The Case of Franco's Prisons

In 1952, an NGO body called the International Commission against concentration camp regimes carried out on-site investigations in Spain. The purpose of the Spanish visit was to determine whether Franco's castle system constituted a concentration regime. And they visited 17 prisons, I think like four or five labour battalions and one, merchurised penal colonies. But this Commission came to really ambivalent conclusions about Franco's prisons. It said no case reproduced the conditions obtaining and hit with concentration camps. In better institutions, the conditions were the same as may be found in well-developed Pinotentry systems devised by ordinary criminals.