Hidden harmony: Converging interests in the development of prison reform

The agonistic perspective on criminal justice

The historical study of the development of criminal justice has tended to focus on macro-level ruptures—large-scale paradigm shifts in the field (Goodman et al., 2017) (e.g. Foucault’s (1977) exploration of the shift to the panopticon; and more recently, wherever the prefix “post”—as in “postmodern”—is used in order to indicate large-scale shifts, e.g. Hallsworth, 2002; Pratt, 2000). For example, in The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, David Garland (2001) focuses on the rise of an increasingly punitive culture of control. Simplifying complex and well-developed arguments, these and other scholars paint a picture of historically conflicting paradigms, from which one paradigm emerges victorious. Importantly, once a paradigm is victorious, its dominance is assumed to prevail, as if unchallenged, until the next period of large-scale contestation and eventual rupture.

Scholars working within a conflict theory perspective have begun to examine the more nuanced nature of these large-scale ruptures. For example, following the successes of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, it has been argued that racial inequality has been sustained by more subtle shifts in support for government assistance and policing strategies (Hohle, 2017). Thus, while the rupture remains of central importance, contestations of power are understood to continue even after “the dust has settled”. In a similar spirit, the authors of the agonistic perspective do not challenge the broad picture of social change focusing on large-scale ruptures, but they believe that more is happing throughout the process, even in those times marked by the dominance of a given paradigm. They assert that while history is intermittently marked by macro-level shifts in penal orientations (e.g. from a focus on retributive justice to a focus on rehabilitative justice, or vice versa), various collectives and actors always entertain differing and conflicting positions on the meso- and micro-levels, making even periods in which a given paradigm dominates colored by undercurrents of contestation. In line with conflict theorists, the agonistic perspective rests largely on the theoretical assumption that intergroup conflict is the motor driving social change. More specifically, the agonistic perspective is built around three central claims (Goodman et al., 2015: 316):

This perspective is insightful as it draws researchers’ attention to the greater complexity of the lived experience in all periods of social life, not just those periods marked by large-scale, open contestation and rupture. This theoretical framework is also useful in that it illustrates the greater complexity of human life more broadly; that people are simply more diverse than one would otherwise conclude were one to focus primarily on large-scale ruptures (or harmony). The agonistic perspective also reminds researchers that power is not only inherently unequally dispersed throughout society, but also that power hierarchies look different in different areas of social life (economic capital, political capital, etc.), and on different levels of analysis.

It is important to point out that the theoretical position expressed in the agonistic perspective did not emerge “out of the blue”, but rather, is in line with foundational currents of classical social theory. Stretching at least back to the 19th century, social theorists working within the school of thought that would come to be broadly described as “conflict theory” have emphasized the fundamentally important role of tension and struggle in the development, and very nature, of society. Karl Marx largely focused on these dynamics within the realm of economics, and other 19th-century scholars, such as Ludwik Gumplowicz, Ludwik Krzywicki, and Lester F Ward, examined them in other spheres of social life. This broad perspective would come to considerably influence the social sciences, including work on criminology and penology. In the 1930s, Georg Rusche and Otto Kirschheimer (1939) examined the nature of societal punishment and penal sanction from a conflict theory perspective, working more specifically within a Marxist paradigm (Garland, 1990). They argued that the selection and execution of punishment is shaped by broader struggles between groups, particularly social and economic classes. The foundational role of conflict within their work is even more explicitly expressed in Rusche’s (1933) essay, “Labor market and penal sanction”.

While a more detailed exploration of the influence of conflict theory on criminology and penology is beyond the scope of the current article, within our discussion of the agonistic perspective, it is important to point out a few of the more specific ways in which a focus on tension and struggle has echoed in more recent scholarship. Contemporary researchers have drawn attention to the ways in which conflict can in effect appear and disappear within penal scholarship depending on the level of analysis with which one is working (Hannah-Moffat and Lynch, 2012; Valverde, 2012), thereby allowing room for meso- and micro-level conflict even within larger, seemingly stable systems. For example, while top–down directives within a given penal system may reflect the apparent hegemony of a single, unified policy (on the macro-level), the way such policies are implemented on a local (meso-) level and on an individual (micro-) level may reflect the renegotiation or even subversion of said policy (Lynch, 1998; McNeill et al., 2009). Such scholarship not only points to the central role of tension and conflict for understanding the development and practical running of prisons, but also to the notion that if we see only harmonious agreement and seamless implementation, we are probably not looking hard or close enough (i.e. on the right level of analysis). Similarly, scholars such as Page (2011, 2013) have used Bourdieu’s notion of “field” as an analytical tool to fill in the gaps between macro-level changes and those on the meso- and micro-levels, arguing that macro-level factors affect individual actors, but not automatically and not necessarily without mediation, and that the notion of penal fields can serve as a middle-range concept linking phenomena on these different levels of analysis.

