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1

Przestępczość w II Rzeczpospolitej w świetle danych statystycznych

100%

Krajewski K.

Archiwum Kryminologii

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2012

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issue XXXIV

531-567

EN

After Poland regained independence in 1918, the system of crime statistics had to be organised from scratch and unified. At the same time, until new criminal code became effective, there were three criminal laws each of them with different scopes and forms of criminalization. Because of this in 1924 – 1934, crime statistics were based on classification drafted by the State Police Headquarters. Only since 1934 the statistics were base on the classification of the new criminal code. There was also a problem of separating statistical data concerning more serious crimes, defined by L. Radzinowicz as “true crime” from petty offences (which today are subject to Offences Code). As far as crime dynamics is concerned, the interwar period should be divided into three subperiods of 1924-1930, 1931-1934, and 1934-1938. In the first period crime intensity fluctuated yet with an overall increasing tendency. In 1931-1943 there was an explicit increase, particularly in 1931 and 1931. Reasons for this should be sought in the influence of the Great Depression. Since 1935 there was a decrease in reported crimes. In the last year of available statistics, that is 1938, crime level was 22,3% lower than in 1934. What draws one’s attention is the differences in reported crime levels before and after the war. Particularly, in the 1950s and 1960s crime levels were comparable to those in 1920s, that is before the Great Depression. It fell below this level only in 1970s, and in 1980s it increased again to the level comparable with 1920s. Reported crime levels throughout the period of communist Poland was however lower than in most of 1930s before the war. At the same time, it is clear that present crime levels are much higher than any of those in the interwar period. Data concerning intensity and dynamics of murders between 1924-1937 are particularly interesting. In 1920s number of murders increased similarly to increase of overall crime figures. After 1930 number of murders fluctuated only and its dynamics diverged from an explicit increase in overall crime. This fact made L. Radzinowicz conclude that the Great Depression – unlike it influenced crimes against property – did not influence violent crimes in an the same way. A decrease in violent crimes during an economic depression can be related, according to the author, with decreased alcohol consumption resulting from lower incomes of the population. There are many signs that murders are related to differences in the level of civilization, economic, and cultural life of particular parts of the country before the war and not to the economy cycle. What is interesting in the light of this is that the number of murders in post-war Poland never approached the number of crimes which were observed before the war. Dynamics of robbery was much different. Number of robberies in 1920s uninterruptedly decreased, and it increased since 1930s. But in comparison to the post-war period, robberies seem almost marginal.

2

Przestępczość polityczna w województwie lubelskim w okresie międzywojennym

100%

Kędzierska G., Siemak Z.

Archiwum Kryminologii

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2012

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issue XXXIV

603-627

EN

In the system of security organs of the Second Polish Republic fight with crime described as political belonged to the duties of National Police. The department of political Police was a secret specialized internal service of the National Police designed most of all to invigilate almost the whole of the political and social life of the country as well as to persecute perpetrators of crimes against the state, with particular focus on persons suspected of acts of subversion. Between the wars the political police underwent a complex reorganization four times each time under a different name: Defensywa Polityczna, Służba Informacyjna, Policja Poli-tyczna i Służba Śledcza (respectively: Political Defence, Information Service, Political Police, and Investigation Service) and with specialised units for fight with various forms of political crime. Illegal political activity, form the point of view of law then, was divided into activity against the state and espionage for other countries. Until 1926 political service in lubelskie voivodship conducted full operational observation of factions and political movements of communist character, of ethnic minorities, and of radical peasant activists. Political movements of bourgeois character were not of interest to political counterintelligence, still they were under discreet operational observation. After the May Coup in Poland, interest of the political police, apart from communists and national minorities, was extended also to the whole legal opposition against the government. Political police in lubelskie voivodship was occupied with revealing social tensions, antigovernment moods, subversive actions, and actions against the state (in particular those by communists and nationalists form national minorities), observation of legal political formations and parties, but also of trade unions and members of parliament. Until 1934 the police statistics included, for example, high treason, rebellion and resistance against the government, desertion, and other crimes against military power and the state. After 1934 the police statistics included high treason (articles 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98 of contemporary criminal code), insult to the government or its institution (art. 125, 127), individual and group resistance (art. 129, 131, and 169 in relation to art. 129), insult and assault of an official (art. 132, 133, and para. 4 of art. 256), insult to the nation and the state (art. 152, 153), incitement to crime (art. 154, 155, 156, 157, 158), incitement to crime (art. 165 – 167), riots (art. 163, 163). “Incitement to crime” in lubelskie voivodship was carried out mainly by offenders’ by “dis-playing flags and banners” of anti-state and subversive content (26,5 % of national overall) and “spreading communist pamphlets and appeals” (16,5%). Such acts as “high treason” (7,9%), “insult to the government or its institution” (6,9%), “group resistance” (11%) were above national average.

