Środki poprawczo-wychowawcze stosowane wobec małoletnich więźniów w Królestwie Polskim (do 1867 r.)

Abstract

Introduction: During the autonomous period of the Kingdom of Poland, seven-year-old children were already under criminal responsibility. Tragic consequence of juvenile delinquency was imprisonment, during which minors served the sentence with demoralized adult prisoners. Corrective and educational measures were to counteract this phenomenon. Research Aim: The aim of the article is to present corrective and educational measures in the light of legal solutions for juvenile prisoners in the autonomous period of the Kingdom of Poland. Institutional sources in the form of penal code, regulations of the Administrative Council, regulations of the Government Commission for Internal and Clergy Affairs and prison regulations relating to juvenile offenders and juvenile prisoners were analyzed. Evidence-based Facts: In the history of rehabilitation pedagogy, there is no synthetic study on teaching minors in prisons during the autonomous period of the Kingdom of Poland. The few research results focusing on the state of prison education at that time, only marginally refer to the education of children in prisons. These issues were dealt with by both nineteenth-century social activists and researchers in the interwar period. In the post-war period, we can also find it incidentally in monographs devoted to the rehabilitation of minors. Summary: Despite the fact that the main goal of the partition policy towards children was Russification, the efforts made in prisons, thanks to the social commitment of penitentiaries, contributed to their moral improvement.