Teorijski okvir analize nedavnih reformi krivičnog prava u Poljskoj

In the article, I analyse certain aspects of recent criminal law reforms in Poland from the perspective of criminal punishment being a complex legal and social institution of a processual nature. It is intended to enable a critical examination of the punitiveness of the penal system, which can hardly be explained by its effectiveness or even by penal populism. In the study I use the following methods: historical legal, comparative legal, formal logical, dialectical, analytical, synthetical and inductive/deductive. The synthesis and triangulation of the methods follow the principles of culturally integrated social and legal studies (Królikowska, Utrat-Milecki 2010).

Prisons in the United States and Western European nations have a rich history, with the use of confinement as a form of punishment dating back to medieval times. Throughout the centuries, scholars and penal reformers have widely documented reform efforts and the shift in punishment philosophies. This shift resulted in corporal punishment methods being abandoned and replaced with incarceration. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the confinement of criminals in prisons expanded across the United States and Europe. As the use of prisons as punishment became common practice, penal innovations throughout continental Europe influenced the development of competing prison discipline systems in the United States. The opposing systems in the United States in turn promoted a change in penal practices across Europe. The state of early prison systems has been well documented, from first-hand accounts of abysmal conditions in early European prisons to historical examinations of physical prison structures. Scholars have conducted case studies of historical penal institutions as well as examined the history of women in prison, which paints a vivid picture of prisons throughout history. Historians and scholars also place great emphasis on reform efforts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where authors cite social transformations, ideological shifts, economic changes, and political events that resulted in the widespread use of incarceration that continues in the early 21st century. The 1970s is arguably the most pivotal decade in the recent history of prisons, where the United States witnessed a sweeping change in the political climate. This change resulted in a transformation of penal and sentencing policies, which ultimately resulted in mass incarceration practices in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Europe. A substantial amount of scholarly research on trends in the correctional population emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. The consequences of the unprecedented increase in incarceration have also been examined, particularly with regard to the large-scale incarceration of minorities. Overall, the numerous historical accounts of prison development and penal practices throughout time will help researchers and students alike gain a comprehensive understanding of the history of prisons in the United States and Europe.

It has often been said that the Chinese prison and penal reform in the early twentieth century was part of a global circulation of Western institutions and practices and signified China's entry into the modern era. The process has also been described as an example of how the local (China) interacted with the global (the West). By moving back in time to locate some fragments of the histories of penal practices and their representation from earlier periods, the objective of this article is to trace the trajectory in which the histories of prison and penal practices became intertwined with the politics of European expansion, and to suggest that the "modernity" of the reform was as much about the reframing of the multifarious histories of the past as a new history of difference as it was about the adoption of Western institutions and practices. In doing so, it also seeks to demonstrate how the global and the local can best be conceptualized as historical temporalities rather than specific locales.

This article considers the implications of cultural values, political-cultural arrangements and the changing mediascape for the distinct cultural resources on crime and punishment that we consume as citizens. It first explores what we mean when we talk about punitiveness, making the important, yet often overlooked, distinctions between public attitudes, political rhetoric, public policy and penal practice. Next, the ways in which the media constrain how we perceive problems and the means of solving them are considered, especially the ways these constraints are influenced by different political-cultural styles. ‘Stealth’ penal reforms, in which punitive rhetoric is employed by politicians to divert attention away from more progressive policies pursued quietly on the sly, are criticized because they tend to legitimize and regenerate only punitive ideational resources for public consumption. Finally, implications for future research are offered along with some practical suggestions for enriching public discourse in order to nourish and sustain a broader range of understandings and responses to crime.

