You Will Have To Swim, Mr. Marek !
Marek Kaminski During and after 1970s the Polish underground press drew on experiences of Second World War veterans of Armia Krajowa. After martial law in Poland and the government crackdown on Solidarity, the activities of underground publishing were significantly curtailed for several years. Nevertheless, with the communist government losing power in the second half of the 1980s, production of Polish underground printing (bibuła) dramatically increased, and many publications were distributed throughout the entire country. After 1989 some of the underground publishers in Poland transformed into regular and legal publishing houses. In the 1980s, at any given time there were around one hundred independent publishers in Poland who formed an exceptionally vibrant segment of the black market. Books were sold through underground distribution channels to paying customers, including subscribers. Marek Kaminski is Associate Professor of Political Science and Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine. Between 1982 and 1989 he managed Solidarity’s underground publishing house STOP. In his landmark book Games Prisoner’s Play: The Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prison, Kaminski presents unsparing accounts of initiation rituals, secret codes, caste structures, prison sex, self-injuries, and of the humor that makes this brutal world more bearable. This is a work of unusual power, originality, and eloquence, with implications for understanding human behavior far beyond the walls of one Polish prison. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction of that book. ———————————————————————— Prison socializes an inmate to behave hyperrationally. It teaches him patience in planning and pursuing his goals, punishes him severely for his mistakes, and rewards him generously for smart action. No wonder that inmates are such ardent optimizers. A clever move can shorten one’s sentence, save one from rape or a beating, keep one’s spirit high, or increase one’s access to resources. There is little space for innocent and spontaneous expressions of emotion when they collide with fundamental interests. Brutal fights, self-injury, and rapes can all be explained as outcomes of carefully calculated actions. Paradoxically, much of the confusion in interpreting prison behavior arises from both a failure to understand the motives of inmates and an unwillingness to admit that outcomes judged as inhuman or bizarre may be consequences of individually rational action. The main message of the book is that prisoners optimize under the constraints of their harsh life conditions and the local subculture. Their behavior reflects their attempts at optimization. Such a “rational choice” approach helps us to better understand prison behavior. A Personal Note I beg the reader’s forgiveness for a brief personal narrative that explains how I learned this lesson myself, and how I collected the data that support it. This is not an autobiography, but I would not be writing this book had I not experienced the life of a prisoner firsthand. In 1985 I was a twenty-two-year-old sophomore student of sociology who had switched disciplines, disappointed with abstract concepts after three diligent years of studying math. Poland had just witnessed the glorious rise of the Solidarity movement in 1980 followed by the introduction of martial law under General Jaruzelski in 1981 with the rationale that can be summarized as “I kicked your ass, but the Soviets would shoot it.” Dissatisfied with the moral and aesthetic poverty of communist way of life, I joined the underground Solidarity resistance network. In 1985, I was running an underground publishing house, STOP that employed about twenty full-time workers and up to 100 moonlighters. Between 1982 and 1989, we published about thirty-five titles of more than 100,000 books combined. We were a part of a decentralized network that included about 100 underground publishing houses, hundreds of periodicals, thousands of trade union organizations with a hierarchically organized leadership structure, a few Nobel prize winners, and even underground theaters, galleries, and video rentals. We called it an “independent society.” Half-revolutionist, half-scholar in the making, I was also looking for a topic for my Masters thesis in social anthropology. With hesitation, I started collecting data on the inner workings of the resistance network. My dilemma was figuring out how to balance facts with fiction. If too accurate, my thesis could easily become a handbook for the communist secret police. After my thesis defense I could also fall under permanent surveillance, effectively preventing me from running my organization. At the very worst, the communist court could use my thesis as evidence and throw me in prison. On March 12, 1985 my thesis dilemma was solved. During a random stop at a police checkpoint, “Dragon,” the driver of our van, was so nervous that the policeman became suspicious. He disregarded Dragon’s fake documents and implemented a thorough search of the van, which was filled with illegal Solidarity books. Dragon decided to talk. Within hours, five secret police agents had escorted me to a police station, joking that “you will have to swim, Mr. Marek.” In fact, I was “swimming”–police jargon for jail sentence–for five months in the Bialoleka and Rakowiecka jails. On my second day in a police station cell, after overcoming my initial shock and disbelief, I decided that my thesis would be on the subculture of Polish prison. After just several hours I knew that I was entering a bizarre, terrifying, and incredibly interesting environment. Rapes, knife fights, suicides, brutal sex, blunt talk, and self-injuries appeared to be its chief attributes. Ordinary life was reduced to eating and defecating. It seemed as if Pandora had freed all the imaginable violent human emotions from her box there and let them play without the usual societal constraints. I decided to make the best of my personal misfortune and use it as a unique opportunity to study this fascinating society-within-society. My goals were clear: I did not want to write nostalgic memoirs or point an accusing finger at the regime that had jailed me. I wanted to conduct an extensive and uncompromising research project, using all of my methodological skills. I expected that this would require developing new research techniques or modifying old ones. I was ready to face the necessary risks. It was up to me whether I mobilized my academic spirit–or gave