Prisoners go to work

Summer floods in Poland and winter heavy snow. What those two situation have in common? Yes – natural phenomenon. But also: Polish prisoners. What? – You might ask.

During flooding thousands of prisoners were working on water banks and helping people to repair their houses. Recently in many cities we have been able to witness detainees removing snow from our streets. Those are most noticeable examples.

Every day and every year a quarter of approximately 80 thousand of those who were put into Polish prisons works inside their walls. 4,300 works outside. Hospice, social services, public offices of different kinds or forest – there are many places where they find a job.

They work because they want to, not because they have to – underlines officials from Centralny Zarząd Służby Więziennej.

Why is it so important? Work can play a fundamental role in providing valuable skills and qualifications that help prisoners get a job once they are released. Law says that working is an important measure to achieve goals of resocialisation and preparation for a life after leaving walls of detention centers.

Availability of resources, security, control measures and type of commited crime impacts type of work in each prison. There are many types of work available e.g. in industrial workshops and/or land-based activity units.

Prisoners who work in such units can perform varied type of work which can provide skills in different areas, such as: “textiles, engineering, woodwork, printing, data entry, plastic moulding, component assembly, computer aided design, desk top publishing and employment offering practical training in rural activities, fresh produce production, protected cropping, amenity horticulture and landscaping leading to formal qualifications1”. Jeśli nie pana musi być z cudzysłowiu, adres nie wystarczyThose who can not work outside prison walls usually are employed in catering, cleaning or building maintenance.

Rates of pay vary depending on resources, the amount and type of work available at each prison, but maximal pay for a prisoner cannot be higher than half of minimal wage (it's approximately 500 zł per month) According to data from 2009 average pay for an hour of work for detainees was 4,30 zł/per hour.

In his latest sentence, Constitutional Tribunal, find that lowering wage of prisoners is illegal due to Constitution. Soon, prisoners will be able to earn normal pay for their normal work.

Such limitation has functioned from 1997, when administration recognized that, detainees have to be paid less, to limit the cost of work for companies that employ them.

Argument for that kind of restriction was also the fact that criminals don't pay for their living in jails (ex. water, food etc.).

Let's discuss!
Do you agree with Constitutional Tribunal verdict?
Should prisoners pay for their „accommodation”?
If a prisoner works in normal conditions, why should they be pay less, for the same work as „free” people? Do you agree?

Want to know more on prisoners work? Check „Więźniowie na rynku Pracy” by M. Korsak :)
http://www.bezrobocie.org.pl/files/1bezrobocie.org.pl/public/biuletyny_fise/080929_biuletyn_nr_11_wiezniowie.pdf

Winter of complaints in Poland

Sudden Attack of winter in recent days completely surprised drivers and of course Polish municipal services responsible for removing snow. Traffic jams, damaged trams, delayed trains and late buses were common in last two weeks.

Lot of people were late to work, school, home. So did I. When I was standing on a cold tram (yes, the heating was damaged), becoming more frozen, some reflection came into my mind.

The tram was stuck in the longest traffic jam I have ever seen. After the tram driver opened the doors to let passengers walk through the snow and snowdrifts, I took my camera and started to shoot photos. For me all situation was quite funny and interesting, although I knew I would be late for work (If You want to see my photos, check: http://www.gadu-gadu.pl/5546370258653390840/warszawa-tramwajowy-korek-gigant).


Other people were angry, some say that if the local elections were in Warsaw during first winter days, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz would never have won. Another guy replied saying that all snow would be removed.

Nevertheless, the elections were a few day ago when the weather was nice and sunny so we are not able to check what would happen if we were to cast our votes during winter days. And still the winter is a kind of natural cataclysm for most of Poles.

So I asked my foreign friends from Norway and Finland how they cope with winter. Hege, from Norway, says that Norwegian take winter as something natural. They got used to poor driving conditions, colder weather and so on.
- You in Poland have to think about winter as something normal, and to bear in mind that it's not a summer when driving is easier.

