As stipulated by the Spanish legal system, one can go to jail on a provisional or preventive basis , by judicial decision during a procedure in which there is no final judgment, in which case the prison is usually close to the competent body , although not necessarily (for For example, the controversial transfer of imprisoned Catalan politicians to prisons located in Catalonia).
Preventive detention must be agreed by the judge if any of the accusing parties or the Public Prosecutor requests it and there are reasons for it: that it is a serious crime , that there is a danger of destruction of evidence or that there is a risk of criminal repetition on the part of the condemned.
The other possibility of being imprisoned is as a consequence of the execution of a final sentence with a sentence of imprisonment .
In this case, the courts usually grant convicted individuals a period of between five and ten days to appear in a penitentiary with a document called a warrant to enter prison . Normally, convicted persons have freedom of choice of center and go to prisons close to their home or where they believe that they will feel less helpless, because they have family or friends who live nearby and they will have more ease for visits.
In this case, the chosen penitentiary center admits the inmate, who now depends on the General Directorate of Penitentiary Institutions, which classifies and keeps him in said establishment or relocates him to another prison , either for criminal policy reasons (dispersal of prisoners of terrorist organizations, for example) or due to overcrowding of that specific prison, or because it is not indicated for the individualized treatment of the convicted person.
The case of Iñaki Urdangarín
In the case of the brother-in-law of King Felipe VI Iñaki Urdangarín, sentenced to a sentence of five years and 10 months in prison for the ‘Nóos case’ , and who has chosen the Brieva prison in Ávila to serve his sentence, the exceptional thing is that it is a prison initially intended for women , although it has an isolated module in which he is the only male resident. This exceptionality is not frequent, but the Prison Administration will have understood that for reasons of both internal and external security, Brieva is a suitable place for the sadly famous member of the king’s family to serve his sentence there, convicted, by the way, of crimes prosecutors, in addition to the crimes of prevarication, embezzlement, fraud and influence peddling.
