Prison, as Erving Goffman has remarked, is a total institution, regardless of political system. The prison system results from (a tangle of) the criminal, penal, and penitentiary policies pursued by and/or prevalent in a given country, in the specified historic moment. In parallel, it stems from the personal composition, system of values, and educational level of the prison staff (the guards, administrative personnel, educators, etc.). One more contributing factor is the actions taken by the prisoners who develop various strategies to survive their time of confinement, by adapting themselves or offering resistance. It is somewhere in this area that the specific universe of prisons evolves and takes shape: a space of power and dependence, unceasing imposition of frameworks and their contestation, resistance, and adaptation.

Volume 118 of the APH seeks to trace the history of the prison system in the Polish territory in the post-Enlightenment period. We are also interested in a comparative perspective, one that would show the experience of the countries of East Central Europe, particularly in the twentieth century.
You are kindly encouraged to submit your draft articles, whether transversal/review ones or focused on specified topics set within the context of the age or period, chronologically ranging from the nineteenth to the twentieth century (until 1989). We are particularly interested in the following areas:

– the state–prison–the convicted relationships;
– modernity (innovativeness) in prison construction;
– changes in the penitentiary and social rehabilitation theory and practice;
– political prisoners, their attitudes and organisations;
– prison subcultures;
– the sex/gender context;
– ethnic and religious (denominational) divergences;
– prisoner assistance organisations;
– prison and prisoner community in culture (literary fiction, motion pictures, visual arts);
– memory of prison experience (recollections/reminiscences, diaries/memoirs, oral history).

The Editorial Board invites you to send – in English or in Polish – abstracts or articles devoted to the above subjects as well as review articles and reviews on relevant publications by January 31st, 2018, to the address: aph@ihpan.edu.pl. The final versions of the articles whose abstracts have been accepted should be sent by April 30th, 2018. Generally, the articles should not exceed 30 standard pages (1800 characters with spaces = one page).