1.

A Reserved Terrain

The Informational Void

As most writers on the subject point out, it is the essential nature of penal institutions that the people placed inside them have limited contact with the outside world. Rarely is attention drawn to the two-sided nature of this isolation. Confinement, after all, constitutes a barrier that is impenetrable from both sides: the persons incarcerated cannot easily get out, and outsiders cannot easily get in. This fact, though quite obvious, seldom finds its way into our awareness, perhaps because of our aversion to the very image of being confined. But for scholars who would like to make their way inside and conduct research while retaining their outside identity, the barrier created by confinement is an essential fact.

The problem, as we shall see, is complex. It does not consist merely in overcoming confinement understood literally: closed doors, high walls, steep banks, and so forth. Entrance into this area of social reality that is closed to most of us poses a puzzle which I would like to solve in this part of the book. The task calls for understanding the peculiar nature of this barrier of confinement, which serves as much to protect the institution against probing by outsiders as it does to protect outsiders from the inmates.

The penal institution as a management system bases its inner organization on intervention in all domains of human life and strict scrutiny from above.¹ At the same time the prison is excluded from social oversight and remains at the complete disposal of political authorities. Political control is realized on one hand by the acceptance of hierarchic subordination as a style of management. The administrative-legal nature of relations creates for higher-level penal authorities an opportunity to wield an unlimited influence over the organization and functioning of those on a lower level. This relationship is often a dual dependence, personal (filling posts, giving promotions, handing out rewards and punishments) and official (the possibility of issuing unlimited directives). Chiefs at a certain level concentrate their attention on the requirements and expectations of persons or groups perceived as the source of their power. In turn the realization of those requirements and expectations becomes, on a similar principle, the object of the efforts of the subordinates.

On the other hand, being at the disposal of political authorities requires that members of the penal institution dissociate themselves from all possible involvement with events and movements in the society at large, which can be particularly dangerous for authorities during political crises.² The absence of these social influences results in a constant feeling of isolation on the part of members of the institution. Political authorities attain this effect above all by prohibiting any public airing of problems connected with the work of the prison staff. These functionaries are bound to regard as official secrets anything connected with their professional work.³ Administrators of the institutions are also obliged to observe total silence about professional matters.

The void left by this absence of authentic articulation of problems is filled by propaganda versions—quite easily sniffed out by the public society. The lack of authentic information also leads to the spreading of information by persons who have had firsthand dealings with the institutions, and as a rule these are negative experiences.⁴ Consequently, the public sees the staffs of these institutions as remaining outside its influence and thus possibly available to be used against it. The staffs, on the other hand, do not expect any positive support or acceptance from the public. This situation dooms the prison staffs to remain loyal to the authorities and to continue to suffer from a lack of communication with society. Furthermore, the authorities always have the means to control information about the institutions, even pejorative information, so as to keep a desired distance between the staffs and society. And the isolation is to a certain degree institutionalized, for staff members live together in separate buildings, relax in their own recreation centers, organize their own economic production in prison farms and factories, and so on.

The “Sacred Area”

Penal institutions serve above all to realize the political functions of a given social system. They are a negative aspect of the political system of a state that punishes those who break the law by limiting their freedom. The prison thus fulfills a mission that is characteristic of political organizations: it influences other groups in order to force them to submit to its control.⁵

It is true that the prison system may also be viewed as an element of the didactic system of the state. But attempts at integrating the political and didactic functions have been, so far, mere illusory endeavors; the political functions dominate decisively. Even if the openly proclaimed intention of the penitentiary system is the resocialization of offenders, the function is still political.⁶ The penitentiary system is closed to influence exerted by organizations that realize adaptive or educational functions—that is, those that prepare people for the roles imposed upon adult members of society— and it remains open to the impact of the political system.⁷