The under-appreciation of harmony

At roughly the same time as we saw the rise of conflict theory (broadly defined) in the wake of the Darwinian revolution, other scholars argued for the central role of collaboration in the evolution of human social life (e.g. Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, or The Conquest of Bread). While not ignoring competition, these scholars were arguing for the importance, logical necessity, and even primacy of collaboration in human life. Émile Durkheim, building on the social psychology (Volkerpsychologie) of Wilhelm Wundt, believed that collaboration was an essential condition of collective life, and he is generally understood to have laid the foundations for the sociological study of punishment (Garland, 2013). Durkheim understood punishment to be an expression (and reinforcement) of our “collective consciousness”, and as a means of enabling and enacting social cohesion. Like his emphasis on solidarity more broadly, Durkheim’s explicit reflections on the nature of punishment as being grounded in solidarity have often been criticized (e.g. as being “naive”) and are rarely explicitly used (Garland, 1990; Lockwood, 1992). Nevertheless, Durkheim identified the ideological tropes that continue to implicitly underlie the sociological study of punishment irrespective of theoretical orientation; for example, that it is not crime itself that dictates the nature of punishment, but rather broader social factors. Garland (2013) lucidly argues that much of contemporary sociology is in many ways still in step with Durkheim’s initial reflections on social life. More broadly speaking, Durkheim’s emphasis on the collective and on the non-reductionistic emergent properties thereof was subsequently built upon by numerous sociologists, for example in the symbolic interactionism of GH Mead and later H Blumer (Hogg and Williams, 2000), and in the functionalism of T Parsons (Krajewski, 1994). These understandings of consensus which posit consensus as a core element of social life can be thought of as what TJ Bernard called sociological theories of consensus, as opposed to conservative theories of consensus based on moral, normative assessments of humanity (Krajewski, 1994). The historical roots of the focus on consensus, which are beyond the scope of the current piece, have been traced back further, for example to the writings of de Toqueville and even Aristotle (Krajewski, 1994).

Even when working within a conflict theory perspective, there is logically no avoiding mention of consensus (at least to build the groups, ideologies, or collaborations thereof, that can then be in conflict with each other). As the conflict theorist Ralf Dahrendorf argued, neither conflict nor consensus can alone account for social life, a position that bears some resemblance to the thinking of LA Coser, and a lesson that has been applied by some to criminology (Krajewski, 1994). However, collaborations are usually (implicitly) understood to play “second fiddle” to conflict. For example, Page (2011) insightfully explains how various “get-tough-on-crime” ideologies and political positions in effect converged with such interest groups as the California Correctional Peace Officers Association to produce California’s “correctional crisis” (prison overcrowding and serious management problems). In his insightful look at Durkheim’s influence on the sociological study of criminology, Garland (2013) writes that Durkheim’s understanding of solidarity is in effect useful for further elucidating social divisions. Similarly, in his book Solidarity and Schism, Lockwood (1992: ix) explicitly focuses primarily on “the problem of disorder”, rather than the “problem of order”, thus, on the “schism” side of the equation. This kind of research is necessary and laudable, and we believe there should be more of it. We also think that researchers can, and should, study converging interests and collaborations in a manner that is not necessarily rooted in conflict, and that does not explicitly or implicitly reduce collaboration to a supporting role.

The under-emphasis on cohesion is not unique to criminology or penology. Within the social sciences more broadly, it has been estimated that roughly 10 times the number of academic publications have been dedicated to various forms of conflict than to various kinds of cooperation (Bierhoff, 2002). This is perhaps not surprising, as people in general tend to focus more attention on negative information than positive information (and academics are, after all, people) (Ito, Larsen, Smith, and Cacioppo, 1998). The predominantly theoretically “critical” stance of the academy is an interesting matter in itself, and has led to interesting and surprising challenges in criminology and penology (see Valverde, 2012). With these general trends in mind, our goal in the current article is modest, but we believe important. Just as evolution cannot be understood on the basis of Darwinian struggle alone, but requires an understanding of intra-species cooperation and inter-species mutualism, so too is it important that we not overlook or underemphasize the role of ideological and/or practical accord within the development of penology. More specifically, we believe that within the greater complexity of human systems that the agonistic framework highlights, of equal importance to tension and conflict (on various levels of analysis) are moments of congruence between actors, collectives, and schools of thought. The very notion of social life requires at least moments of consensus and (at least perceived) unity. Were it otherwise, we would not be able to speak of groups or schools of thought at all; such collectives require the possibility of (at least perceived) agreement. Similarly, historical, large-scale changes in perceptions of justice, including how criminals should be treated, have been shown to arise not only from ideological or group-based struggles, but also from the (new) convergence of (new) ideologies; for example, outcome-based justice being linked with the politics of social democracy and welfarism at the turn of the 20th century, or the earlier focus on equality and proportionality that arose alongside the Enlightenment focus on liberalism and the market economy (Garland, 1990).