Much of the recent commentary on America's incarceration crisis operates on the assumption that penal practice is a matter of public policy, susceptible to rational debate about social good and social harm in the public sphere. This essay takes a far more pessimistic view, arguing that in historical perspective punishment in America has deep roots in the private sphere. Historically, the form and frequency of punishment in the United States has been driven by the desire for private retribution and personal vengeance more than abstract notions of justice. Secondly, rationalistic penal reform rarely detaches itself from the other deep motive in American criminal justice, the goal of racial control. Penal systems regarded today as barbarities, for example the southern chain gang, in their time emerged as reforms to replace apparently even more barbaric systems, such as convict leasing. The character of such reforms often reflected a basic continuity: the use of the criminal law to discipline and punish racial minorities. Together the privatized and racialized character of American punishment make genuine penal reform unlikely.

This is the first book to address the question of what role public opinion should play in the way criminal offenders are punished.Should public opinion determine—or even influence—sentencing policy and practice? Should the punishment of criminal offenders reflect what the public regards as appropriate? These deceptively simple questions conceal complex theoretical and methodological challenges to the administration of punishment.In the West, politicians have often answered these questions in the affirmative; penal reforms have been justified with direct reference to the attitudes of the public. This is why the contention that politicians should bridge the gap between the public and criminal justice practice has widespread resonance. Criminal law scholars, for their part, have often been more reluctant to accept public input in penal practice, and some have even held that the idea of consulting public opinion constitutes a populist approach to punishment.The purpose of this book is to examine the moral significance of public opinion for penal theory and practice. For the first time in a single volume the editors, Jesper Ryberg and Julian V. Roberts, have assembled a number of respected criminologists, philosphers, and legal theorists to address the various aspects of why and how public opinion should be reflected in the way the criminal justice system deals with criminals. The chapters address the myriad complexities surrounding this issue by first weighing the justifications for incorporating public views into punishment practices and then considering the various ways this might be achieved through juries, prosecutors, restoratifve justice programs, and other means.

This chapter examines the shared history of spatial punishment and penal labour in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan, China and Mongolia. Spatial punishment (transportation, exile and banishment) and penal labour were not only combined in penal practices, but also linked over the course of the historical development of penal regimes. By exploring the combination of spatial punishment and penal labour, as well as the historical transition from the former to the latter, this study sheds light on the broader history of penal practices and reforms. Moreover, by taking a geographically broader East Asian perspective and conducting a comparative analysis among different societies, this chapter helps reveal the diverse approaches towards space and labour in penal practices in the region and beyond.

The pension system and pension funds are important elements of the economic system. Their functioning is analysed not only by lawyers and economists but also by employers, employees and politicians. The relationship between the pension system and the fiscal system is important for every country since the standard of living but also the functioning of the labour market is strongly affected by the level of pension contributions.The paper presents the evaluation of the relationship between recent legal changes in and functioning of Open Pension Funds in Poland. The results of performed analysis show that the legal changes introduced in 2011-2014 lead to slow reversal of the capital part of the Polish pension system.

The goal of this chapter is to present the reforms of family policies in Poland and to analytically assess their direction and possible gendered effects. In particular, I will focus on three policy fields: parental leave reforms, childcare services and support in cash including child allowances and tax credits. My main argument is that the reforms of family policies extending financial family support might signal transformative change of the policy model from implicit to explicit familialism, as increase in monetary support is accompanied by only weak development of care services. Although Poland went quite smoothly through the economic crisis, the country did not invest so much in care services, but rather in financial support for the families, with stronger maternalist direction in public discourse on childbearing, especially during the right-wing coalition in office since November 2015.

Strategic instrument or social institution: Rationalized myths of the university in stakeholder perceptions of higher education reform in Poland

