A Büntetés-végrehajtás Országos Parancsnokságának Szakkönyvtára a börtönügy irodalma tekintetében országosan egyedülálló gyűjteménnyel rendelkezik. Állománya a könyvekkel, folyóiratokkal és egyéb dokumentumokkal együtt mintegy 8 ezer könyvtári egységet tesz ki.
In Service of Justice
History of the Museum
The first Hungarian Prison Museum
Professionals of the age have felt the great relevance of the experiences of the past, be it recent or old traditions, customs and systems almost belonging to a museum. The most valuable data collection of the Hungarian penal scientific community was compiled not by a historian or a legal historian but the warden of the Budapest Royal National prison, Károly Vajna. His great two-volume work “Old Punishments in Hungary” had as its aim to commemorate the first modern penal institutions (the Szempc, Tallós, Szeged Prisons) and early forms of custodial sentence, but at the same time it also published information on other types of punishment.
Memorial objects meant the start of that valuable collection which was compiled by him in the following years during his travels around the country. The continuously growing collection was first placed in the Budapest Strict and Medium Regime Prison which limited the possibilities of exhibition. In the collection of the museum mostly relics of the past were placed: old instruments of feudal penal administration. The picture collection of the museum was huge. A number of items depicted the everyday life of the penal administration: staff equipment, letters and copies of legislation from the world of prisons and the huge collection of copies of penal legislative documents and works by inmates. International relations were represented by photos of foreign penal institutions, like the ones in Plötzensee, Moabit, Tegel, Nürnbert and others. The most stunning part of the exhibition was the unified plaster models of the penal institutions in a 1:250 ratio.
In 1920 the museum was moved to the building of the Ministry of Justice. The collection of the National Prison Museum soon became endangered though. The new government in power after World War II did not need the relics of a “feudal and imperialist” past. The elaborate collection first went to the basement and then it was offered to the Ministry of Education. After a couple of years of adversity, some of the material of the museum found home in 1949 in the prison behind the old central building of the Kiskun district. The conditions of the move have dwindled the collection significantly. An exhibition first opened in 1951 using the collection moved to the Kiskun Museum.