But Livie, from Finland, says - well we also complaint about winter, first
days of snowing are always harder, but well it's winter. Think about a lot of
nice things that you can do when there is so much snow! Skiing, sleighing , and
running through the snow!


That strikes me a lot. Are we the nation of complainers who can never see a bright side of life? Is it the heritage of communism era or national feature? Discuss!

Free party is not a crime – or is it?

Part 3 – Police clashes

Since the times of the Spiral Tribe, free parties have been attracting police interventions. There are several reasons for that. A view of a free party with its huge wall of speakers and people dancing to loud and repetitive music is often beyond the comprehension abilities of people who never saw such view before. Police often looks for a person in charge to get to know what is going on. Usually policemen do not believe that there is no organisation cell at such party and that all members contribute equally to the fact that the party takes place. Reactions are different – sometimes police stops the party, arrests some of its participants, confiscates the sound system's equipment. Some argue that the level of loudness is much too high; they claim that they receive complains from the villages near the party. Sometimes, they just watch the party from a distance with a plan to intervene if something is happening. Some policemen notice that the atmosphere at the party is friendly and there is no need to act with aggression to stop it, others don't.


Police brutality at Czechtek teknival 2005



A well known free tekno track

Problems to discuss:
1. Do you think that the legal regulations (eg. in Poland) should be changed in a way that would totally ban free parties?
2. Can you think of any ways in which a free party could be beneficial to both its participants and people from the outside? Or do you think it causes losses of any kind?

Cloud computing

Have you heard about cloud computing? Probably yes, but you thought it was very complicated and only available to large companies? Wrong! Cloud computing is ideal for small projects, especially start-ups that have the potential to develop but at the beginning do not have the appropriate budget.



Amazon, the company famous for the largest online store in the world, based on its huge base of hardware and knowledge, provides cloud solutions for everyone. The service, called Amazon Web Services (AWS), allows us to host applications in any programming language and with any configuration we need. Amazon puts at our disposal the EC2 service, which gives us full access to resources of a dedicated server with root privileges. So we can install any operating system and configure it freely. We don't have to rest at a single server. The potential of cloud computing is scalability. We can run any number of server instances with the same or a different configuration. Amazon puts in our hands the tools for automatic starting and stopping instances, depending on current traffic or load.



Undoubtedly the most popular AWS service is however S3 (Simple Storage Service). This service allows us to store any number of files in the cloud. The only limitation of this service is a file size of up to 5 TB. Such a high limit can be taken to be a lack of limits by which S3 is great for bloggers, graphic designers, webmasters and really anyone on the Internet. The service can even be used as a backup disk with a copy of your most important files or your entire operating system.



You may wonder, where's the catch? Nowhere, but the service is not for free. The bottom line is, however, that we pay only for what we actually use. So we pay for every second of the exact use of the server rather than in advance for the whole year as is the case in most hosting companies. At S3 we also pay only for the amount of space used and generated traffic. For more information, refer to AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/

Free party is not a crime – or is it?

Part 2 – The beginnings

As I mentioned before, the movement has been started by a sound system called Spiral Tribe. It existed in the first half of the 1990's and became active again in 2007. The group originated in London and traveled across the whole European continent and North America. From 1990 until 1992, Spiral Tribe were responsible for numerous parties in indoor and outdoor locations. Their largest and most famous party was the Castlemorton Common Festival free party in 1992. Thirteen members of the group were arrested immediately after the event and were subsequently charged with public order offences.Their trial became one of the longest and most expensive cases in British legal history, lasting four months and costing the UK £4 million. In March 1993, after being acquitted of all charges relating to Castlemorton, the collective decided to move to Europe, doing parties in cities such as Rotterdam, Paris and Berlin. Over the next few years, the collective organised parties and teknivals throughout Europe, then it slowly dispersed with some members taking up residence in Germany and Holland and releasing work on Labworks and many other techno labels. Individual members of the collective joined other sound systems, did squat art events or pursued other interests. Most of their music was released on the famous Network 23 label.