By taking seriously examples of practical collaboration or ideological harmony we are also reminded that the (penal) systems of the West (particularly the USA and the UK) are not obvious, automatic, or necessary. By ignoring variations in converging interests or positions (to examine them only when problems arise), we implicitly assert a “world-scale theory” wherein our (usually American or British) reality becomes the measure by which we assess the world (e.g. Valverde, 2012), a matter only partially addressed by comparative research (e.g. Downes, 1988). Thus, by actively exploring both collaboration and conflict, we reduce the tendency to take the surrounding social structures and the surrounding social tensions for granted. We will now examine a particular period in the history of European criminal justice that cannot be understood were we to ignore the unique convergences of actors and ideologies that emerged at that time and place.

Penal reforms and pedagogy in an independent Poland

Following the initial invasion and partition of Poland in 1772, the nation would remain occupied to various degrees and in various ways by three foreign powers—the Austrian Empire, Prussia/Germany, and Czarist Russia—until the nation regained independence in 1918. In the wake of the failed November (1830–1831) and January (1863–1864) Uprisings and the brutal repressions that followed, Poles began to widely embrace a movement that would come to be called “Polish positivism”. This movement embraced much of the scientific and constructive elements of scientific positivism (à la Comte), but was focused on the protection and development of the Polish nation in particular within the struggle for national independence. The movement involved a shift away from armed conflict toward strengthening the core elements of the nation, namely, “organic work” (strengthening the economy), “work at the foundations” (educational efforts for the masses), and emancipation and tolerance for national minorities and women (many of whom would themselves become influential members of the movement, e.g. Maria Konopnicka, Eliza Orzeszkowa). These were explicit attempts to protect the nation from brutal efforts at Germanization and Russification on the part of the partitioning powers. For our current purposes, it is important to highlight the central role of education, educators, and professional pedagogues within this movement. As we will see later, the Polish intelligentsia was also actively involved in Polish positivism, a point illustrated by Aleksander Świętochowski’s assertion that “great problems hidden in the womb of mankind can be solved by education alone” (Miłosz, 1983: 285–286).

In general, pedagogical theory served as a promising framework for a correctionalist reform program, for three main reasons. First, pedagogy was seen as an element of the emancipatory project of modernity. Within the expanded Zeitgeist of the Enlightenment, and within Polish positivism more particularly, pedagogy served as a theoretical background for programs which showed promise for coping with various kinds of social ills. Second, relative to law studies, educational studies of that time were more confidently drawing on the naturalistic ideal of knowledge, an epistemology that understands knowledge to arise from empirical sciences, rather than a priori conceptual analysis (Wrenn, n.d.). While the tradition-bound rigidity described by Radzinowicz (1999) reigned in departments of law, Polish pedagogues were inspired by the work of such laboratories as that led by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig (and the work of his Polish student, Jan Władysław Dawid), and they thus placed particular emphasis on empirical exploration of larger philosophical questions (Nowak, 1999). This made educational studies in Poland closer to Enrico Ferri’s (1896/1917) project of criminal sociology as a modernistic alternative to the retributive, classical theories of criminal law. The third reason for the connection between criminal justice and pedagogy was that the modernistic assumptions of that time as to the nature of crime were uniquely bound to the study of juveniles. Within the modernistic perspective, the question of the guilt and responsibility of minors became controversial, as the errors of youth were increasingly understood as resulting in a deterministic manner from maladjustment during these formative years. Hence, problems of maladjusted youth come to be the first-and-foremost point of interest of correctional pedagogy. Before tackling the issue of prison pedagogy, the State Institute of Special Pedagogy (Państwowy Instytut Pedagogiki Specjalnej, PIPS) first examined the wider areas of social deviance and criminality, with particular attention being paid to minors as both perpetrators and victims. PIPS trained pedagogues to work with children and minors who were not able to attend normal schools, and who therefore required the establishment of special educational centers (Lipkowski, 1972). The director of PIPS, Maria Grzegorzewska (1888–1967) stated that these efforts were undertaken on behalf of “all those who, if you respect in the notion of ‘equality,’ need something more than ‘equality’ in order to reach the same level as their peers” (in Wójcik, 1984: 14). This broad understanding of maladjustment served as the conceptual basis for the professional training of educators according to differentiated types of special needs. The main categories of maladjustment comprised: individuals with intellectual disabilities, the blind and visually impaired, those with hearing impairments, and socially maladjusted youth. The characteristic trait of Grzegorzewska’s thinking about maladjusted children is that they need help and support, not unlike the blind and the deaf. In this line of thinking, no matter what kind of “disability” the child reveals, they are in a state of need. It is therefore not surprising that Grzegorzewska took a typically educational approach, in contrast to approaches created in the field of criminology, the sociology of deviation, or the psychology of abnormality, not to mention legal points of view. The advantage of such a perspective was that the issue of juvenile delinquency came to be treated as not only a legal or even a clinical problem, but also—and rather above all—as an educational one.

