Abstract
The aim of the research was to analyse letters written by prisoners so as to discover what the penitentiary space means to them. The practical goal was to show the usefulness of employing epistolography in assessing the quality of social and living conditions and to evaluate the quality of penitentiary practices in the context of prisoners’ needs, as well as to unmask the hidden re-education programme. The article is based on the results of the content analysis of 26 anonymised letters written by prisoners who for the first time serve a sentence in Polish closed regime prisons. The collected research material was subjected to a framework analysis supplemented by an emergent technique. The analysis of prison letters indicates a generally critical assessment of the quality of the practices carried out and their accuracy in relation to the prisoner’s rehabilitation needs. The letters reveal also the existence of a hidden re-education programme. The use of the epistolary corpus in the description of the penitentiary space may result in the improvement of the current penitentiary methods. A thorough analysis of prison letters indicate areas that require change or the application of specific solutions that may contribute to the rationalization of penitentiary practices.
Highlights
The legal status of prisoners is determined by their rights and obligations
Prisoners’ letters may be useful in diagnosing the social climate of an institution (Pytka 2005, 164; Nowak 2017, 105-117) and in conducting socially engaged research on the spatially conditioned agency of a person, their readiness to change, as well as JOURNAL OF SECURITY AND SUSTAINABILITY ISSUES ISSN 2029-7017 print/ISSN 2029-7025 online all those imponderable elements of the penitentiary space which can be included in the phrase ‘the theatre of social life’ (Goffman 2011; Szczepanik 2015)
A penitentiary unit is a place where various types of re-education activities take place, but their results are sometimes contradictory to their authors’ intentions (Przybysz 2011, 180-192; Szczepanik 2015). This hidden re-education programme, which in its extreme form may lead to prison socialization that consolidates the process of prisonization and educates prisoners to live in prison rather than in society, is one of the factors hindering the process of penitentiary rehabilitation
Summary
The legal status of prisoners is determined by their rights and obligations. From the re-educational point of view, one of the most important rights is the ability to keep in touch with the outside world (Journal of Laws of 2020). Depending on the type of penitentiary isolation (Journal of Laws of 2020; Kalisz 2015, 67-82), the possibilities of establishing and maintaining contacts and social ties with the external environment are limited. In view of the above, the writings of people deprived of freedom constitute an interesting source of knowledge about the penitentiary space, especially in the context of conducting personal identification tests in conditions of prison isolation (Poklek 2017, 41-57), as well as in the context of the security of the penitentiary unit, and in a broader sense, in the context of public safety (Kołtun, Kośmider 2019). As a consequence, undertaking this type of scientific research and the use of epistolography in the description of penitentiary space may result in the optimisation of the current methods of conducting penitentiary work
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