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Interwar Poland, Lessons for Criminology from Across International and Historical Contexts
Fri, September 8, 4:30 to 5:45pm, Palazzo Congressi, Floor: ground floor, Congressi 3Abstract
Sir Leon Radzinowicz (1906–99), one of the most significant criminologists in 20th century Europe, in his captivating scientific autobiography, Adventures in Criminology, indicated that between the two world wars, there was no recognized criminological university center in Poland. Furthermore, he stated that no Polish university housed a chair of criminology, there were no lectures on the subject at the universities, and only a handful of academics dealt with it. However, it was then that the new discipline of criminology, distinct from criminal law, was born in Poland. That "a small criminological window" turned out to be sufficient to change the landscape of Polish penal sciences. The researchers mentioned by Radzinowicz, their collaborators and successors, became Nestors of Polish criminology. Thus, in 1933 the first issue of the journal entitled Criminological Archives (its spiritual successor entitled Archives of Criminology is still issued today) was published by Professor Wacław Makowski. Criminology was considered a separate academic discipline at the Free Polish University in Warsaw. In addition, this private institution of higher education created a Chair of Criminology, with the discipline being listed among 20 others. After the Second World War, criminology had to face up to the ideology of the great new world, for which crime was only a bourgeois relic (so-called "sovietisation of the penal science"). The author aimed to present various views on the development of criminology in Poland after the country regained independence in 1918 and to show the consequences of these changes on contemporary Polish criminology. The unique database of digitized Polish criminological texts from the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century has been built during the study. The research has been financed by the Minister of Education and Science (Poland) under the program “DIALOG” in the years 2020 - 2023 (reg. no. DIALOG 0071/2019).