Profesor Stanisław Batawia

The editor-in-chief of „Archiwum Kryminologii”, professor Stanisław Batawia, full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Professor of Warsaw University and of the Institute of State and Law of the Polish Academy of Sciences, died on April 21, 1980. His personality, publications and activities exerted great influence on criminology and the fight against crime in our country, and were of consequence in our attitudes towards different categories of people exhibiting deviant behavior, particularly offenders and alcoholics. Professor Batawia was born in 1898 in Łódź. He received the degree of Doctor of Medical Sciences in 1929, and the degree of Doctor of Law in 1931. From 1929 until the outbreak of the war in 1939 he worked at Warsaw University as senior assistant of the Department of Criminology. At the same time, he worked as a physician, first in the Nervous Diseases Clinic of Warsaw University, then on Psychiatric Ward of the Hospital of the Centre for Sanitary Training, and on the Children’s Neuropsychiatry Ward of the Institute for Mental Hygiene in Warsaw. He also worked as physician-psychologist in the Stefan Batory Grammar School in Warsaw. From 1935 he was an expert in forensic psychiatry. He took part in the military operations in 1939 as a doctor; during the German occupation of Poland, in the years 1940-44, he worked in a health service centre in a village near Warsaw. In August 1945 he was qualified as assistant professor in criminology on the basis of his thesis Niepoprawność przestępców w świetle badań nad bliźniętami kryminalnymi (Incorrigibility of Offenders in the Light of Studies of Delinquent Twins), which he had presented to the Board of the Faculty of Law, Warsaw University, as early as in 1939. In 1946 he was made associate professor at Lódź University where he was also the Head of the newly-organized Department of Criminology. At the same time he lectured on criminology and forensic psychiatry at Warsaw University. In 1949 he was transferred to the Department of Criminology of Warsaw University. In 1958 he received the degree of Professor. From 1953 he also conducted (apart from his activities at the University) criminological studies in the Department of Criminology of the Institute of Legal Sciences at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was also closely connected with the Department and its works after his retirement in 1969, acting as consultant of its proceedings up until the last days of his life. In 1965 he was appointed correspondent member, and in 1969 full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Apart from his work in the field of criminology, Professor Batawia was also active in the field of psychiatry and studies on alcoholism. In the years 1951-54 he was national specialist of the Ministry of Health in the field of forensic psychiatry, and in the years 1954-62 a consultant of the Forensic Psychiatry Ward at the Psychoneurological Institute; he also collaborated with the Scientific Research Centre of Social Anti-alcoholism Committee from the beginning of its existence. He was a member of the Team of Specialists of the Permanent Commission of the Council of Ministers for Fighting Alcoholism. He participated as an expert in the work of Parliamentary Commissions on the Law against Alcoholism and the draft of the law on the prevention and combating of juvenile delinquency, and in other legislative works connected with the subject of criminology and psychiatry. The International Criminological Society appointed Stanisław Batawia its representative in Poland. He was also the Polish correspondent of the Committee in Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders of the United Nations Secretariate. The entire scientific activity of Professor Batawia was influenced by his medical and legal education. His research work was closely connected with his educational and medical practice, and also his extensive social work. Professor Batawia was the founder of Polish criminology. His ideas and methods exerted a great influence on the present shape of criminology in our country. He tended to practise empirical criminology where generalized statements were supported by profound evidence and hypotheses were always subject to empirical verification. He was of the opinion that the results of criminological research, enabling a thorough understanding of criminological problems in Poland, should be the basis for legislative work. He tried to make the range of empirical studies undertaken by the Department of Criminology broad enough to include systematic gathering of statistical data on crime in Poland, macrosocial determinants of crime, prediction studies, and sociological analyses of the ecology of crime. He himself, however, concentrated his interest mostly on the problems of clinical criminology, on the etiology of crime as seen in individual cases. He thus concentrated on individual case studies, on the problems of the careers, environment and biopsychic attributes of individual offenders and persons manifesting grave behavior disturbances. However, while tackling the problems from the, point of view of clinical criminology, he by no means lost .sight of their broad social background. He emphasized even in his pre-war works the importance of the fact that offenders were mainly recruited from the least priviledged social classes. In his book Wstęp do nauki o przestępcy (An Introduction to the Study of the Offender), he carried out a keen analysis of the process of demoralization of children from such classes. „The typical theft perpetrated by a poor child is the result of all the circumstances of his upbringing and of the environmental influences which affected him from his earliest days of childhood. The divergence between the status of a young manual worker and the living conditions of these socially priviledged, of which the poor child is acutely conscious, constitutes a serious factor in the etiology of juvenile delinquency. The children are also frequently led into delinquency by peers who have repeatedly managed to steal without being apprehended and who thanks to this can afford various entertainments. The youth learn how to acquire money by illegal means from newspapers and the cinema which show offenders with a great deal of tolerance, even sympathetically, and where the victims of criminal activities are often significantly morally inferior to the offenders (...). The fact of theft alone does not in the least indicate an antisocial attitude. Had the needs of the child been adequately understood at home, had the society enabled him to enjoy the values which is almost impossible to do without at a certain stage of development, we would not have witnessed a significant majority of the thefts committed by children (...). It is only in prison and in a typical corrective institution where the individual who has infringed certain rules of the law develops criminal attitudes through remaining in a criminal environment”. Professor Batawia declared himself against those criminologists who concentrated on sociological or psychological problems only, as this could lead to one-sided conclusions. Although he was a psychiatrist himself, he criticized the one-sidedness of research work caused before the war by the monopolization of criminological studies by psychiatrists. Criminology is an interdisciplinary science; what is therefore necessary is a comprehensive approach to the studies of crime and offenders. A research group engaged in such studies should include a lawyer as well as a sociologist, psychiatrist and psychologist; (this view is well illustrated by the choice of staff at the Department of Criminology, amongst which representatives of all the branches mentioned above are to be found). The notion of interdisciplinary character of criminology is also evident in the themes and concepts of Professor Batawia’s researches, in the methods applied by him, in the elaboration of the results and in the consequent conclusions which take into account the entire complexity of the problems discussed. In his book published in 1939, Professor Batawia severly criticised the one-sidedness of theoretical approach. He radically disposed of the arguments of the anthropological school in criminology. The book ended with, the following words: „The problem of chronic criminality can only be solved by means of social reform and reforms of criminal policy. Don’t let us make biology responsible for sociological phenomena”. He also stated before that crime was a social phenomenon par excellence, and thus an offender could not be considered apart from his social background. He expressed his „criticism towards the authors who wanted to reduce various attributes of an offender to the common denominator of pathology”. He particularly criticised the notion of psychopathy as vague and very unprecise, falsely identified in certain works with social harmfulness and asocial or antisocial behavior. At the same time he attached great importance to the problems of psychopathology, which allow to understand deviant behavior of offenders with personality disorders. He considered it necessary to take into account the psychiatric perspective to assume a proper attitude towards a number of essential criminological problems, in particular to that of recidivism. Professor Batawia considered it inappropriate to base criminological studies on very general concept of „offender”, which denotes different individuals „who were given the common name only because ' they had been united by the most general qualification of the Penal Code”. The offenders are by no means an homogenous category of persons whose behavior could be explained by one adequate theory. Criminology should seek etiological explanations concerning different categories of offenders. This principle was strictly observed in his studies. It resulted not only from his scientific experience and opinions, but also from his entire attitude towards man, in particula

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