ОРГАНІЗАЦІЯ ДІЯЛЬНОСТІ ПЕНІТЕНЦІАРНОЇ СИСТЕМИ ПОЛЬЩІ У 1918–1939 РР.

Abstract

The proposed article is devoted to the organization of the penitentiary system of Poland in 1918-1939. Particular attention is paid to the formation of the prison system in the first years of independence of Poland, the legal framework of activity, the internal structure and its evolution, etc. It is established that between the two world wars in the Second Polish Republic lasted the difficult process of organizing of penitentiary system, which began in the fall of 1918 with the declaration of independence of this country and was interrupted by the aggression of Nazi Germany in September 1939. Poland searched for the optimal model of the prison system for twenty years. It was complicated by the difficult financial situation in the first years after the Great War and in the era of the world economic crisis, as well as the different legal bases of the functioning of penal institutions on Polish lands which was the part of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires at the end of XVIII – beginning of XX centuries. It is found out that the first legal acts that initiated the organization of the penitentiary system of the Second Polish Republic were signed by chief of state J. Pilsudski in early of 1919. However, the problem of legislative unification of the activities of Polish prisons was solved only in 1928 with the adoption of an order about the organization of prisons signed by the Polish President I. Moscicki. The Prison Rules of 1931 and the updated Prison Law of 1939 testified to the authorities’ efforts to transform the penitentiary system from repressive to re-socializative. It was found that the establishment of a concentration camp in the Bereza Kartuska (Polesie Voivodeship) contradicted the tendencies mention above on the one hand, and became the logical reflection of the establishment of an authoritarian political system in the Polish state on the other.