Foreword

I met Paweƚ Moczydlowski at the Fourth International Conference on Penal Abolition late in May 1989 in Poland. Toward the end of the conference he brought me a manuscript. It was, he explained, an English translation of a sociological study of Polish prisons, which he had managed to publish in Poland in Polish under martial law. The Polish edition had rapidly gone out of print, and Polish authorities took a somewhat subtle approach to censorship: by allowing only a few hundred copies to be printed, the Polish authorities had soon been able to declare the book out of print. Paweƚ held out no hope of further publication in Poland. At his request, I smuggled his manuscript out of the country just two days before Solidarity triumphed and the Communist order rapidly collapsed.

I learned only this summer on a return visit to Poland the professional price Paweƚ and his Warsaw colleague Andrzej Rzeplinski paid for the original publication of Paweƚ’s study. In 1982, they were banned from further prison visits. That ban was lifted only when Paweƚ himself became Director General of Polish prisons in April 1990. Andrzej is now one of the most active members of the Helsinki Human Rights Watch Committee and thus has access to any prisoner in Poland on demand. Paweƚ, Andrzej, and other Polish prison specialists work as a team to ferret out violations of prisoners’ rights and redress them. The reforms they are undertaking together are among the more astonishing features of the political transformation of Poland.

Knowledgeable readers from outside Poland will readily see that the pre-reform prisons Paweƚ describes here have much in common with prisons the world over. The one major difference is that before 1989, Polish authorities required able-bodied male prisoners to work or suffer severe punishment. As a result, prisoner idleness was much less of a problem there than, for instance, in the United States. Prisoners were pushed hard not only in formal production but in hidden private production for the benefit of staff at all levels. What sets Paweƚ’s study apart is that it does not describe prisoners alone or staff alone but relates with candor how staff and prisoners corrupt one another. I can only imagine how threatened authorities felt by the original publication of this work. Heavily engaged as they were in trying to stamp out the Solidarity Movement, they hardly needed these revelations to heighten public scorn for the regime. This book, like the massive circulation of underground literature under martial law, reflects the popular premise in Poland that their government is an alien force of self-serving crooks. This premise has made it acceptable for Polish scholars to be openly political and critical in their writing and to focus on the interaction of authorities and subjects far more freely than we are accustomed to seeing in Western literature. Paweƚ gets down to details of particular instances of horrific violence and human exploitation not as a fringe radical, but as a responsible mainstream social scientist. In so doing, his book contributes an extraordinarily authoritative, full and scathing account of prison life to the international literature.

Paweƚ writes that the Polish prison population exceeds 100,000, in a country that now has 40 million people in all. Recent Polish experience indicates an irony of dramatic political transformation—that many of the changes occur before the formal transformation. In 1986 the prison population reached 116,000. By the end of 1989, before Paweł assumed office, the population had dropped to 40,000. Only a few hundred of those released—in a final amnesty in 1986—were political prisoners. In addition, Polish Communist authorities repealed a Draconian provisional law, and, encouraged among others by the ombudsman’s office they created in 1987, they continued to reduce the prison population dramatically by stages, culminating in the latest in a long series of amnesties in the fall of 1989. Also in 1989, the legal minimum cell space allocated to each prisoner was increased from a cubic meter minimum (easier to maintain in older prisons with higher ceilings) to a minimum of three square meters. The prison population has actually increased since Paweł assumed the directorship, reaching 58,000 or so last summer in adult prisons, with perhaps nine thousand more in juvenile institutions. Still, prison sentences have continued to decline and parole has been accelerated.

For their part, the new prison leadership of Paweł and his associate director, celebrated human rights lawyer Danuta Gajdus, has focused reform on staff-prisoner relations. In part, their initiative has been Draconian. Paweł is rather proud of reporting that 30 percent of the prison staff he started with has left the service—many through more or less voluntary retirement, and many by being fired. Paweƚ fires miscreants readily, swiftly, and almost routinely, and the Justice Minister always backs him up. A variety of people, including a prison director, ombudsmen, human rights watch visitors, and prisoners report that Paweł and Danuta have managed to convey that prisoner complaints will be taken seriously and that staff are as subject to regulations as the prisoners.

The sheer decline in prison overcrowding is given much credit for a change in the atmosphere in prisons, but I think equally important is a lesson Paweł has applied from this study of his. The more open a prison— the more prisoners have a chance to get out into the community (as in prison C in this book)—the less corrupt and violent are staff/prisoner relations. By law, prisoners who have served 30 percent of their sentence are eligible for weekly twenty-four-hour furloughs. And by Paweł’s initiative, those who are eligible for furlough are likely to receive it. Now anyone in prison can have tea, while most of those who want vodka have merely to wait for a weekend opportunity to obtain it without guards’ complicity, and need only sober up a bit before checking back into prison to avoid losing their privileges. Paweł even jokes that the tension in prisons is relieved by escape having become easier, telling me that facilitating escape is his major penal abolition initiative. The promise of furloughs is, I infer, the major factor in releasing the staff’s grip on prisoners’ daily existence on the one hand, and in giving prisoners an incentive to remain peaceful and obedient to regulations on the other.

Meanwhile, since 1989, work has become scarce, and so rather than being forced to work, prisoners compete to become “good” enough to earn wages. The guards no longer beat prisoners for being idle; instead they are more inclined to sympathize with the plight of idle prisoners.

I seriously doubt that corruption has been eliminated or that violence has disappeared. As my wife, fourteen-year-old daughter, and I freely toured Polish prisons this summer, I was struck by how highly disciplined prisoners are. Outside of solitary confinement, beds are meticulously made and cells are kept spotlessly clean and neat. Prisoners still stand at attention as one enters, in men’s prisons at least, with an elder speaking first. I am convinced that prisoners are treated with considerably greater dignity and less abuse than before. I am convinced that prisons are considerably more peaceful and orderly than before. I am also aware that the prisoners are passive subjects of control, that they are still considered incompetent to shape their own regime, and that prison staffs have no more confidence in the prisoners’ ability to succeed after release without recidivating than in the accounts Paweł offers here.

Sadly, prisoners continue to mutilate themselves in large numbers, and their strikes continue—some of them, such as refusing breakfast, pathetically ineffectual. This is especially true among recidivists facing long sentences, whose prospects of furlough or employment are remote, who, for instance, may see a best hope of relief in being removed to a hospital for treatment of a life-endangering condition. Paweł and others including legislative reformers such as Irena Rzeplinska recognize this problem and hope to shorten prison sentences still further.

As I left Poland last summer, it was rumored that Paweł might be asked to clean up the police for the Interior Ministry as he had succeeded at cleaning up the prison service for the Justice Ministry. For all the limitations inherent in sudden political reform, Paweł’s is still a remarkable story of a scholar who has had the opportunity to apply academic lessons to real-world problems.

Hal Pepinsky

Bloomington, Indiana

November 14,1991