An interesting point is that the group was obsessed by the number 23. Images for musical releases, posters, backdrops and flyers featured the number 23. Parties were often organised on the twenty-third day of the month. Members sometimes recorded under the moniker of SP23, and the record label itself was called Network 23.

23 minute warning – History of Spiral Tribe

Castlemorton Free Party

Problems to discuss:

1. Do you think that the court should have penalized Spiral Tribe's activity ?

2. Why did the country try to fight the movement? Share your opinion.

Life choices

Most of us tries to live a regular life and stick to the scheme. We create relationships or even families with children. Each one of us has a couple of people around who are more or less important for us. We spend time with them, tell them our secrets, but sometimes also argue. The truth is that we do not realise how much we care until we lose somebody.

A couple of days ago I watched the movie called "The Next Three Days". The polish title of the movie fits even more to the topic I want to discuss with you: "Dla niej wszystko". The movie is about "a married couple" whose "life is turned upside down when the wife is accused of a murder" (via IMDb). They are a happy family - John (Russell Crowe), a college teacher, his wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks) and their son Luke (Toby Green, Tyler Green, Ty Simpkins). They live a normal life until Lara "is accused of a murder" (via IMDb). In one moment everything changes by 180 degrees. John has to take care of his son and manage his job. His parents are some kind of help for him, but it is getting worse anyway. He loses any appeal in court and from day to day, from month to month he is also losing hope to rescue his wife from jail. The only way for him is to drop everything and save what he love. From this moment a regular college teacher starts to create a perfect plan to get his wife out of jail and bring his family together, again.

How far would you go and "what if you had 72 hours to save everything you live for" (via IMDb)?

Free party is not a crime – or is it?

Part 1 – The movement

Freetekno is a relatively new cultural movement present in Europe and North America. It has been started in the early 1990's in the United Kingdom by a sound system called Spiral Tribe. The most crucial mission of the movement is to organize free parties in the so-called Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ). Those parties are free from any restrictions that are present in the legal club scene. Moreover, people usually do not pay any entrance fee as making profit is not the aim of such parties.
The sound system is, literally, a wall of speakers. Behind the wall, the sound system crew places all pieces of equipment needed to run the sound (decks, cd players, mixers, equalizers and – what is most important – a power generator). In front of the sound system there are people dancing to all kinds of electronic music, usually bass heavy ones with repetitive beats. The walls are often decorated in a way which is characteristic for a given freetekno crew. Most of the freetekno decorations are black and white and include different kinds of spirals and abstract patterns.

KIEREWIET sound system (Netherlands) at the Centertek Teknival in Poland in 2009

Typically, a free party involves one sound system or more, if more – then it becomes a teknival. Such parties are often held in isolated outdoor venues (open air parties) or in abandoned buildings (these are called squat parties). Usually, there is no information on the location of the party in the Internet or elsewhere. The aim of such 'conspiracy' is to eliminate inadequate participants. This culture is not only about attending parties; it is more of a life style where trust and respect are the key elements. The atmosphere is friendly and the party goers police themselves. Racism, sexism and aggression are not tolerated. Different people can be met at free parties – from punks, through ravers, to college students and adult people with their families. Anarchist and liberal philosophies, as well as fighting for animal rights and vegetarianism are said to be the most popular among freetekno people. What is more, freetekno is a culture of the travellers. Party people and sound systems drive long distances in the Summer to attend parties in different countries across the whole continent.

013 SOUND SYSTEM (Belgium) at the Centertek Teknival in Poland in 2008

Problems to discuss:

1. Would you call freetekno a culture or just a short-lived movement?

2. What is your opinion on the music and visual elements? Do you consider them artistic?