Development and Identity of Penitentiary Education

Abstract

In the post-war Poland, official Marxist ideology dominates according to which crime is strongly associated with capitalism and has no place in a society where so-called class conflict was eliminated. Crime in such political conditions was seen as a primitive form of resistance and, therefore, was given a political nature. Common criminal proliferated to the rank of a rebel against whom severe criminal repressions appropriate to the enemies of the political system were used. In such ideological conditions in Poland, the first prison in which a specific pedagogical experiment was conducted appears, and the organization of which is a strong part of the development of the penitentiary education. Juvenile Correctional Facility in Jaworzno operated from 1951 to 1956. Theoretical sources of the activity lay in the prison resocialization system of Antoni S. Makarenko. Unfortunately, the post-war origins of this field of knowledge and practice is the dark spot on education which will languish in prison mentality for many decades to come. The first turning point for the changes that occurred in the prison after the war was the year 1956, when the reality of the Stalinist era prisons was partially revealed. Information about cruel treatment of prisoners, especially political ones saw the light of day. After 1956, the treatment of convicted persons no longer was characterized by dramatic repression, but was far from performing their resocialization functions. Incidental attempts were made to introduce the innovative solutions to the system of imprisonment, but they remained on the margins of the mainstream prison policy and were solely experimental. in the post-war Poland penitentiary education found its established position as late as in the 1960's through reprints and Polish interpretation of the contents of Soviet studies. Penitentiary education occupied an important place in the realization of functions performed by the prison in a socialist state. The prison was presented as one of the most important "ideological fronts" and, therefore, teaching should pay special attention to the politicization of education. Significant and systemic changes in the system of prison organization, particularly in the treatment of convicts, took place only after 1989. The biggest transformations in the conditions and possibilities of making intentional resocialization interactions inside the correctional facilities took place in 1997. The legislator resigned from the resocialization of convicted persons understood as the aim of imprisonment. In support of the government draft of the executive penal code, the need to break with the subordination of the criminal law to "any doctrine or ideology" was stressed and treating it only as a means of criminal policy.