Reviewed by: Crime and Empire, 1840–1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context George Robb Crime and Empire, 1840–1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context. Edited by Barry Godfrey-Graeme Dunstall. Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2005. This collection of essays, which grew out of a conference in New Zealand on “Comparative Histories of Crime,” addresses itself to the issue of how crime was conceived and managed in the heyday of British imperialism. Perhaps reflecting the volume’s origins, its contents are heavy on examples from Australia and New Zealand, lighter on India and Africa. This imbalance, however, might also be seen as a strength, as the antipodes have traditionally gotten short shrift in imperial historiography. Whatever their geographic focus, the contributors’ thematic range is impressive. Chapters cover such topics as policing, imprisonment, criminal law and the courts, and contemporary and historical representations of the criminal justice system. Whenever possible, contributors place colonial legal and penal practice within international perspective. After all, simultaneous with the imposition of British law and penal practice in the colonies was the centralization of state control in Britain itself and throughout Europe, with its attendant creation of national prison, police, and court systems to replace the old medieval patchworks of local, pluralistic approaches to crime. One notable example from this collection of a comparative approach is Godfrey and Dunstall’s chapter on policing in two “frontier towns”—Timaru in New Zealand and Crewe, a mining boom town near the Welsh border. Both of these towns experienced considerable violence, much of it fueled by alcohol and a preponderance of young and single men. This connection between masculinity and crime dovetails nicely with recent work on the topic by Martin Wiener and Clive Emsley. It also exemplifies a commitment to gender in this volume, found also in essays on sati, the creation of a women’s prison in New Zealand, and the experience of Boer women in South African concentration camps. Colonial law was often an instrument for the subjugation of colonized peoples, though it might also provide a means of resistance, or be useful in settling disputes among colonial subjects themselves. Given the vast geographic, racial, and ethnic diversity of the empire, police and penal practice could vary considerably across regions and over time. The career of a single administrator could encompass stark contrasts. Such was the case of Edward Eyre, as Mark Finnane points out in his essay, “Crimes of violence, crimes of empire?” During his early years in Australia in the 1840s, Eyre was noted for his protective attitude toward aboriginal peoples, while a generation later he was “the agent of racialising and brutal domination in the West Indies.” (51) Among the more heavy handed examples of imperial law, Mark Brown points out in his essay “Colonial history and theories of the present,” was the practice in India of classifying entire populations as “criminal.” In the 1850s, “Track Laws” meant that if the British authorities could track an offender to a particular village, but could not locate him within it, then the entire village could be held responsible for the alleged crime. An 1871 Act brought unruly ethnic groups in north India under subjugation by declaring them “criminal tribes”—a category which gave the government broad powers of regulation and control, including the right to impose curfews, hold daily roll calls, and resettle entire villages. Criminal law thus became an instrument of political subjugation, excluding whole populations from membership in civil society. Colonial administrators could also be pragmatic in their encounters with “native” legal practice. As Jane Buckingham demonstrates, British judges in India invoked Brahmanic law and cited legal precedents from princely courts in their interventions over sati. Wherever possible, the law’s authority should appear benignly hegemonic rather than overtly coercive. Richard S. Hill provides another such example in his essay on “Maori police personnel” in New Zealand. Not only would using Maori police constables save the British money, but would help “make Maoris parties to their own submission.” (181) Much like the New Police in British working-class neighborhoods at the time, Maori police were seen as “missionaries” part of whose function was to instill British, middle-class values in...