The links between pedagogy and criminal justice led to the use of the term “resocialization” (resocjalizacja) within the Polish context. The Polish understanding of resocjalizacja is related to its German counterpart, Resozialisierung, a term that often appeared in combination with the notion of Besserung (“betterment”) (Kusztal, 2011). However, the various positive connotations of the concept are not reflected in its English counterpart, as “resocialization” (much like the notion of “reeducation”) is largely taken to be a pejorative notion, one associated with the social engineering projects of totalitarian regimes (Pospiszyl, 2008). This is, however, not how the term is understood in the Polish context, a fact that underscores the different roles played by pedagogy and law in different national contexts. The high intellectual quality and academic respect enjoyed by Polish resocialization is attested to by the world-class level of the lecturers who worked at PIPS in the interwar years, such as Janusz Korczak (1878–1942; who famously accompanied the children from his orphanage to their deaths in the German extermination camp at Treblinka) and Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1886–1980; a famous philosopher and esthetician). It is important to also mention Sergei Hessen and his idea of pedagogy as a form of applied philosophy (Hessen, 1997).

Importantly, the reach of the pedagogical approach to criminality, particularly that regarding minors, extended to other fields. This can be seen in the following statement made in 1921 by the Codification Commission of the Republic of Poland, the body charged with developing national law for minors:

Punishment is a means not only insufficient in the fight against adolescent criminality, but often even harmful in that regard, such that the child who commits a crime as defined by the criminal code ought not be treated the same as an adult criminal, but rather should be tried before a different court and by a different procedure, and rather than meeting out punishment—relatively speaking—the courts should dispose of educational means and meet out educational care.

Polish intelligentsia

Polish society in the 19th century, unlike its western counterparts, lacked a middle class (Micińska, 2008; Żarnowski, 2008). Many of the social roles filled by the middle class in other nations were in Poland the purview of the intelligentsia—a social stratum that originated outside the traditional social-economic structure (as in Poland its members could in effect occupy any level of these other strata). Its self-identity was defined by a common ethos, with little or no reference to the place of its members within the surrounding social structures (Żarnowski, 2003). The intelligentsia was characterized by a high degree of intellectuality and by a shared commitment to the ideal of social emancipation. Due to the statelessness of foreign occupation, including both cultural and physical repression, the Polish intelligentsia was characterized by ardent patriotism. As a group, members of the Polish intelligentsia did not share economic interests, not even to the extent that the western middle class did, nor did they share a common social or economic status (Sztuka, 2013). Similar to the history of the Polish nobility, which was considerably larger than in other European countries and could occupy any level of the socio-economic ladder (Davies, 1979), this collective was in many ways apart from the dominant hierarchies in Polish society (Żarnowski, 2008). In this regard, Isaiah Berlin’s (2013: 117) definition of the intelligentsia is helpful:

The concept of intelligentsia must not be confused with the notion of intellectuals. Its members thought of themselves as united, by something more than mere interest in ideas; they conceived themselves as being a dedicated order, almost a secular priesthood, devoted to the spreading of a specific attitude to life.

While they were not indifferent to the surrounding political realities, including the political disputes of the day, their identity granted them a considerable degree of distance to the various political power structures within which politicians often battled (Zienkowska, 1987). In fact, they often supported the weaker side of political struggles, thereby rejecting the automatic affiliation with the powerful and expressing solidarity with the wider society as a whole; a holistic approach to society that rises above and beyond the particular fights of the day (“solidarism”) (Janicka, 2016; Rodak, 2009). Rather than being bound to any political party, class structure, or economic interests, the Polish intelligentsia asserted its role as the cultivators of national culture and by invoking the postulate of social and national liberation (Jedlicki, 1988; Walicki, 2007; Żarnowski, 2008).

