Direção-Geral de Reinserção e Serviços Prisionais Opens Arsonist Rehabilitation Programme Across Seven Prisons in July — Kent-Adapted Firesetting Intervention Anchors the 88-Convict Pipeline

The Direção-Geral de Reinserção e Serviços Prisionais (Directorate-General for Reintegration and Prison Services, DGRSP) will roll out an arsonist rehabilitation programme across seven Portuguese prisons from July 2026, adapting the University of Kent's Firesetting Intervention Programme for Prisoners framework for the Portuguese correctional system.

The seven receiving facilities — Castelo Branco, Coimbra, Izeda (Bragança), Lisboa, Vale do Sousa, Viseu and Porto — were selected on the basis of where the existing forest-fire-related custodial population sits. According to the DGRSP file briefed to Público, Portugal currently holds 29 detainees in pre-trial custody for forest-fire crimes, 59 convicted inmates serving sentences and 20 non-criminally-responsible persons interned in psychiatric custody. A further 108 individuals are serving suspended sentences in the community, four of them on electronic monitoring.

The programme breaks with the methodology of the DGRSP's 2019-2022 pilot, which ran group-based sessions and produced uneven completion rates. Sessions from July 2026 will be delivered individually, on a one-to-one basis with specialised technicians, both inside the prison walls and — for suspended-sentence cases — in community probation settings. The 20 specialist technicians who will run the first cohort begin a training week ahead of the July open, with priority placement at facilities housing the highest concentration of convicted arsonists.

The Kent FIPP framework, on which the Portuguese adaptation rests, has been peer-reviewed in the Psychology, Crime & Law literature and is the most-used cognitive-behavioural protocol for adult firesetters in the UK prison estate. Its central module focuses on the fire-interest and fire-script cognitions that distinguish habitual arsonists from one-off offenders — the population the DGRSP has the hardest time deterring on release. Portuguese adaptation work was done in coordination with the Faculdade de Psicologia of the Universidade de Coimbra.

The launch lands inside the broader 2026-2028 Lei de Política Criminal (Criminal Policy Law) cycle approved by the Assembleia da República this week, which puts fogo posto (arson) at the top of the priority-crime list and added a prison-crew forest-cleaning mandate. The combination is deliberate: the DGRSP rehabilitation pillar handles the individual recidivism risk, the Lei de Política Criminal handles the prosecutorial weight, and the cleaning-crew mandate puts low-risk inmates into forest-mitigation work during the fire season.

The operational timing matters. Portugal's Dispositivo Especial de Combate a Incêndios Rurais (Special Rural Fire-Fighting Apparatus, DECIR) entered its phase Charlie peak deployment on 1 July, putting the rehabilitation programme launch alongside the calendar window in which arson detection and arrest activity historically spikes. The DGRSP file flags that around 20% of Portuguese forest fires are attributed to deliberate ignition, with another large slice attributed to negligence — an evidence base assembled through the Instituto da Conservação da Natureza e das Florestas (ICNF) post-fire causation reports.

The unanswered question is the funding line. The DGRSP brief does not specify whether the technician hires sit on the Orçamento do Estado 2026 baseline or on a PRR carve-out. The Ministério da Justiça (Justice Ministry) is expected to confirm the financing model at the formal programme launch in early July.