Workers from the Centre d'Iniciatives per a la Reinserció, CIRE, and UGT delegates gathered this Wednesday in penitentiary centers and educational facilities for juvenile justice in Catalonia to demand the equalization of their conditions with those of the rest of the prison system employees. In Lleida, about thirty people gathered for half an hour in front of the entrance to the Ponent Penitentiary Center with banners demanding security, recognition, and equalization.
The protest is based on a contradiction that the demonstrators consider unsustainable. They claim to work in the same environments as civil servants, with direct contact with inmates and similar risks, but were excluded from the labor, economic, and security improvements derived from the agreement signed in 2024 for civil servant personnel.
CIRE staff demand the same improvements that civil servants received in 2024
During the gathering at Ponent, attendees read a manifesto in which they denounced institutional abandonment by the Department of Justice and demanded an end to the differential treatment compared to the rest of the prison personnel.
"We do work inside prisons, we assume the same risks, and we sustain the same prison system, but the administration has left us out of all improvements. That is intolerable discrimination" - manifesto read by CIRE workers and UGT delegates
The demand affects both working conditions and security coverage. The group claims that the administration should recognize them as agents of authority, a protection that prison civil servants have had since January of this year.
In the protest in Lleida, those gathered insisted that they carry out their activities inside prison and maintain direct contact with inmates. Therefore, they maintain that it makes no sense for the labor and protection framework to be different within the same system.
UGT links the protest to aggressions and the lack of adaptation of spaces
Jordi Camí, UGT-Terres de Lleida personnel delegate at CIRE, identified one of the main complaints as the response to incidents suffered by these workers within the centers.
"We are asking for it because, in the end, an aggression cannot mean one thing for some and another for us" - Jordi Camí, UGT-Terres de Lleida personnel delegate at CIRE
The mobilization also comes when part of the staff maintains open complaints about the physical safety of the workspaces. The protesters denounce that, two years after the murder of a cook at Mas d'Enric by an inmate, there are still areas of the CIRE pending evaluation and adaptation in terms of security.
That reproach also appeared on the banners displayed at the entrance of Ponent and in the text of the manifesto. The concentration lasted half an hour and brought together about 30 people at the access to the prison center in Lleida.
Among the claims read before the Ponent Penitentiary Center was again the demand to review the CIRE spaces that remain without safety adaptation two years after the Mas d'Enric crime.