Prisons as punishment spaces

Gradually, especially after the enactment of the Penal Code in 1848, deprivation of liberty was introduced as a punishment for committing criminal acts. Consequently, closely linked to the court of first instance, the party prison, where those tried by the court were incarcerated, took on a leading role, as it was used for examinations of evidence, attending trials and serving sentences. Imprisonment thus had a dual function, preventive and punitive.

Historically, there were prisons in all the towns of a certain entity as a municipal dependency, more often integrated within the council building itself. After the implementation of the judicial parties, civil governors ensured that a space was provided as a prison for each of the parties’ headquarters. It was also intended to end the common departments that housed men and women together.

In 1849, the Prisons Act was enacted, which established that prisoners were to be maintained by all the persons of the judicial party. Running expenses and staff costs began to be borne by the State. The law, in addition to decreeing the separation of men and women, stipulated that a department for minors should be set up, one for political prisoners and another for serving longer sentences and for custodial prisoners.

The first references of the Sort prison appear in the work of Agustí Coy y Cotonat when he talks about the chapel of Sant Eloi:

“Before it was called San Cosme y San Damián. On 5 January 1820, the Town Council appealed to the Prelate to authorise a priest to review and reconcile the chapel of Saint Eloy, which had been desecrated by troops and turned into a prison in the previous war.

This was favourably approved by Bishop Bernardo, according to a decree inserted in the Book of Decrees. On 21 September, it was reconciled by the parish priest of Bastide. It was restored for a few years, but it was desecrated again; it served for some time as a Latin school and was finally turned into a Party jail. Its interior construction was of Romanesque style, like the old parish.”

COY COTONAT, Agustín, op. cit., p. 624.

Thus, it seems that the chapel of Sant Cosme i Sant Damià, located in Plaça Sant Eloi, began to be used in a stable way as a prison in the early twentieth century after it was seized from the church to become property of the Town Council. We can also assume that it was probably used as a prison, as Coy and Cotonat himself details, during the nineteenth-century wars: the Peninsular War and the Carlist Wars. There is no documentary evidence that women were imprisoned here in this period.

During the 20th century, the person in charge of the prisons was the “agutzil”, a judicial officer attached to the Court of First Instance of Sort. During the Second Spanish Republic, this role was filled by Maties Rafel Simorra. After the Francoist forces arrived in Sort in 1938, Rafel was investigated and accused of being a member of the Catalan Republican Centre and a Popular Front voter. He was also persecuted by the Political Responsibilities Tribunal, which in 1939 opened a case into him under the Political Responsibilities Act of 9 February 1939. This court imposed economic sanctions on all those who had participated in politics between 1934 and the end of the Civil War. In practice, these sanctions were fines and expropriations of property and businesses.

Finally, the Official State Gazette of 6 January 1941 ordered the definitive removal of Maties Rafel from his position as a result of the investigation that had been conducted into him. In January of the same year, Moisés Cervós Llinás, President of the Regional Commission of Disabled Veterans, a lawyer and who had been an accidental judge before and after the Civil War, appointed Joan Ricart Orteu de Tírvia as agutzil given his status as a disabled veteran, which gave him preference for public administration roles. Ricart earned 250 pesetas per month. The role does not seem to have been awarded in the established manner, as no public tender was announced. Years later, the role was awarded to a retired civil guard, Francisco Losada Carita. Losada, who came from a family of carabiniers, was married to Consuelo Bufalà Ralla d’Esterri d’Àneu. Consuelo’s father, Casimiro Bufalà, had been the president of the Republican Left of Catalonia in Esterri during the years of the Second Republic. The couple had two sons, Julio and Casimiro, who fought in the Republican Army. Francisco Losada himself was trialled in an expedited summary court-martial together with residents of Sant Esteve de la Sarga and was ultimately acquitted.