The cultivation of Polish identity, including national education, was part of the independence struggle from the beginning of the Partitions. Rousseau spoke to this spirit following the first Partition of Poland in 1772:

You may not prevent them from swallowing you up; see to it at least that they will not be able to digest you. [. . .] The virtue of her citizens, their patriotic zeal, the particular way in which national institutions may be able to form their souls, this is the only rampart which will always stand ready to defend her, and which no army will ever be able to breach. If you see to it that no Pole can ever become a Russian, I guarantee that Russia will not subjugate Poland.

As mentioned above, national education and the cultivation of Polish culture came to explicitly play a central role within the national resistance movement known as Polish positivism (Davies, 1979; Zdrada, 2007). The national struggle for self-determination, largely championed by the intelligentsia, came to place greater emphasis on the active and patriotic support of underground, national education. It is important to underscore the depths to which the Romantic sense of service had been absorbed by the Polish intelligentsia. They saw themselves not only as the cultivators of Polish culture during the era of the Partitions, but as destined to play a central role in national life following the eventual rebirth of the nation. As part of this mission of the nation, members of the intelligentsia were to suffer alongside their Polish brothers and sisters during the era of foreign occupation; however, following eventual national liberation they were to play a unique and even heroic role in the service of the rest of society. This social vision would lead them as a collective to largely reject the most aggressive elements of the positivistic sciences, such as the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer. Of fundamental importance to them was the notion of service, particularly that which they—as the leaders of the nation—were to perform for the nation as a whole, often at considerable personal costs (Sztuka, 2013). This sense of service also included the responsibility for the moral reform of criminals (Milewski, 1997). This spirit of a somber but optimistic shared fate was not limited to this social group, but very much fit the spirit of turn-of-the-century Poland, including the Polish diaspora abroad (Pliska, 1965). This desire, willingness, and ability to establish effective, large-scale, underground educational programs as found during the period of the Partitions (such as the underground “Flying Universities” in which Maria Skłodowska Curie was secretly educated) would allow Poles to establish the largest underground educational network in German-occupied Europe during the Second World War (Hryniewicka, 2015; Snyder, 2010).

The merging of interests: Resocialization, pedagogy, and the mission of the intelligentsia

When Garland (2001) draws the picture of penal welfarism as the socio-ideological context in which the modernistic rehabilitative ideal arose (in the early 20th century), he also points out the important role played by the new professional middle class in the development of rehabilitation practices (in contrast to the old middle class which was based on the ownership of property). This new middle class had emerged as a result of the historical process of the gradual separation of capitalistic enterprise from private property, which increased the demand for, and value of, applied, practical knowledge (Mills, 1951). According to Garland (2001: 148), this stratum consisted of “liberal elites, the educated middle classes and public sector professionals”. This population benefited the most from the new rehabilitative policies toward the socially maladjusted.

As discussed above, there was no old middle class in Poland, which led to the development of a new, modern middle class along a different developmental trajectory. The correctionalist approach that developed there was supported and promoted mainly by the intelligentsia whose ethos combined intellectual qualities with well-developed sensibilities to social and national affairs. While the notion of service to the wider society is arguably a universal feature of the ethos of the intelligentsia (Domański, 2002), this feature was uniquely central to the identity and aspirations of the Polish intelligentsia in particular (Sztuka, 2013). This considerably affected the nature of penal reform in Poland following the regaining of Polish independence in 1918. For their unwavering belief in the ideals of social and national liberation, and for their readiness to bear the personal costs of such beliefs, the intelligentsia at the turn of the 20th century is referred to as “the generation of indomitables” (pokolenie niepokornych) (Cywiński, 2010). The indomitable generation placed particular emphasis on education as a path toward social modernization (as well as national deliverance) (Sztuka, 2013). It was therefore within the field of pedagogy, and not law, that rehabilitative ideals found fertile ground, and it was pedagogy as a field that uniquely matched the spirit and aspirations of the “generation of the indomitables”.

Given the realities of the partitioned land, the price that the intelligentsia (and other Poles) would pay for their “indomitable” attitude, including their attitude toward education, was often imprisonment, if not execution. For many representatives of the Polish intelligentsia, imprisonment therefore became a formative experience that not only hardened them in their patriotic mission, but that also more strongly united them with others who had similarly sacrificed and suffered. The extent to which imprisonment became part of the national consciousness is nicely captured by a speech entitled “Prison psychology” given in 1930 by Marshal Józef Piłsudski, then Polish Minister of Military Affairs and de facto national leader, a fragment of which reads as follows:

