History
Approximately forty years ago, Professor Roberto Bergalli arrived in Barcelona after having regained his freedom after the kidnapping and imprisonment he suffered during the Argentine civic-military dictatorship. It is at that moment, from 1980, when a few young people met him personally at the Institute of Criminology of the University of Barcelona. There, some first Seminars were organized and some first knowledge of social sciences penetrated the uni-directionality of criminal sciences that had been transmitted to us, with an orientation between positivist and dogmatic. The appeal, the difficulties, and the challenge that this entailed immediately captivated a young generation of restless scholars and activists.
The publication, in 1983, of El pensamiento criminológico, un análsis crítico…, co-coordinated by Roberto Bergalli, Teresa Miralles and Juan Bustos Ramírez, has become for many years and up to the present an obligatory reference, of both Criminology and of the authentic discipline that we always strive to know and achieve a (certain) academic recognition in Spain: the Sociology of penal control. The other work that, in the form of a periodical publication, further affirmed the path started, was the appearance (in 1986) of Poder y Control. Revista hispano-latinoamericana de disciplinas sobre el control social. This publication, whose original Editorial Committee was made up of Juan Bustos Ramírez, Victoria Camps, Antonio Doñate, Hernán Hormazábal and Bergalli himself, represented the dissemination of the works of the most prestigious thinkers in Spain, from a critical perspective about the penal system, which contributed, from various Latin American countries and also from Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Great Britain or France, to a type of reflection absolutely indispensable in the times, still, of the consolidation of a democratic system in the Spanish State.
Along with the appearance of these works, a whole host of complementary activities were forming a notable study group with visits, seminars and conferences in which Alessandro Baratta, Jock Young, Massimo Pavarini, Dario Melossi, Louk Hulsman, Tamar Pitch, Gerlinda Smauss, Sebastian Scheerer, Luigi Ferrajoli, Rosa del Olmo, Lola Aniyar de Castro, Raúl Zaffaroni and many others participated. With many of them it was decided to promote (in 1984-85) the Common Study Program on Criminal Justice and Critical Criminology, as a program of common studies and European inter-university cooperation. This Program, which was immediately extended to other European Universities in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Belgium and Great Britain, was carried out within the scope of the “Erasmus” Program (later “Socrates”) of the European Union. The Common Study has constituted in recent decades an academic site of unique meeting and participation, through which hundreds of students from the named countries (and from more than ten Latin American countries) have participated, who were trained in this critical perspective. Most of them continue disseminating and working in these issues through their papers, dissertations and master and PhD theses, which has been building for years an important corpus of knowledge and practice.
In the University of Barcelona, this perspective was implemented in the creation of a first Master called "Sistema Penal y Problemas Sociales" in the Department of Criminal Law and Criminal Sciences. Likewise, shortly afterwards, a specialization in Criminology and Criminal Legal Sociology of the PhD Program in Law and Political Science at the University of Barcelona was created. Institutionalized in recent years, the specialization has received numerous students (European and from Latin America), As of 2008, with the transformation that took place in European university studies, the first official Master in Criminology and Criminal Legal Sociology would be created, the precursor to the current Master in Criminology, Criminal Policy and Criminal Legal Sociology.
A little over 20 years ago we designed the project called "Open the prison" (Abrir la Cárcel) by which a group of professors decided to approach some prisons in Catalonia for the development of a cultural and academic activity. We then thought of the important role that other public institutions could play in the way of establishing channels of circulation and communication between people deprived of liberty and the community. And, in this context, we believed that it could be especially important to achieve the entrance of the University into prison. We were then convinced that positive results could be produced from this “intersection of institutions”, among others: the training of the prison population allowing a diversification in the distribution of access to culture; the construction (with all its symbolic meaning) of “free” spaces inside the prison where the university dynamics could be reproduced (professor-student).
Thus, towards the end of the 1990s, a group of professors and young researchers (Mónica Aranda, Miquel Izard, Pep García Borés and others), constituted the “Association against Punitive Culture and Social Exclusion” (Asociación contra la Cultura Punitiva y de Exclusión Social) and we achieved that the then Prison Administration of Catalonia approve the project called "Opening the prison" for the development of a series of Seminars that we gave during the 1999-2000 academic year. The first courses were given on Fundamental Rights, Music, Psychology and Hygiene. Despite the favourable reception of the group of inmates, the opposing resistance from sectors of the penitentiary unionism caused the termination of the project (and later also the resignation of the penitentiary Director). Despite, also, of the attempt of the then Vice-Rector for Research of the University of Barcelona, Marius Rubiralta, to continue the paralyzed project, it was not possible to continue. The instant consequence of that incident was the creation of the Observatory of the Penal System and Human Rights that, as a Research Centre of the same University, to –initially- carry out the work of monitoring an institution that, like prisons, had demonstrated an opacity and resistance that astonished (negatively) the university authorities of that time, who placed in us the necessary trust for the creation of the OSPDH. That was the real reason for the creation of our Research Centre, thus fulfilling almost prophetically the Foucauldian intuition that where there is power, possibilities of resistance can arise.
At the beginning of May 2001, the OSPDH was formally created, and it was made up of numerous people who have given the best of themselves in the fields of research from Law, Psychology, Political Science, Sociology, Philosophy, Communication Sciences, Anthropology, and Economics. Various work areas integrated the Observatori, as can be seen by browsing the web. From these areas of knowledge worked people as Mónica Aranda, Roberto Bergalli, Marta Monclús, Iñaki Anitua, Cristina Fernández, Alejandro Forero, Héctor Silveira, Pep García Borés, Jordi Cabezas, Joan Antón Mellón, Camilo Bernal, Montserrat Carbonell, Alejandra Manavella, Marcela Aedo, Gabriela Rodríguez, Gemma Nicolás, Cristina Garés, Rachele Stroppa, Sheila Marín, Juan Manuel Ternero, Rodrigo Chaverra, Natalia Giraldo, Keymer Ávila, Miquel Izard, Carme Vivancos, Katherine Olivieri, Paula García, José Navarro, Mónica Serrano, Aura Roig, Elena la Torre, Nicolás Laíno, Gabriel Bombini, Markela Sitara, Iván Montemayor, Bruno Rotta Almeida, Bruno Amaral Machado, José Carlos Moreira, Juan Manuel Ternero, Damián Zaitch, or Ramiro Sagarduy.
We have worked on numerous national and international projects, in Europe and in Latin America. Currently, our presence in important international networks and organizations (such as the World Organization Against Torture, the Committee for the Prevention of Torture of the Council of Europe, the European Prison Observatory, the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, the Euro-Latin American Network for the Prevention of Torture, the Inter-American Association of Public Defenders, among others), credit this dedication and rigorous commitment.
In our twentieth year of existence, we can and must say that we will continue the work started despite so many obstacles encountered in these two decades.
Iñaki Rivera Beiras, Director of the OSPDH