3

Fałszerstwa pieniędzy (banknotów i bilonu) oraz czeków i książeczek oszczędnościowych w Polsce w latach 1918-1939

84%

Sprengel B.

Archiwum Kryminologii

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2012

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issue XXXIV

569-601

EN

In interwar Poland (between 1918-39) banknotes, coins, saving books, and checks were counterfeited. Coins and banknotes were poor protected, some people have rarely dealt with them, and thereby mostly coins and banknotes were falsified. Foreign countries’ banknotes such as for example US dollars were also falsified. Forgery was done by organized crime groups with their own network of distributors who introduced forgeries into circulation. Skilful craftsmen and even manual workers moonlighted with forgery of coins and banknotes. Quick forgery of newly issued money proves the efficiency of the forgers. In addition to the methods used for centuries they invented also new ones. They showed a great invention in gaining similar or even the original paper to falsify money. Graphic designers, printers, lithographers and artists were employed in the production process. After their activities were exposed, they moved to other part of the country to continue their procedure there. The research shows that distributors where the ones most frequently caught by police. Forgers were seldom given away by the distributors who sometimes even did not each other as the criminal network consisted of several middlemen acting in conspiracy. As more and more people learned to recognize Polish money and the economic situation improved, the scale of counterfeiting of money slightly decreased. This tendency is especially visible in the last years of the Second Polish Republic, although the difficulty of verifying statistical data that show different trends in different sources should make one cautious about their credibility. Based on media reports it must be assumed with high probability that the largest size of this phenomenon took place in the early years of the Second Republic. The available data indicate different frequency of appearance of falsified money in the circulation. Most of it was probably not in Warsaw or other big cities but where people very poorely rec-ognized Polish coins and banknotes. Reports of forgeries from such areas are not most numerous. Regulation on the procedure for taking, sharing and retention of falsified currency and its implementing rules, issued in 1927 by the President of the Republic should be considered as belated. The fight against counterfeiting of money was one of the main tasks of the International Commission of the Criminal Police of which the Polish National Police was an active member. It also cooperated in this area with police forces from other European countries and even with the U.S. Federal Service of Investigation (FBI). In order to make the prosecution of money falsification more effective there was a special office and file of falsifiers and falsified money organized and maintained by the Police Headquarters. The instruments to motivate the police to prosecute counterfeiters were also introduced. Criminalist studies played an important role in the process of detection.

4

Skazani z Warszawy osadzeni w więzieniu karnym "Mokotów" w latach 1918-1939. Obraz statystyczny i próba charakterystyki (ustalenia wstępne)

84%

Rodak M.