This article presents selected results of a legal and sociological research project entitled“Penal cultures. Cultural context of criminal policy and criminal law reforms. Legal,penological, historical, sociological, and cultural (anthropological) analysis of criminallaw reforms in Poland against the background of European and world trends”, conductedin 2012-2014 on a sample of 160 Polish judges. The research was carried out usingthe questionnaire method supplemented with in-depth interviews with 12 judges.The questionnaire was sent by email to all the presidents of district, regional, andappellate courts in Poland with a request to pass it to their judges. The questionnaire wasaccompanied by a recommendation letter from the Vice-Rector for Scientific Researchat the University of Warsaw with the information about the research unit, that is aboutthe Professor G. Rejman Division of Culturally Integrated Legal and Social Studiesand the European Centre for Penological Studies at the University of Warsaw. Thequestionnaire was either sent back in bulk from individual courts, or the respondentssent it back individually by post or email to the university address provided.The punishment phenomenon was examined in a processual approach. Theresearchers adopted the hypothesis that criminal judges were the first link in thisprocess and knew more about punishment and punishing as social and legal phenomena than the general public. The presented research refers thematically to the studiescarried out by Bronisław Wróblewski and Witold Świda before World War II, reportedin their book Sędziowski wymiar kary w Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej. Ankieta [The judiciarysentencing of punishment in the Republic of Poland. A Questionnaire], publishedin Vilnius in 1939. Similarly to those studies, the present research asks questions aboutthe determinants of the judiciary dimension of punishment, but it emphasises morestrongly the cultural, philosophical and moral dimensions of punishment attitudesdisplayed in sentencing.The statements of the respondents show a varied l evel of the judges’ knowledge aboutmatters concerning the socio-cultural and psychological aspects of punishment. Theyalso reveal a strong legal orientation of views and remain within the set of notions andtheories focused on law. Similarly to the Vilnius pre-war studies, the judges’ statementsshow a strong formative influence of lawyers’ education curricula implemented at alllevels of education.The results of the research carried out in 2012-2014 illuminate the judges’ viewson the goals and functions of punishment and punishing. They show the declaredhierarchy of the most important variables defining professional decisions regardingthe sentences imposed by the judges. They show the influence of systemic and culturalvariables on the professional attitudes and motives of the judges’ decisions in this matter.The judges’ statements on the effectiveness of penalties in individual and generalprevention are generally subdued. Although these factors are taken into account inthe process of sentencing, there is no deep conviction about their high impact. It issignificant that the research shows a clear distancing of the judges from the assumptionthat they may be subservient to influences from their superiors, scholarly authorities,public opinion or the decisions of colleagues in similar matters. Independence isdeclared by judges to be an important feature of their professional ethos and appliesto all sources of influence. On the other hand, what the judges indicate as variablesrelevant to their decisions on sentencing are the personal and family conditions ofthe perpetrator and their potential for rehabilitation, which may occur as a resultof criminal sentencing and end the state of impunity. The respondents also indicatethat the fairness of a sentence and the doing of justice to the offender is a significantaspect of the court’s action.Although the research procedure in this case was strongly grounded in empiricism,this was not its main distinguishing feature – it was the conducting of research inthe culture of methodological and theoretical integration of the empirical material.It makes it possible to deduce a complex structure of the researched process andto undertake an analysis explaining many more variables than would appear in thedisciplinary mono analysis.

Positivist criminology is drawing renewed scholarly attention. Yet the new historians of the science of crime do not come from legal backgrounds. This heavily ideological, discourse-based discipline is an irresistible temptation for scholars who (under the influence of Foucault) see a link between ideas of punishment and the symbolic legitimacy of social systems, and who (thanks to the linguistic turn) have become sensitive to the multiple implications of text and discourse in the analysis of power systems. To a great extent, the new studies about criminology are enterprises of “unveiling.” Furthermore, the study of criminology is exceptionally relevant for Latin America, where this science was genetically bound to the emergence of several nation-states, and contributed to shaping the discourse and perceptions of many reform-minded elites.In this carefully crafted book, Robert Buffington analyzes how the eclectic collection of photographs, and medical, penal, journalistic and anthropological texts that constituted (or were intertwined with) the corpus of criminology delineated definitions of citizenship in modern Mexico. Much like their Argentine counterparts, Mexican criminologists refused to commit to any European school of criminology, choosing instead to combine Lombrosian and anti-Lombrosian theory, and limiting their contribution to the gathering of new data about the Mexican case. Buffington shows convincingly how the lax argumentative disposition of criminology (built on the analysis of individual cases) allowed for a combination of common prejudice and modern theory, objective data, and moral judgment that tended to validate old class and race prejudice with the prestige of science. Rather than emphasizing the change introduced by science in prison reform, penal reform, or modern anthropology, Buffington points to the less obvious “perceptual continuity” underlying all reforms despite the most violent social and institutional changes.Carlos Roumagnac, the police inspector, criminologist, and journalist, whose versatility and narrative skills made him the chief popularizer of criminology, has a prominent place in this story. One of the highlights of the book is an essay about his sensationalist yet “scientific” popular criminology, whose hidden (and not so hidden) ideological underpinnings Buffington exposes with great skill. Yet, the leap between the textual analysis of Roumagnac’s fascinating prose and the conclusions about its actual ideological role is less clear. More information about the reception of the “Roumagnac effect”—circuits of discussion, size and nature of his readership—would have strengthened the case about the persuasive power of popular criminology.Ideas about crime are not just dissected but also followed as they were adopted for key institutional reform. What Buffington finds is remarkable continuity. In the prison system, he traces an unbroken line connecting Porfirian and postrevolutionary penitentiary principles—a continuity based on the survival of the positivist concept of social defense, and a shared confidence in the powers of a state whose right to rehabilitate inmates was never questioned. He also finds continuity—colonial continuity this time—in penal law, an area where positivist criminologists were met with strong resistance from the legal establishment, leading to a much-negotiated reform. The resulting 1931 penal code allowed for the coexistence of a wide variety of penal philosophies, while granting great discretionary power to the judge. In this theoretical flexibility, mixed with paternalism, Buffington identifies a clue to the remarkable continuity of the Mexican institutional system. This observation seems more than reasonable, yet it is one that he feels compelled to present cautiously given his limited collection of documental evidence of court practices. So, while the study may not be conclusive, it is richly suggestive, delineating an agenda for future case-study-based analyses of legal practices.These conclusions, however, are only deceptively timid. By studying the role played by boundary-delimiting science in the construction of modern Mexican society, this skillful “exercise in unveiling” provides material for fundamental questions concerning the well-established historiographical subjects of nationalism, education, and ideology, and the less-traveled roads of modernity, punishment, and science. Overall, it brings many valuable insights to one of the greatest enigmas of modern Mexico in particular, and Latin America, in general: the success with which the modern nation-state has imposed a system of domination and exclusion upon so many.