An apt illustration of this state of affairs in Poland is the extremely brief history (barely sixteen months long) of two associations, Stowarzyszenie Pomocy Osobom Uwiezionym i ich Rodzinom, or Patronat (the Association for Aid to Prisoners and Their Families), and Polskie Stowarzyszenie Penitencjarne (the Polish Penitentiary Association), whose aim was to assist people deprived of their freedom. Patronat attracted many well-known authors, artists, and scientists. The Polish Penitentiary Association emerged in an academic environment, attracting students, lawyers, criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, and teachers as well as persons professionally connected with the Department of Justice or centers cooperating with it, including judges, lawyers, curators, journalists, and publicists. After the proclamation of martial law on December 13, 1981, both societies were suspended. The fundamental controversial point was the government’s demand that members of these groups refrain from visiting the penal institutions.⁸

The resistance of a prison system to contacts with academic centers has been explained by Robert Merton, who noted that

science which asks questions of facts concerning every phase of nature and society comes into psychological, not logical, conflict with other attitudes toward these same data which have been crystallized and frequently ritualized by other institutions. Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institutions of science make skepticism a virtue. Every institution involves, in this sense, a “sacred area” which is resistant to “profane” examination in terms of scientific observation and logic.⁹

To the academic investigator in Poland, the most serious obstacle to research in prison has been not the conflict which “appears whenever science extends its research to new fields”¹⁰ but the anticipation that such a conflict will be inaugurated by the prison system. A permanent consequence of this anticipation is the development by the penitentiary system of its own research activity, due to the absence of independent academic research in prisons.¹¹ Department of Justice centers have been set up whose employees are prison functionaries. Probably the intention was to ensure an attitude of loyalty, attachment, and respect on the part of the researchers.¹² These centers as well as the functionaries themselves concentrate on topics defined by the needs of the institution, reserving for themselves exclusive rights to research concerning the domains of social life controlled by the department.¹³ Thanks to such narrow specialization, they regard themselves, within the subject range delineated by their bureaus, as more competent than, for instance, academic social scientists. The academic scholar therefore confronts a “monopolist” in trying to get access to data about a social field that remains under the latter’s administration, a monopolist who also controls the state of knowledge on this particular subject.¹⁴ In practice, studies pertaining to the prison system have to be approved for print by the central prison authorities, then passed by the state censorship office. The monopolist even claims the right to decide the veracity of statements made about prisons by other investigators.

Although academic scholars are permitted to conduct narrowly constricted research in penitentiaries, the problems which may become the subject of their studies are manipulated. Agreement to conduct investigations in prison calls for acceptance by the prison authorities of both the topic and the instruments which are to be employed in the investigations. Rejection of a proposed theme can be justified by stating that an internal research center wishes to broach the same topic. If the subject is accepted, control of research instruments is maintained in determining whether the data gathered go beyond the problems originally stated. If they do, then the instruments have to be adjusted.

Certain research issues are prohibited according to the expressed wishes of the prison authorities. These topics include the practical implementation by the prison administration of the rights of convicts during incarceration, any activity by the prison administration to expand the legal rights of inmates, the conditions of confinement and the opinions of the prisoners on this subject, the way in which the inmates are treated by the staff, the welfare of prisoners, their attitude to the staff and fellow prisoners, and the expectations of convicts regarding the prison administration.¹⁵ Outsiders thus are doomed to use mainly the information about prisons propagated by the prison staff’s own researchers.

Science of course is protected against the absence of objectivity by the public character of the scientific method.¹⁶ Anyone willing to do so can repeat or test another scholar’s research. From this point of view, the knowledge gathered by research centers established by the prison system enjoys the status of proposed truths as long as other scholars are deprived of the opportunity of an unhampered examination of the findings. It is true that various institutions, such as scientific periodicals and congresses, have been created to uphold scientific objectivity and criticism. But political power, when it stifles free criticism or fails to protect it, can weaken those institutions. That is true above all in relation to knowledge about those institutions such as prisons which realize the political functions of the political system, particularly a totalitarian one.¹⁷

Upon entering the penal “sacred area” that is so inaccessible to the “profane,” the unwelcome scholar becomes an unwilling part of the political system, always sensitive to scientific criticism. Moreover, awareness of the obstacles and difficulties to be encountered forms an enormous psychological burden and creates an additional subjective barrier to institutional research.