Archiwum Kryminologii

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2012

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issue XXXIV

629-663

EN

Within twenty years of Second Polish Republic over 20,000 prisoners passed through the Criminal Prison "Mokotów". Nearly 13,000 prisoners of this group came from Warsaw. Thanks to the well-preserved original documentation, which consists of the personal records of prisoners of Mokotow prison, the chance to begin research on the functioning of that specific environment opens for historians. Especially that until now all the historical narratives describing the society of the Second Republic neglect the thread of crime and criminals in social history. This article is the result of search query that started in 2010 and includes qualitative and quantitative analysis of more than 20,000 archiving units from archive of Criminal Prison „Mo-kotów”. The research was conducted thanks to a scientific grant funded by the National Cen-tre for Science (Grant No. NN108268139). The final result of the query should be a study of the environment of the interwar prisoners detained in Mokotów, as well as other selected pris-ons of smaller prison districts like Płock, Łowicz, Sieradz, Łódź and Lublin. The subject of the analysis contained in the article is a community defined as "convicts from Warsaw", i.e. prisoners who lived within the limits of the then Warsaw, when placed in the institution. The selection of this group of prisoners, rather than the presentation of the whole environment, is a result of two factors. The first one is the volume of the article that prevents one from a presentation of a comprehensive picture of the whole criminal environment. On the other hand, the geographical restriction allows the query to cover a very actual social group, which was a part of the interwar capital’s reality. The archives of Mokotów prison in addition to the documents on the operation of the institution primarily consist of personal acts of the detained. They are the basis of the analysis presented in the article. A little more than 2,000 files from among more than 20,000 thousand personal sheets of prisoners detained between 1918 - 1939 were selected to complete the analysis. There was no any special key of selection established, every tenth folder was selected. The collected statistical material based on data which were contained in all the questionnaires and which can be analyzed over the entire twenty years. The appearance and the content of the questionnaire changed three times. There was a fixed set of data, which remained unchanged in every version, and certain positions occurring only in one of each versions. For example, in the first version of the questionnaire the information about the number of children and military service were given. Since the mid-20s the questions about these issues disappear from the personal sheet. The available data allowed to create a list of characteristics on which the analysis presented in the article was carried out.

5

Międzywojenna polska debata kryminologiczna-poszukiwanie społecznych przyczyn przestępczości i sposobów jej zwalczania

67%

Rodak M.

Archiwum Kryminologii

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2009

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issue XXXI

101-145

EN

This article is an attempt of a summary of the debate, pending in Poland in the interwar period, on the issues related to the etiology and methods of preventing and / or controlling crime. Analyzing these two highly interrelated and interdependent problems, the author decided to take into consideration the clear-cut division in criminology prevailing in the interwar period and to reflect it in the structure of the article. Thus, the text is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the causes of crime, the second the criminal policy. However, the text is not an analysis of all the causes of crime. The author focuses on discussion of the interwar views on the social causes of crime held by persons or institutions related, on various different levels, to criminology. Accordingly, the section on criminal policy includes response to crimes being, at least in theory, a result of social causes. The autor of the article faced the problem to attempt to collect and present ideas on social causes and method of preventing and / or combating crime published in the interwar period. The study covers articles and books, in which the above-mentioned problems have been discussed both by scientists (criminologists, lawyers, doctors, psychologists, and sociologists) and laymen (journalists, publicists, community workers, and politicians). In this text, the attempts to analyze the opinions expressed by the latter of the aforementioned groups is a significantly new thing. The views of people not directly related to the academic community at that time were rarely taken into the consideration while discussing criminological theoretical considerations of the interwar period. The point of departure of this text is assumption of the thesis that in the interwar debate on the broad issue of crime, the views which favoured social factors in generating crime were significantly dominant. It should be recalled that on the other side of the dispute there remained a theory of special importance of so-called endogenous factors. It was argued that the specific psycho - physical construction of a man makes him predisposed to become a criminal. This was an aftermath of a C. Lombroso’s theory, already modified in the interwar period. It should be noted that his theory in Poland was not received unquestioningly. However, the dispute between supporters of exogenous and endogenous factors took place in interwar Poland. A strong trend was a school trying to combine the two trends, taking into account the reasons of both parties as typically they did not exclude. This should be regarded as a unique achievement of the Polish criminology of the interwar period.

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5 Archiwum Kryminologii

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Przestępczość w II Rzeczpospolitej w świetle danych statystycznych

Przestępczość polityczna w województwie lubelskim w okresie międzywojennym

Fałszerstwa pieniędzy (banknotów i bilonu) oraz czeków i książeczek oszczędnościowych w Polsce w latach 1918-1939

Skazani z Warszawy osadzeni w więzieniu karnym "Mokotów" w latach 1918-1939. Obraz statystyczny i próba charakterystyki (ustalenia wstępne)

Międzywojenna polska debata kryminologiczna-poszukiwanie społecznych przyczyn przestępczości i sposobów jej zwalczania