Convicts from Warsaw detained in "Mokotów" prison 1918-1939. Statistical viewpoint and attempt at characterization (preliminary findings)

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