The cost of a failed reintegration: 4 dead, freedom, and 2 more victims

Four murders, freedom, and two more victims: the price of reoffending

Free since 2013. Nine years later, the crime statistics crossed his name again: two more victims, among them Ester Estepa, who disappeared on 23 August 2023 and was found months later in a reed bed in Gandía. The Provincial Prosecutor's Office of Valencia is now seeking 41 years in prison for José Jurado Montilla, better known by a nickname that has turned the case into a media phenomenon: 'The TikTok killer'.

The record that did not stop his release

This is not the first time the justice system has faced this name. Jurado Montilla was attributed four homicides that sent him to prison, but freedom came in 2013. The subsequent file includes, according to the prosecution, two new homicides committed in 2022 and 2023: that of the young man from Málaga — who, according to the account, he met in a context of vulnerability — and that of Ester Estepa, whom he met at a shelter in Alicante. The prosecution maintains that the victim was beaten after refusing to have sensual relations and was then sensual assaulted; her body was not found until months later.

The economic cost of reoffending

The economic reading of the case is devastating. Imprisonment has a direct budgetary cost, but reoffending carries a cost in lives that no budget accounts for. Some argue that failed rehabilitation costs more than prevention, and others take the argument to its extreme: the definitive solution was once priced at two euros, a provocative remark that circulates as a metaphor for despair. The underlying question is not how much it costs to keep an inmate, but how much it costs to get the sentence wrong.

The life sentence without parole that came too late

The case reopens the debate about the limits of the system. Spain's renewable life sentence (prisión permanente revisable) appears as the tool that would have prevented the second wave of victims, but it has a problem: the earlier conviction was tried under the 1973 Penal Code, which capped sentences at 30 years and left the door open to prison privileges. The criticism is aimed at that framework, though not all of it targets the judges: part of the analysis reminds us that the judge applies the law, and that responsibility for the legal design lies with the legislator.

Four murders, 41 years requested, six dead on the table. And there are still those who argue about whether the problem is the law, the judges, or a system that mistakes clemency for calculation. The only thing that is clear is that society will pay the next bill. The question is whether anyone wants to do the maths before it is time to pay.