Poland is perhaps the only country in existence in which it is possible to still speak easily of things as personally compromising as criminality. As I stand before you in the uniform of the highest ranking official, the uniform of the highest ranking representative of the Polish army, I can talk with confidence of criminality if only because for the last 150 years of Polish history the prison was nothing other than part of everyday life. It is part of our intellectual culture, political culture, and the culture of everyday life of Poland. Year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation familiarized themselves with the prison as something belonging to everyday things. It entered human thought just as elsewhere other problems of life enter the mind, but not the prison. (1931, p. 3)

Being intimately familiar with prisons as a result of over a century of foreign occupation, and often having experienced prisons themselves, the Polish intelligentsia felt that prison reform was a central part of their modernizing project for the nation—especially given that Poles were finally able to police, judge, and punish themselves in the wake of Polish independence in 1918 (Rodak, 2009). The importance of penal reform for the new nation is illustrated by the fact that one of the first legal acts enacted by the young state was The Temporary Prison Rules. Józef Piłsudski, chief of state and one of the primary architects of Polish independence, signed the act on February 8th, 1919. What is more, the struggle for national independence gave a romantic, idealized gloss to the notion of criminality, which certainly did not hurt the reception of the notion of resocialization, something that was further supported by Polish positivism (Sztuka, 2013). Thus, among Polish pedagogues and the intelligentsia more broadly, there was considerable interest in shaping future correctional facilities so as to meet the requirements of penal modernism and its “treatment ideal”, the notion that corrective measures can be taken to not only reform the prisoner, but also to reform the prisons (also called the “rehabilitative ideal” or “correctionalism”; Garland, 2003). Thus, while the term that has come to be used to name this field in Poland—“resocialization” (in Polish, resocjalizacja)—was first used in the 1960s (Sztuka, 2013), its ideological foundations took root over a century earlier (just as the notion of the “rehabilitative ideal” existed before the phrase was used by Francis Allen in 1959).

In contrast to Western European models of criminal justice, the Polish notion of “resocialization” was not dominated by applied criminology, clinical psychology, or the sociology of deviance. Rather, from the very beginning it found expression in the language of education, and what is more, that language came to be used by lawyers, psychologists, doctors, politicians, and social activists. For example, Bronisław Wróblewski (1888–1941), a lawyer and professor of criminal law at the Jan Kazimirz University in Lwów, believed that the preventative element of punishment was more important than the repressive element, arguing that the penal system ought to follow the pedagogical model. He asserted that penal studies ought to take “the content and form of a pedagogy that uses criminal punishment as an educational environment” (Wróblewski, 1929, in Raś, 2007: 85). Similarly, Adam Ettinger (1878–1934), a lawyer and professor of criminology at the Warsaw Free University, asserted the importance of the ethos of the intelligentsia for the successful implementation of corrective measures within the penitentiary system. In his view, the intelligentsia was united with the wider society in the common struggle to build a better, freer nation. Ettinger’s (1924) theoretical framework, therefore, rested on the working assumption that the wider society was important for the processes of rehabilitation, not only as the social body to which prisoners would eventually return following their release from prison, but as the social body within which prisoners lived as prisoners. Similarly positivistic approaches to the use of pedagogical science within the development of the Polish penal system are reflected in the work of Stanisław Batawia (1898–1980) and Leon Radzinowicz (1906–1999). ² In 1933, Radzinowicz wrote that “today, we should turn the common overseer and the average prison guard into educators” (Radzinowicz, 1933a in Raś, 2007: 201), and his most significant Polish text, The Foundations of a Science of Prisons (1933b), is clearly permeated with such pedagogically-oriented thought.

Polish tensions: Roads not followed

To point out this confluence of interests is not to paint an artificially romantic picture of this period. The interwar period in Poland was rife with social struggle and strife of all kinds (Davies, 1979; Rodak, 2009; Roszkowski, 2004). The “May Coup” of 1926 (Przewrót majowy) which brought about the overthrow of the government speaks to the considerable divisions in the country at that time. That there would be considerable conflicts at that time in Poland is not surprising. Under the partitions, the people had been ruled by vastly different systems—legal, linguistic, cultural, penal, educational, economic, and otherwise. Based on the national censuses of 1921 and 1931, roughly one-third of the population comprised ethnic minorities (e.g. Belarusians, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians), and there was often considerable tension between elements of these various communities (Davies, 1979). Similarly, following the rebirth of the nation, millions of people moved to and from Poland, considerable population shifts that came with challenges of their own (Kicinger, 2005). One also cannot forget the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1920), or the other armed conflicts in which Poland was engaged during that period.

