Spain Turns to Corruption Rehab for Officials Who Can’t Stop Stealing
By Nicholas Casey, 5/17/21, New York Times

CÓRDOBA, Spain — Carlos Alburquerque isn’t your typical rehab
candidate. He’s a 75-year-old grandfather living in Córdoba,
a city in southern Spain. He was a town notary before he
retired in 2015. He hasn’t touched drugs or alcohol in years.

But his isn’t your typical rehab program: It’s an 11-month
boot camp to reform corrupt Spanish officials and “reinsert”
them into mainstream society.

“Repairing the damage is what is left for me in this life,”
said Alburquerque, who is serving a 4-year prison sentence
for stealing around 400,000 euros, nearly a half a million
dollars, in his work drawing up contracts and deeds.

Over the course of 32 sessions in an austere conference room
in Córdoba’s penitentiary, Alburquerque will be monitored by
a team of psychiatrists. He will sit in a circle with other
convicted officials for group therapy sessions with titles
like “personal abilities” and “values.” He is, in some ways,
the guinea pig of an experiment meant to answer an age-old
question: Buried deep in the soul of a swindler like
Alburquerque, might there be an honest man?

That such a program exists in Spain may say much about the
country’s belief in second chances as it does about how
corruption has captured the public imagination here. Flip
open a newspaper or turn on the radio: You will hear of
schemes, scandals and skulduggery which almost always lead
back to the public purse.

There was the so-called “Gürtel Case,” sometimes called
“Spain’s Watergate,” that erupted after a raft of bribes for
govt contracts were discovered logged in a notebook belonging
to the ruling party’s treasurer. The scandal helped topple
the party from power in 2018. There was the “Palau Case,” in
which the president of a Catalan music hall defrauded it of
23 million euros, using the proceeds for home renovations
and lavish vacations, among other extravagances.

In the rocky coastal region of Galicia, police once nabbed
a ring of corrupt town officials in a sting called “Operation
Pokémon.” Why it was named after a Japanese video game was
never clear — but some speculated it was because of the large
number of officials involved. (There are hundreds of Pokémon
characters.)

On a recent afternoon, Ángel Luis Ortiz, a former judge who
now runs Spain’s prisons, let out a long sigh as he looked
out from his office into downtown Madrid during a conversation
about Spain’s struggles with public embezzlement. The boom-bust
cycles of Spain’s economy had led it to a long history of
fraudsters and betrayals of public trust, he said.

But at least, corruption rates in Spain were no worse than
in other European nations, Ortiz said, just 5% of all crimes.
(The anti-corruption watchdog Transparency Int'l ranks Spain
just below France, and above Italy.) It was Spain’s will to
rehab the offenders that set it apart from the rest, Ortiz
said — an offer which now extends to some 2,044 white-collar
criminals in Spanish prisons.

Nine prisons are running programs so far, which began in
March. Prisoners don’t get reduced sentences for joining, but
officials say participating is looked on favorably when it
comes time to request parole.

Who qualifies? It’s a veritable Who’s Who of Spain.

There’s the king’s brother-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, the
handsome Olympic handball player and former Spanish duke who
is serving a fraud sentence of almost 6 years, and is partici-
pating in the program. Francisco Correa, a businessman nabbed
in the Gürtel Case is also enrolled. (Though Spaniards know
him better for his nickname, “Don Vito,” a reference to “The
Godfather” trilogy.)

Yet for all the volunteers, Ortiz still thinks his biggest
challenge may be convincing Spain’s corrupt officials that
there actually might be something wrong with them.

“They are people with money & power — & we are struggling
against this idea that they can get away with anything &
don’t actually need the help,” he said.

For that, the govt turned to Sergio Ruiz, a prison psychiatrist
in the southern city of Seville who helped design the program.
Dr. Ruiz said that in addition to getting participants to
recognize their flaws in group therapy, inmates would event-
ually be asked to participate in “restorative justice” sessions
where they would ask for forgiveness from their victims.

Dr. Ruiz explained he had been surprised at the outset when
he searched the scientific literature & found almost nothing
on rehabilitating white collar criminals. Psychiatrists had
studied murderers ad nauseam, Dr. Ruiz explained. But few had
ever bothered to get inside the mind of the shady functionary
who swindled the public garbage fund.

So Dr. Ruiz decided to run a study of his own. He asked for
volunteers from 3 groups — white collar prisoners, violent
criminals and a “control” group of ordinary Spaniards — and
surveyed each on their values and beliefs.

The results surprised everyone, he said.

“We think of these people as ruthless, but that’s not how it
is,” Dr. Ruiz said of white collar criminals. “They have the
same system of values as any ordinary citizen.”

Instead, Dr. Ruiz said, corrupt minds have a unique capacity
to create exceptions to their own rules, what cognitive
psychologists sometimes call “moral disengagement.” They have
intricate ways of explaining away their misdeeds as somehow
benefiting others rather than themselves.

And Dr. Ruiz found dangerous levels of two other traits
in the fraudsters. “Egocentrism and narcissism,” he said.

At first glance, Alburquerque, the corrupt notary in Córdoba
who volunteered to be rehabilitated, doesn’t appear to have
much of either. He’s mild-mannered & speaks in hushed tones
even in the loud hubbub of the penitentiary. It’s hard to
imagine that he pocketed nearly a half-million dollars before
he was caught.

“Here, one has to take responsibility,” he said, admitting
he had been wrong.

But there’s more to the story, Alburquerque said.

While sums of money may have disappeared under his watch, he
had always made sure his employees were highly paid, unlike
many other notary offices, he said. He had even attempted to
return much of the fraud money before he was caught. Anyone
in Córdoba could attest to the fact that he was a key member
of the city, he added.

“I have an advantage over other mortals, but not all, in
that I can sleep 5 hours less than others,” he said of his
work ethic. “Always what I’ve done is worked and studied.”

They are words that Yolanda González Pérez, the prison warden,
says she’s heard before from other white collar criminals who
haven’t fully accepted their crimes.

“They tell themselves ‘I’m not as much of a criminal as
the others are,’” she said.

But Ortiz, the director of the Spanish prison system, isn’t
worried. He’s ready to roll up his sleeves with Alburquerque
& other participants who might be willing to rethink their
old ways.

Maybe a breakthrough will come early on, when according to
a summary of the rehab manual, psychiatrists will begin the
process of “therapeutic alliance” to form a bond with the
corrupt officials.

Or later on in week five, when the inmates “will finally
take on the subject of developing humility and empathy.”

It takes patience to change someone, Mr. Ortiz said.

“We can be working months in these sessions,” he said. “We
just keep at it with the prisoners and we’ll see when the
fruit is ripe.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/world/europe/spain-corruption-rehab.html