Inside the Spanish prison Alves resides in with Ronaldinho's former bodyguard

Footballer Dani Alves has been jailed for four-and-a-half years after being convicted of raping a woman at a Spanish nightclub.

On Thursday, the former Brazil international was found guilty of sexually assaulting a woman in the bathroom of an upscale Barcelona nightclub on December 31, 2022.

The 40-year-old father-of-two had been held on remand at Brians 2 prison near the Catalan capital since his arrest in January last year and now faces his first night behind bars as a convicted sex offender.

According to MARCA, Alves will also share the prison with a Brazilian, known as Coutinho, who was a bodyguard for former Barcelona player Ronaldinho and was convicted of sexual assault.

The Brians 2 prison is the same institute where antivirus software pioneer John McAfee was held before his eventual death in 2021.

McAfee was facing 10 counts of tax evasion in Tennessee and seven counts of fraud and money laundering conspiracy in New York when he was found dead in a Spanish jail.

The prison, where McAfee was sent in October 2020 after he was caught traveling through an airport in Barcelona, is a boxy, cement, low-slung complex with a green roof, according to photos.

Pictures show the institute's bare furnishings, empty halls and simplistic design, which Alves will have to get familiar with over the next four and a half years.

McAfee had compared Brians 2 to 'the Hilton' when compared to U.S. prisons. However, he still complained about the food in tweets that he posted at the time.

Just weeks after McAfee's arrest, the Spanish newspaper El Diario reported that McAfee was impressed by the structure of the country's criminal justice system and compared it to five-star hotel in the US, according to a letter that he wrote his wife.

'Life in Spanish prisons is like the Hilton compared to the abject surrealism and dehumanization of American prisons,' he wrote. 'Here I am treated as a human being instead of a number.'

With a capacity for 1,500 inmates, the prison opened in 2007 as the Department of Justice tackled overcrowding at other penitentiaries.

There have been examples of violence in the prison, too, including a highly publicized brutal inmate-on-inmate murder shortly before McAfee was arrested.

The victim, who had been jailed for coercing minors and disabled individuals into performing sex work and gender violence, was listening to music on an MP3 player when the prisoner caught him off guard and plunged a knife 29 times into his neck, chest and abdomen.

In April 2020, a 27-year-old man, who was diagnosed with mental problems, apparently experienced a manic bout and attacked inmates and prison staff before he was restrained by prison guards.

The detainee, who was serving a 32-month sentence for larceny and gender violence, was immobilized by correction officers and stopped breathing.

The prisoner at one point stopped breathing and was declared dead by paramedics.

Former Barcelona president Sandro Rosell, who was arrested for money laundering before he was acquitted by a court over lack of evidence, spent part of his 20-month prison stay at Brians 2.

And Fèlix Millet, the former president of Barcelona’s Palau de la Música concert hall who masterminded one of the largest schemes that brought in 23-million euros, was serving a nine-year eight-month sentence in Brians 2. He died of a stroke in March 2023, at the age of 87.

Alves, meanwhile, protested his innocence on February 7 after taking the stand on the last day of his three-day trial at Barcelona's Audiencia Provincial court.

He admitted to having sex in a toilet at upmarket Barcelona nightclub Sutton December 30 2022 with his 23-year-old female accuser, but insisted it was consensual.

The woman he was today found guilty of raping confirmed Alves had forced himself on her when she gave her evidence in court behind her screen.

A friend who was with her the night of the rape broke down in tears as she recalled how the victim was 'crying uncontrollably' after leaving the small bathroom where the incident occured.

State prosecutors had demanded a nine year prison sentence if Alves was convicted and a private prosecutor acting for the victim demanded a 12-year jail term at his trial.