Sport in Spanish prisons: towards the Third Degree or the Third Half?

Published research on the effects of sport among the prison population in Spain has come to conflicting conclusions, creating a confusing picture: is it rehabilitation, mere fun, or a form of social control? What lies behind this disparity of findings? Can a prison sports programme have positive effects on inmates, contributing to their reintegration into society? If so, what specific features should the programme have in order to achieve this outcome? To shed some light on the area, answering these questions, is the objective of this article. Firstly, we carried out a review of the Spanish and international literature on the subject, which led us to conclude that a sports programme could in fact have positive effects on inmates’ reintegration, provided that it complied with a certain set of requisites. However, the studies we reviewed made no mention of these requirements, despite their importance. Thus, the second step in our research was to select a sports programme in a Spanish prison which complied with the requisites and to investigate its effects on the inmates taking part. Through participant observation and interviews we found that the programme did indeed have positive effects among prisoners. This represents an important advance in our knowledge, since we were then able to set out the guidelines which the design and implementation of prison sports programmes should follow if they are to aid the social reintegration of inmates. This is the foremost contribution and value of the present study.