Preface

In the 1970s and early 1980s Polish prisons rapidly filled up as the state pursued a strict penal policy in a situation of growing social discontent. The number of inmates and persons held in custody reached some 100,000. By the end of this period, every eighth adult male in Poland had experienced imprisonment. Not surprisingly, doubts emerged concerning the meaning and efficacy of the application of incarceration.

Such large-scale imprisonment accentuated the role of prisons as agents for resocializing their inmates, but no special successes in this area were noted. Official statistics showed that over 30 percent of Polish ex-convicts returned to prison. And everyday life experiences showed that most of them left the penitentiary worse people than they had been upon admittance—the prison demoralized. This divergence between the prisons’ declared aims and the reality inclines one to seek causes, and it was my intention in this study to discover which features of these prisons made it impossible to realize the purposes of the penal system.

In the original Polish-language version of this study I discuss the psychosocial situation in prisons and its institutional conditioning. The manuscript has more than four hundred pages and includes numerous references to and presentations of the results of research conducted in the West (mainly in the United States). For Western readers such information is not new, and consequently I have limited the present book so that it contains only findings pertaining to Polish prisons, together with a number of references to Western studies.

The investigations which I carried out in Polish penitentiaries and the subsequent presentations of the collected material took several years of concentrated effort. The difficulties encountered in carrying out the research, putting the material into order, and editing it often inclined me to forsake my planned undertaking. That I was able to finish it is an achievement of many persons who, on the basis of my verbal reports or typed excerpts of the written work, convinced me that the effort was worth completing. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Jacek Kurczewski and Professor Hanna Swida-Ziemba for discussing my work and offering comments in the course of its writing, to the workers of the Institute of Social Prevention and Resocialization at Warsaw University, and to the students of the Interdepartmental Penitentiary Group for their assistance and encouragement in continuing my task. Finally, I would like to thank the prison staff members and the prisoners themselves who made this book possible.

Warsaw, 1990