was a web of joint state- and Church-run charitable and tutelary agencies which exercised further control, both direct and indirect, over former prisoners and their families, in the order of a million people by 1948. ³⁹ This gamut of coercive welfare entities blended with the work of specialized religious orders and lay Catholic associations deploying the labour of ‘excellent women’. All their efforts overlapped with the work of the state welfare agency, Auxilio Social (Social Aid), which was by now also delivered overwhelmingly by women – those of the Sección Femenina, the women's branch of Franco's single state party, commonly called the Movement. ⁴⁰

The local ‘sentence remission’ boards’ direct supervision of prisoners and their families was to ensure ‘the rooting out of poisonous ideas of hatred against the Fatherland (Antipatria)’. ⁴¹ If they agreed the prisoner was exhibiting good conduct and a favourable attitude towards work, the boards disbursed to the family a very modest monthly amount. But if the family ‘erred morally’ they forfeited the funds and sometimes more. The Francoist state system also took children away from prisoners and their families, and into state guardianship. Many were interned in religious schools or orphanages whence a large number were given or sold to Francoist families of high standing. ⁴² The entire system produced a highly segregationist social structure. Luis Díaz, a parolee from 1945, described the situation to political exiles in France: ‘not only were we shackled in prison and in the cattle wagons transporting us across Spain, but we wear them still now in our “conditional liberty”; we wear them in the “fatherly” gaze of the police, in our labour … in our permanent exclusion from our professions … We are not allowed to do anything!’ ⁴³

Franco's Prisons in the 1950s: Discursive Change but a Continuity of Penal Policy and Personnel

By 1948, with the crystallizing Cold War, Franco saw his chance to reach a modus vivendi with the Western powers. Anticommunism was the ace card his dictatorship would play repeatedly over the years. But in the matter of the prison system, a cosmetic clean up would also be required. A new set of Prison Regulations were approved in 1948, the year which also saw Franco end the formal state of war under which Spain had been governed. The prison regulations were trumpeted as ‘finally, giv[ing] scientific rigor to the Spanish penal system in accordance with the most advanced doctrines that understand the criminal as a human being, susceptible of regeneration through a penal treatment founded upon the principles of Christian charity which keep him [sic] from the danger of recidivism’. ⁴⁴

On the ground, Franco's prisons remained brutal and often still lethal. Even though the very worst overcrowding had ended by 1945, with the mass pardons and implementation of ‘conditional liberty’, abuse both physical and psychological remained systemic. And whatever was written in the regulations, in practice everything still operated by the grace and favour of prison personnel, which facilitated, as surely it was intended to, the submission of the incarcerated. To this end, the 1948 Prison Regulations legally incorporated the ‘remission of sentences’ scheme (Redención de Penas por el Trabajo), which remained operative throughout Francoism, and also codified the authorities’ local surveillance of the lives of those inside the parole system.

One potentially disruptive element for the Franco dictatorship's plans to reach an understanding with the Western powers came with the 1952 investigation into Spain's prisons by the UN-backed International Committee against Concentration-Camp Regimes (Commission internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire (CICRC)). Led by David Rousset and other former deportees and victims of Nazism, the investigation in Spain was part of a sequence mooted from 1950 to cover the Soviet Union, Spain, Greece, Algeria and Tunisia. Franco struggled hard, and for some considerable time, to keep the CICRC representatives out. But in the end, in 1952, committee members were allowed, heavily supervised, to inspect conditions in a pre-selected group of 17 men's prisons. The resulting CICRC report was never released in Spain, not even in highly censored form. ⁴⁵ But, paradoxically, while the inspection did reveal the mass political repression, it also allowed Franco to claim a diplomatic triumph. ⁴⁶ After all, nobody had found anything resembling a Nazi death camp in Spain – i.e., a facility where prisoners were taken for the express purpose of immediate killing. The Nazis had also operated many concentration camps which were not death camps, of course – camps just like the ones in Franco's Spain. But, in the climate of the rising Cold War, that distinction was all that mattered, and of course the CICRC had come to Spain long after the era of Franco's own wild camps. Scenting the home strait to Western acceptance, Spain's new Ministry of Information and Tourism hastened to publish its own propagandistic work extolling the Christian and redemptive virtues of the Spanish prison system. ⁴⁷ This text, unlike the CICRC's report, was widely distributed from Spanish newsstands, and reissued three years later when Franco's Spain was accepted as a member of the United Nations.

