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GAMES PRISONERS PLAY: THE TRAGICOMIC WORLDS OF POLISH PRISON
by
Marek M. Kaminski

Not to be confused with GAMES CRIMINALS PLAY, reviewed earlier this year, GAMES PRISONERS PLAY is about Polish prison culture as it existed in the mid-1980s, written from Kaminski’s recollections of his stint as a political detainee. It’s social anthropology with a peculiarly cerebral twist: Kaminski uses game theory to illuminate how the common interactions of his fellow prisoners proceeded logically from the “givens” of their environment, going so far as to include decision matrixes for key dilemmas.

Kaminski’s certainly adept at examining the “rules” of incarceration—a juvenile etiquette born of aggression and male panic, with fairly horrifying consequences for noncompliance. Some of his looks at the win/loss dynamics of prison are funny (to fart or not to fart in a crowded cell), others are decidedly less so (whether or not to have consensual sex with an inmate, in exchange for protection), but these exercises eventually interlock to form a portrait of degradation at its most concisely inhuman, such that any humor in the book’s approach is pretty well drained from the proceedings by the end.

In fact, GAMES’ attempts to maintain a clinical distance from its subject matter only help the content hit twice as hard—there’s no misguided optimism, or even outrage, to cushion the blow from prison’s endless procession of decisions no one should ever have to make.