The Helsinki Watch observers concentrated on various aspects of prison life in Spain including pretrial detention, physical conditions, inmate activities, and both authorized and unauthorized disciplinary actions. Other issues that came under scrutiny included safety; contacts with the outside such as visits, furloughs, correspondence, telephone calls, and transfers; and information about prisons made available both internally and to the general public. This report discusses inmate health, terrorist inmates, food, clothing, female and foreign prisoners, and police lockups. The report concludes that Spanish correctional authorities often violate the national constitution and penitentiary laws and regulations. Several recommendations were made regarding matters that were probably not violations of law: amending routine visiting regulations, allowing contact visits in communal visiting areas, housing inmates in locations close to their homes, notifying relatives about inmate transfers, ending the practice of applying consecutive sanctions of disciplinary segregation, allowing female inmates to keep their children with them, controlling assaults in prisons, reducing overcrowding, and controlling drug distribution channels and offering inmates drug treatment.