The imperatives of the Cold War which thawed Western establishment attitudes to Franco had already been clear by 1953, when the US agreed the bilateral pacts (Pactos de Madrid) which turned the dictatorship into its client regime. Nevertheless, after joining the UN in December 1955, the dictatorship was keen to assure its interlocutors in Western Europe of the ‘modern’ and ‘scientific’ basis of Spain's prison system. Accordingly, it instituted a significant discursive turn, evident in new prison regulations published in February 1956. These saw Francoism adopt on paper the UN-codified principles of post-1945 Western penal reform: ⁴⁸ respect for the integrity of imprisoned persons and the gearing of sentence-serving to a process of rehabilitation and re-education. The curious reference to Franco's ‘political prisoners’ present in the previous 1948 prison regulations had disappeared. ⁴⁹ And whereas the 1948 version described prison as ‘transformative and redemptive’, the 1956 text revised this to ‘reforming, according to the principles and orientation of Penal Science’. ⁵⁰ But beneath the discourse, little changed policy-wise inside the prisons. Neither the spirit of Western European reform nor the letter of the 1956 regulations altered daily life for Franco's prisoners. The prisons were still run by secret decree, and the discipline and routines therein remained militarized until the end of the dictatorship in the 1970s – in contravention of UN norms. The excruciating levels of overcrowding of the first half of the 1940s had gone – though for reasons of Francoism's own security agenda not humanitarian motives. But in the older gaols – such as Burgos, Barcelona and Carabanchel (Madrid) – just as in newly-opened ones, ⁵¹ material conditions remained very poor across the 1950s and beyond, with acute scarcity of food and medical treatment. ⁵² There was continuing assault by religious indoctrination, and also the use of prisoners as slave labour or cheap labour. Nor were there real qualitative changes in prison staff, in that the old-guard Francoist military, medical and religious personnel remained in place, and not only ‘in spirit’ (i.e., through the widespread practice of self-recruitment in the prison service, as under Francoism in general) but very often too in the decades-long presence of individual members of staff. The often-referred-to entry of a new generation of university professionals (social workers, psychologists, etc.) into the prison service from the end of the 1960s was exiguous in the extreme – as such staff still were in the late 1970s and 80s. ⁵³ It was also remarkably easy for senior prison staff to speak the new 1950s language of prisoner ‘rehabilitation’ (or ‘reform’ as the Francoist lexicon called it) while meaning by it exactly what they had meant, and done, since 1939 or earlier – i.e., seeking to reconfigure prisoners psychologically according to Francoism's ideological programme. In all, the many hundreds of voices – in testimonies and memoirs – we have from those who were incarcerated in the prisons constitute a formidable body of evidence that the reality of the 1950s, as indeed of later decades, was far removed from the reforming paragon presented in the dictatorship's discourse. ⁵⁴

Conclusion

Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, the penal system – including the extensive extra-mural surveillance system of ‘conditional liberty’ – was the pivot of the dictatorship's repressive apparatus, and at its core were religious personnel performing key disciplinary functions for the new state. During the years of mass political imprisonment in the 1940s, the Church-implemented re-educative programme was never separate to, but rather an integral part of Francoism's totalitarian intent – i.e., that Republican prisoners, inside or outside gaol, would be closely surveilled and psychologically reconfigured; wiped of their previous cultures and values by fundamentalist Catholic teaching and discipline. This blueprint had originally been designed for a different world, the one in which the Axis powers won the Second World War. But thereafter, and accelerating from 1945, the continued core presence within Francoism of Catholic doctrine and personnel became – paradoxically – a screen for Francoism's still militarized and totalitarian project at home. It did this by providing an apparent ‘guarantee’ of non-totalitarianism that legitimized Franco's dictatorship in the eyes of a victorious Western establishment, which, while constitutionally democratic, was also socially highly conservative. And here the ACNP's longstanding Jesuit and Vatican connections were a strategic asset, as was the image projected by its ideologues of Franco's prisons as inhabited by penitent workers and ‘remorseful’ intellectuals all labouring for the dictatorship. It was not for nothing that Franco's close political confidant, and later Prime Minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, remarked that ‘the Catholic business plays very well in Washington’. ⁵⁵ The Church's service to the dictatorship would continue into the 1960s because it masked Francoism's continuing militarization and repression beneath a discourse of Christian forgiveness and social justice. ⁵⁶

But Franco's prison system and extra-mural surveillance could never have been achieved in the first place without the ideological labour and practical cooperation of the Church's religious and lay personnel. Converting prisoners-of-war into ordinary criminals, while enmeshing their families in the ‘moral regeneration of the Fatherland’ (Patria) was the decisive contribution of the Church and lay Catholic apparatus to the sculpting of Spain's society in the 1940s and 1950s.