Prison cracks down on homemade blades

Homemade blades are one of those prison problems that sound small until you picture what they actually mean. These are improvised knives, sharpened fragments, and other pointy objects made inside the jail or adapted from ordinary materials. At Mas d’Enric prison in Tarragona, officials recorded 170 seizures in 2024 and another 108 in 2025. That drop looks like progress — but the numbers are still high enough to keep the prison under pressure. ### What exactly is the news here? The immediate news is the latest count. Mas d’Enric, the prison near Tarragona, logged 108 interventions involving homemade blades or sharp improvised objects in 2025, after hitting 170 in 2024. That puts it third among Catalan prisons for this kind of seizure, so the issue is not anecdotal — it is persistent. (diaridetarragona.com) ### What counts as a “homemade blade”? Basically, anything an inmate can turn into a stabbing or slashing tool. In recent weeks, that risk became very concrete when four inmates in the prison’s closed-regime DERT unit tore ceramic tiles from a bathroom and hid the sharpened fragments in their clothes. Staff defused the confrontation without force, but the episode showed how quickly common materials can become weapons. (diaridetarragona.com) ### Why does the drop from 170 to 108 not settle things? Because the story is not just the year-over-year decline. The bigger point is that Mas d’Enric remains one of the Catalan prisons where staff keep finding this stuff at a notable rate. A lower number than 2024 does not mean the threat disappeared — it means the prison is still dealing with a recurring security problem, just at a somewhat reduced level. (diaridetarragona.com) ### Why is Mas d’Enric under such a harsh spotlight? Because this prison has been through a brutal stretch. In March 2024, a kitchen worker, Núria López, was killed by an inmate inside Mas d’Enric, and the case triggered protests, internal reviews, and a much wider argument about prison safety in Catalonia. Since then, every indicator of disorder there — assaults, self-harm, contraband, improvised weapons — has landed differently. The margin for error feels gone. (europapress.es) ### Is this only about blades? No — it sits inside a broader pattern of tension. Diari de Tarragona reported 246 inmate-on-inmate assaults at Mas d’Enric in 2025, down from 287 in 2024, and 43 aggressions against workers in 2025, four of them serious. The prison population also rose to 899 by the end of 2025. More people, more conflict, and more pressure on staff is not a great mix. (diaridetarragona.com) ### So are officials saying things are getting better? Sort of. The official line is that the blade seizures fit a wider downward trend in some indicators across the prison system. But turns out that can be true at the same time the day-to-day risk stays high. A prison can improve on paper and still be one bad shift away from another serious incident. (diaridetarragona.com) ### What does a crackdown actually look like? Usually not some dramatic sweep. It means more searches, tighter control of materials, closer monitoring of conflictive units, and faster disciplinary responses when staff find improvised weapons. After the April 2026 tile incident, the department said disciplinary measures would follow, and two of the four inmates were transferred to Brians prisons. (diaridetarragona.com) ### Bottom line? Mas d’Enric’s blade numbers fell in 2025, but that is not the same as normality. The prison is still catching a lot of improvised weapons, and in a jail already marked by violence and a staff killing, every sharpened fragment carries more weight than the count alone suggests.