The specter of a prison punishment for even slight political offenses became an element of daily life in post-war Poland. In interwar Poland, imprisonment, especially for communists, had served as a rite of passage, endurance training, and a university teaching life skills. The post-war order brought a dramatic shift, as communists all over the region, often veterans of interwar prisons or war-time concentration camps, used incarceration sites as a way to mold the future. The prison system functioned as a tool to subjugate society and silence or destroy enemies- anti-communists as well as...