The Polish case stands out due to the parallel existence of prestigious large universities with long histories of scientific advancement and the largest number of private higher education institutions in Europe, which generally offer market-oriented programmes in business and management. Since 1989 Poland has undergone a process of extreme massification, with student numbers having exponentially multiplied. This chapter sheds light on the differential impact of isomorphism and highlights how external pressures can be strategically ‘funnelled’ so that they primarily affect only one part of their initial target, in the Polish case the private HE sector. Like the Czech Republic, the persistence of the historically inherited model of academic self-rule has served to fend off overarching policy change in public higher education. Nevertheless, the Bologna Process has increasingly empowered the Ministry to push for top-down change on the public universities and has incorporated a series of modifications reminiscent of a market-oriented system into its current education strategy. In the following sections, I trace these developments over four time periods viewed from the angle of institutional interlinkages and historical legacies and path dependencies.

The political economy of punishment is a critical approach within the sociology of punishment that hypothesizes the existence of a structural relationship between transformations of the economy and changes in the penal field. Inspired by a neo-Marxist framework, this materialist critique of punishment explores—from both a historical and a contemporary perspective—the connections between the reorganization of a society’s system of production and the emergence, persistence, or decline of specific penal practices. Thus, materialist criminologists have investigated the parallel historical emergence of factories as the main sites of capitalist production and of prisons as the main institutions of punishment in modern societies. Scholars in the field have also explored the correlations between incarceration rates and socioeconomic indicators, such as unemployment rates, poverty levels, welfare regimes, and labor markets. This materialist framework has been criticized in mainstream criminological literature for its alleged economic determinism. In particular, critiques have focused on the theory’s tendency to overlook the cultural significance of punishment and the politico-institutional dimensions of penality, as well as on its exclusive emphasis on the instrumental side of penal practices as opposed to their symbolic dimensions. In response to these critiques, some recent works have tried to integrate the old political economy of punishment with epistemological tools from different disciplinary fields in order to overcome some of the limitations of the materialist approach. This broadening of the structural paradigm in criminology could point toward the envisioning of a “cultural political economy of punishment.” Particularly in its more recent iterations, the materialist critique of punishment provides a powerful lens for investigating current transformations in the penal field, such as the advent of mass incarceration and the ongoing prison crisis in the United States.