To provide a particularly telling example of the challenges facing the newly reborn state: in 1918, in the lands of the Second Polish Republic five different legal codes were in effect (Orliński, 2018). The region of the former Congress Warsaw was influenced by French law (a relic of the Napoleonic period). The western regions of the country were governed under German law, the eastern regions under Russian law, the south under Austrian law, and some of the border regions under Hungarian law. The challenges of unifying or linking these differing systems were considerable, and despite the Herculean efforts of such lawyers as Maurycy Allerhand, attempts to do so were not entirely successful.

An important “tension” at that time was between the field of law and the newly emerging field(s) of criminology and penology. Practitioners of law and legal theoreticians were little interested in the deeper roots of crime (be they psychological, sociological, economic, cultural, etc.; Wąsowicz, 1989), and more interested in making sure that the punishment fit the crime, or even exceed it, thereby stressing the punitive and preventative qualities of punishment over its restorative and reform qualities (Rappaport, 1937; Rodak, 2009). In his autobiographical account of the period, Radzinowicz (1999) related how criminology as a field was not welcome at the faculties of law at state universities, but found a home at the Warsaw Free University (Warszawska Wolna Wszechnica Polska)—where there was no faculty of law. ³ Radzinowicz drew a picture of the legal community as expressing a largely “neo-classical attitude toward the discipline criminal science”—which is to say, an attitude marked by a focus “on the juridical, dogmatic study of the criminal law and, in particular, on the interpretation of the Criminal Code in force” (1999, p. 71). Similarly, Adam Ettinger argued that criminal law did not pay enough attention to the social factors within the etiology of crime. Other scholars of crime and punishment argued the field of criminal law ought not to be a purely and rigidly normative science, but that it should also be undertaken with a mind to identifying and treating the sources of crime and the roots of criminality (Rodak, 2009). In this context, we should once again underline the unique openness of educational studies to etiological inquiry, which is typical of correctional criminology. This was what Radzinowicz (1999) seems to have overlooked when depicting the intellectual climate surrounding the matter of inter-war prison reform.

Resocialization-minded currents within Polish criminology and penology also came into conflict with positions in support of strong biological determinants of crime and criminality. While there were supporters of biological determinism in Poland, and even supports of eugenics (e.g. Leon Wernic, 1870–1953), these movements were in the extreme minority, and they received considerably less support than they infamously did in Germany and the United States, but also in such countries as Sweden and Canada (to name but a few). Unlike many other countries, the Polish government never passed eugenics legislation. Polish-Catholic intellectuals, as well as the Catholic Church more broadly, were ardently against eugenics (Gawin, 2003), and the strength of Catholicism in the nation may at least partially account for the relatively low levels of support for strong biological determinism, including eugenics. At the same time, however, the Polish intelligentsia was particularly sensitive to the potential social consequences of applying a scientific, positivistic approach to pedagogy, including biological determinism, particularly when such a step would seem to threaten human dignity. For example, Maria Grzegorzewska, mentioned earlier, was an ardent critic of Louis Vervaeck’s anthropological laboratories in Belgium and of biological (and racial) theories more broadly (Dziedzic, 1972; Lipkowski, 1972). Thus, the Polish social sciences were wedded to what was conceived of as a larger, moral, social mission grounded in human dignity. In this line of thought, Władysław Wolter (1897–1986) believed that personality types existed, but he did not believe that there were biological categories of criminals. Similarly, Stanisław Batawia argued that strict biological determinism overlooked the social, economic, and cultural factors leading to crime. Such scientific sentiment was reflected in the widely held conviction among early Polish criminologists and penologists that people, including criminals, are to be understood as relatively autonomous beings, each with his or her own unique characteristics; beings that are never-the-less shaped by the surrounding social environment, but not biologically determined (Rodak, 2009).

A third interesting tension at that time concerned the sentiment on crime held by the masses and those of the Polish intelligentsia (including criminologists, pedagogues, and prison reformers). This tension manifested itself in at least two important ways. The first concerned the fact that the masses were generally supportive of more punitive measures than were the Polish intelligentsia, who we have argued were more supportive of the corrective and nation-building elements of punishment (Rodak, 2009). The second point of tension is illustrated by the well-known work by William I Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 1918) in which they claim that criminality increases in the face of weakened or deleterious social ties. Taking such claims to heart, reformers such as Rafał Lemkin (who coined the term “genocide”) wanted the masses to play a more active role in preventing crime. Bronisław Wróblewski argued that social solidarism is the very foundation of all attempts at crime reduction, and many scholars joined his ranks by arguing that, without the active participation of the surrounding society, any-and-all legal measures at fighting crime will come to naught (Rodak, 2009). Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński wrote that:

when society finds itself facing a criminal, in its soul it must acknowledge that it did not fulfill its responsibilities to that person, it did not care for him from childhood, it did not educate him, did not give him work, and did not raise him well.

