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For years, there has been a debate about making the Polish Prosecutor's Office an authority that is arguably located between the classic uniformed services (the police), public administration (tax offices), and the judiciary. In Polish scholarly discourse, two positions prevail regarding the place of the prosecutor's office in the system of state organs - subordination to the executive, or quasi-independence based on an organic statute with the strong influence of parliament. In this blog, I will explain how PiS has exploited Poland's adoption of the former model, and evaluate the promise and perils of a proposal to cure the current defects by rendering Poland's prosecutor's office (more) independent.

In the name of equality there has been a widespread sacrifice of quality, not least in education. Dr Marks, a polytechnic lecturer in physics, assesses the damage to academic standards in the emergint practice of overassisting candidates by the Council for National Academic Awards and, in particular, the Polytechnic of North London.

This article deconstructs a binary that has arisen between prisons as, on the one hand, 'total institutions' of exclusion and, on the other, 'carceral continuums' that incorporate marginalized urban livelihoods. The experiences of four inmates at Pademba Road, Freetown's male prison – which accommodates inmates with sentences from one year to life – illustrate that prisons belong in neither camp. Instead, inmates' unique responses to their imprisonment show that both a prison's continuity and its exclusionary mechanism are situational and gendered as crime, social standing, capital and agency coalesce. Following Michel de Certeau's examination of people's reappropriations of culture in everyday life, this article analyses how inmates' tactics to reinforce and bend prison walls work to either strengthen or undermine the carceral system's strategies and influence the prison's permeability. Inmates' embodied experiences allow for a nuanced understanding of the inside/outside relationship of imprisonment and of the space between mobility and stasis, subjugation, embrace and resistance.