Issue 11. First half 2013

El colapso de la justicia penal es algo evidente. Se necesita tomar partido en su solución, articulando mecanismos paralelos y complementarios a la acción de los tribunales, con respeto al principio de legalidad y por razones de oportunidad. Dar salida a los problemas de los ciudadanos, de un modo adecuado y definitivo, es clave. Hace falta ir más allá de una resolución, la judicial, que no consigue explicar el porqué del delito, dejando a medio camino el poner punto y final al conflicto. Por todo ello, la mediación tiene mucho que aportar en este ámbito.

Criminal Law is increasingly used to solve social problems by hardening punishment, and increasing, as a result, the number of court interventions, which does not provide an appropriate response for the parties, putting aside the vulnerable situation the victims are in. Based on restorative justice, criminal mediation seeks the reparation of the harm produced by punishable behaviors inflicted upon the people and the society, and it urges the parties to take an active role in the process. In this article we will consider the conflicts that are dealt with in the criminal field, how these conflicts are managed in our criminal system, what is the contribution of mediation based on Restorative Justice, and what legislation applies to it.

This article shows how the idea of creating a civil and criminal in-court mediation project emerged, and also its concerns and goals. Further, a practical explanation of how this was set up is presented, how it was implemented and also an assessment is done of how it is working. The first case dealt with at the mediation service will be analysed. The conclusions will refer to the need of rules and regulations on criminal mediation in order to give restorative justice’s certainty a chance.

This article will deal with the mediation processes envisaged by Law 5/2000 regarding the criminal responsibility of minors that are conducted at the Autonomous Region of Madrid through the Extrajudicial Reparation Programme of the Region of Madrid Agency for the Re-education and Reintegration of Minor Offenders (ARRMI in Spanish). Also, statistics on the cases addressed will be shown.

This open space aims at reflecting upon the kind of prisons we have and those we could have, a prison that restores a person who committed a crime where the Dignity, Responsibility and Perfectibility inherent to all human beings should be the foundations on which integral change and development are based to repair the damage done to the victims, the person itself, and the community. The main intervention approach should be: action-reaction-resocialisation, and Art. 25.2 of the Spanish Constitution the pathway to return to society and never go back to jail.
The Project that is being implemented for three years now in a Penitentiary of Madrid aims at contributing as much as possible to meet these goals.

In this article, we will attempt to review the model of mediation in prisons as an effective strategy for conflict solving in the penitentiary field and its consequences. To do this, the specific conflicts proper to this field are analysed together with the solutions that are applied in these penitentiaries, to conclude that a different intervention is needed. We propose mediation as an alternative method that has many advantages, we analyse the experiences carried out so far and, lastly, we make a specific innovative proposal for a women’s jail.

Since 2005, the Mediation Association for Peacekeeping in Conflicts has been implementing mediation in the penitentiary field. Since then, and taking as a reference their Mediation in Prisons Programme, other 13 penitentiaries joint this initiative coming from the entire country, to carry out training activities for different organisations and professional associations in order to make known their expertise to implement a conflict solving programme in a jail environment.
We talked to Mrs Francisca Lozano, Coordinator of the Mediation in Prisons Programme about the specificities of the mediation programme carried out in a jail environment and about their experience with inmates as peacekeeping agents.