Such socially based reform efforts were reflected more widely in various Polish institutions, such as the Institute of Public Affairs (Instytut Spraw Społecznych) in Warsaw (Mazur, 2018). Despite his conviction that society is of fundamental importance to crime reduction, Lemkin wrote that “the helplessness and indifference of society in the face of certain unavoidable dangers from criminal elements in society is astonishing” (in Rodak, 2009: 142). Thus, while education-based reforms were widely supported by the intelligentsia, they were not widely held by the masses.

Conclusion

At the turn of the 19th century in Poland, and especially after Poland regained independence in 1918, we see an interesting and context-specific convergence of schools of thought and social groups within the national approach to criminology, punishment, and penal reform. In that period, the intelligentsia shared a uniquely strong bond with pedagogues, just as pedagogues helped to shape the mission of the intelligentsia. These connections were particularly evident within the educational efforts of the movement known as “Polish positivism” following the crushing of the November and January Uprisings. Penal reform efforts came to be heavily influenced by pedagogy, just as pedagogy became heavily invested in national educational reform, including for the incarcerated and those at risk of being incarcerated (e.g. the poor, the unemployed, the alcohol addicted). It is because of this combination of interests that Polish “resocialization” came to be associated more with education than with law as in other countries (under the name “criminal justice”), and more with education than with other areas of applied social sciences (social work, clinical psychology, the psychology of criminal conduct, applied criminology, etc.).

It is important to underscore that the “harmony” about which we are writing is “hidden” in at least two important ways. Confluences of interests are often hidden from social actors, especially those taking place on higher levels of analysis—just as underlying conflicts can be hidden. The harmonious relations that surround (like many of the underlying conflicts) quickly become the invisible, taken-for-granted norm. Similarly, harmony is often invisible to social scientists, especially given our tendency to search for, and focus on, conflict. That we so readily overlook Durkheim’s observation that all social action, including conflict, presupposes solidarity (Garland, 2013) illustrates how easy it is to overlook the foundational nature of collaboration in social life. Focusing more explicitly on solidarity, future research would benefit from a more detailed analysis of the harmonious links between actors and ideologies, and to this end Bourdieuian field analysis (as suggested by Page, 2013) may be of some help (e.g. by providing useful conceptual tools such as overlapping “habitus”, shared “capital”, complementary “doxa”). Thus, the search for harmony is helpful in more accurately elucidating the historic record, but it is also of analytical significance. While some have proclaimed the death of consensual approaches to the study of society, including criminology, we agree with the likes of Krajewski (1994) that both consensus and conflict are inseparable elements of collective human life, and as illustrated in the Polish case study presented here, that what TJ Bernard called sociological theories (in contrast to normative theories) of conflict and consensus are both necessary for better understanding penal reform. To be clear, within this sociological approach to consensus, harmony is not to be equated with social “health”, nor are deviance or conflict to be equated with “pathology” or “illness”, as is often found in positivistic approaches to criminology (Garland, 1985).

It is important to point out, especially to non-Polish readers, that the nature of Polish society described in this article would be largely destroyed during World War Two and what remained would radically change under the post-war Soviet domination of Poland that would last until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 (see Applebaum, 2012). For all intents and purposes, in this period the pre-war Polish intelligentsia and pedagogues were replaced—ideologically if not physically—with Moscow-backed communist ideologues, part of a process Stalin lamented was “like trying to put a saddle on a cow” (Szacki, 1995: 47). Nevertheless, the unique path that Polish penal reform followed in the decades prior to the Second World War cannot be fully understood without paying considerable attention to the unique combination of shared interests and values that occurred in that historical and social context. Interestingly, all of these separate currents were individually shaped to a considerable degree by social conflict, first and foremost as struggles against national oppression, but also between various camps within these currents themselves. Thus, the agonistic framework would certainly be of help for better understanding this period, including the historical opposition of the established legal community to developments in criminology and the strong opposition of Polish social scientists to biological determinism and eugenics. While contestations at that time existed, the points of overlap and shared interests were also of fundamental importance. By studying both in different contexts, we are reminded that neither the conflict nor the consensus with which we are familiar in a given context are automatic, inevitable, or necessary, but that they always arise in a unique social and historical setting. Like fish in water, we easily take for granted the particular social waters in which we swim—a metaphor that we believe holds for both conflict and consensus. We have been arguing that while we as researchers are generally quite adept at highlighting the hidden conflicts that shape penal reform and social change more broadly, as illustrated here by the agonistic approach, our efforts to better understand the social world would be well served by a similar focus on its hidden harmony.