"RESTAURAVIDAS: Reintegration in the Country of Origin"

The experience of spending years in a prison in a foreign country usually generates a state of post-traumatic stress that must be treated by professionals in a specific and differentiated way upon arrival in Spain.

The difficulties of finding oneself abroad, such as ignorance of the culture and sometimes the language, as well as the operation of the prison legal system, generate a feeling of loneliness and abandonment due to the distance from their loved ones. Many of these people suffer from addiction problems and even chronic and / or mental illnesses that are aggravated by their imprisonment.

Likewise, the lack of access to basic needs such as health, food, hygiene, and the enjoyment of prison benefits deprives these people of the exercise of their fundamental rights.

To do this, since the beginning of 2019, we offer a social reintegration program through a lawyer and a psychologist of the Association of Mediation and Pacification. Accompaniment is provided to those people who freely and voluntarily want to participate, to facilitate their reintegration process after the traumatic experience reported and work the process of accountability for the commission of the crime. This program is offered in a complementary way to the services offered by the prison itself (jurist, social workers, psychologists) and to the assistance offered by the Guidance and Free Legal Assistance Services (SOAJP) of the Bar Associations.

Once a week, the psychologist and the lawyer go to Soto del Real to jointly teach each of the sessions on legal and psychological aspects:

• El psychological counseling It starts with a first reception so that Spanish men and women meet the professionals with whom they are going to work. Then, what it means to have committed a crime abroad, the arrest and the judicial process is discussed. The process of returning to the country of origin is faced together with the realities that the return to Spain entails - new roles with the family, losses ... -, as well as the readjustment with the outside and the release to freedom.
• El legal advice, on the one hand, it deals with the aspects of life in Spanish prisons (rights, duties, penitentiary benefits, the fulfillment of their sentence, etc.) and on the other, it is framed in the restorative justice. Through this route, work is done on:
  •  the responsibility and reintegration of the perpetrator in order to avoid recidivism
  •  reparation for the indirect victim, who in these cases are usually the families of the perpetrators,
  •  social pacification, since by participating in this type of program, confidence in the system is restored.

During 2019 and the beginning of 2020, around twenty men and women participated in Restauravidas. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, visits to the Penitentiary Center were interrupted, so the project was suspended in person until October 2021.

Meanwhile, considering that four Spanish citizens repatriated by the Foundation from Peru they were very disconnected from our reality, it was decided to carry out Restauravidas telematically (through Skype). This made it possible to continue with the assistance as it had been carried out, as well as to verify the success of these sessions in the reincorporation of these people to their life in freedom.

In September 2021 another transfer of Spanish men and women sentenced in Peru to finish serving their sentences in Spain. With seven of them, two other men who had been transferred from Brazil and Italy, a new edition of the program was held in October of that same year.

More recently, between the months of May and July 2022, another edition of Restauravidas has been carried out, where the participants repeatedly expressed their gratitude and the importance that participating in the program has meant for them.

In January 2023 the fifth edition of the program has begun. So far, 50 men and women have benefited from this initiative.