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THE EURO ZONE

Mending their ways

Currently operating in nine prisons across the country, Spain has launched a programme aimed at rehabilitating corrupt politicians and officials

Mark Nayler

Friday, 28 May 2021, 10:24

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There are countless documentaries about murderers on TV today, but hardly any focused on officials who pocket millions of taxpayers' money through subterfuge or bribery. Many such offenders occupy Spanish jail cells, some of whom have been protagonists in the country's biggest corruption scandals; yet once they're imprisoned, we rarely hear about them - about their motives in committing their crimes, their remorse (if they have any) or whether they're undergoing any kind of therapy or rehabilitation. But that might be changing.

In March, Spain launched a programme aimed at rehabilitating corrupt politicians and officials. Currently operating in nine prisons across the country, it consists of group therapy sessions in which offenders are encouraged to recognise their wrongdoings and, eventually, to ask for forgiveness from their victims. Already enrolled in the programme are the King's brother-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, who's serving a six-year sentence for embezzlement and tax fraud, and Francisco Correa, a key player in the notorious Gürtel case, who was sentenced to 33 years in 2018.

The programme's leaders say that there's one major problem in working with Spain's corrupt public figures - that money and power have convinced them that they're immune to justice, and/or that they've done nothing wrong. By a process that psychologists call "moral disengagement", they also tell themselves that they're helping other people, not just themselves. Thus, by a warped process of internal justification, the sinner becomes a saint, at least in self-reflection.

Imagine, as a thought experiment, that Spain's former monarch Juan Carlos has been found guilty of his alleged financial misdemeanours, that he's serving jail time for them and has enrolled on the rehab programme. Imagine how hard he'd be to work with. Presumably not many of the workshops' participants can say their old job gave them legal immunity - that they were literally, in the eyes of the law, incapable of committing a crime while they had it. Imagine how many layers would have to be broken down to secure a humble admission of wrongdoing from Spain's emeritus king, how much psychological graft would be required to achieve his moral "re-engagement".

Back in the real world, Spain's former economy minister Rodrigo Rato, ringleader of the "Black Credit Cards" scandal, has yet to enrol for the therapy sessions. Perhaps the greater your power and wealth is, the more effective your tools of denial and self-justification become, which in turn makes reform and rehabilitation harder to achieve (although Rato publicly apologised before starting his sentence in 2018). If the workshops are able to reform the former IMF chief and prepare him for a cheat-free life on the outside, we'll know they're really succeeding.

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