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Poland Postcommunist Reform
Beginning in 1989, former opposition groups (who during
the
1980s had become quite familiar with the Polish prison
system)
achieved a government ban on violence in prisons and
restoration
of prisoner civil rights. In 1989 Parliament passed an
amnesty
law that released political prisoners but continued to
confine
recidivists. In late 1989, the disappointed hard-core
prison
population staged some 500 riots. In 1990 Pawel
Moczydlowski,
director of the Central Prison Administration, succeeded
in
ending the violence and corruption typical of the
communist
administration. About one-third of prison guards and
threequarters of prison governors were dismissed between 1990
and
1992. By mid-1992, nearly 50 percent of prison personnel
had been
in service less than three years.
Wherever possible, the physical structure of prisons
was
opened to give inmates greater contact; harassment and
arbitrary
punishment were eliminated, and visitation and appeal
rights were
extended. Patronat and Alcoholics Anonymous became active
among
prisoners, and clergymen had unlimited access. Increased
public
access eased tensions between inmates and guards. In 1992,
however, a Helsinki Watch report noted poor material and
sanitation conditions and overcrowding in many Polish
prisons.
Only fifteen prisons had their own hospitals, many of them
with
primitive facilities. The opportunity to work, an arduous
but
often welcome respite from prison tedium, was reduced
significantly in the postcommunist economic decline; in
mid-1992
only about 25 percent of prisoners held jobs, and only
about 4
percent of prisoners worked for civilian companies.
In mid-1992 the Central Prison Administration had debts
of
US$8.3 million. The decline of prison enterprises meant
that
prisons no longer contributed to the budget of the
Ministry of
Justice. Prison budgets were consumed by the cost of
housing
prisoners (3 million zloty monthly per prisoner). Most
Polish
prisons were at least 100 years old, and several
facilities had
been condemned by 1992. In 1992 the prison population was
61,329.
Although significantly lower than in the communist era,
that
figure climbed by 1,000 to 1,500 per month between 1989
(when the
post-amnesty population was 40,000) and 1992 (when experts
declared that the system had reached its capacity).
Sentences
still averaged two years, compared with six to eight
months in
the West. In most cases, courts still tended to impose
maximum
sentences even for trivial crimes. Lesser punishments,
such as
fines and restricted freedom, were rarely imposed as
alternatives
to imprisonment.
In the early 1990s, most aspects of internal security
in
Poland followed the same irregular pattern of reform as
that
which occurred in national security policy in the same
years. By
1992 the mission of state security agencies had changed
dramatically toward protection of all citizens rather than
protection of the state, but the public retained from the
communist era considerable suspicion of such agencies. The
open
society of the early 1990s fostered new types of crime,
which
were met with uncertain reform measures in police and
border
protection and in prison policy. Obtaining public support
for
internal security institutions was a difficult part of
governance
in the early postcommunist era, as all of Polish society
adjusted
to quite new internal and external conditions.
* *
*
Background on Poland's military history is available in
studies such as M.K. Dziewanowski's Poland in the
Twentieth
Century and Norman Davies's God's Playground: A
History of
Poland. A. Ross Johnson covers the development and
organization of the Polish People's Army in East
European
Military Establishments: The Warsaw Pact Northern
Tier; he
covers the role of the military in government in Poland
in
Crisis. Several valuable recent studies of Polish
military
doctrine and the international security position of Poland
have
been published by the Soviet Studies Research Center of
the Royal
Military Academy at Sandhurst and the Foreign Military
Studies
Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The RFE/RL Research
Institute's RFE/RL Research Report series published
between 1989 and 1992 contains comprehensive reports on
the
Polish prison system, reform of internal security
agencies, and
Poland's postcommunist military doctrine and strategy. The
annual
volumes of The Military Balance, published by the
International Institute for Strategic Studies (London),
provide
detailed information on force and armament strength. The
Daily
Report: East Europe, a publication of the Foreign
Broadcast
Information Service, is an invaluable source of
translations of
up-to-date periodical articles on the Polish military and
the
political background of military policy. (For further
information
and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of October 1992
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