Grygier made innovative and pioneering contribution to criminology, both in Canada and abroad.
Criminology on the international arena
Grygier was a founding member of the Polish Section of the International Society of Criminology and the British Sociological Association; founder and first president of the Canadian Section of the International Association of Penal Law; co-president of the First Inter-American Congress of Criminology and Criminal Law; vice-president of the American Society of Criminology and of the Foundation for the Establishment of an International Criminal Court. In the latter capacity, Grygier drafted, with Professor G.O.W. Mueller from the U.N., the Convention of International Crimes and the Statute for an International Criminal Court. At the invitation of G.O.W. Mueller (the chief) and Irena Melup (the co-ordinator) of the studies in criminology and social justice at the United Nations Organisation (UNO), he was invited as an observer on behalf of Social Defence of UNO, and subsequently as an UNO expert.
Criminology in Canada
Grygier was recognized as one of the Canadian pioneers in criminology and has the distinction of having supervised some very successful PhD students over the years (Winterdyk, 2000). He also served as chairman of the research committee of the Canadian Criminal Justice Association.
In 1960, on the recommendation of Dr. Herman Mannheim, he was invited to Canada to start up a program in criminology at the University of Toronto. He prepared a detailed proposal for a Centre of Criminology and secured substantial funding from the Government of Ontario. In the end, however, the university arranged a committee chaired by the Dean of Law, and appointed as the new Centre’s director a distinguished professor of law, who had no interest in empirical criminological research.
In 1967, Grygier moved to the University of Ottawa to set up what he called the first in the world department of applied criminology. Two years later he established two interdisciplinary, bi-lingual programs, one leading to a Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in criminological research and the other to a professional degree of Master of Correctional Administration (M.C.A.). These programs reflect Grygier’s passion for both academic research and the practical application of criminological knowledge. Later, in the early 1980s, the University established an undergraduate program in criminology.
The department was a truly international centre, with professors and students coming from many countries. Dr. Justine Ciale, Professor Emeritus at the University of Ottawa, recalls: “At the time, there was a scarcity of professors of Criminology both in Canada and the United States. He (Tad) therefore had to assemble an eclectic team, a teaching staff, made up of social workers, a sociologist, a statistician, a psychologist-criminologist, and a legal scholar, among others, all having experience in working with offenders. …. The program achieved great success in training many students who went to fill important roles in almost every province of Canada. From 1970 to 1980, graduates from the Department of Criminology were offered upon graduation an average of 3.2 jobs in the field of criminology. ”
Research and application
While teaching and directing research at the universities of Toronto and Montreal, Grygier acted as the Director of Research for the Minister of Correctional Services of Ontario, Hon. Alan Grossman, who led the province in innovative reforms of the Ontario penal system. As well, he was an informal scientific advisor to the Ontario governments of John Robarts and Bill Davies. In this capacity, Grygier drafted two Ontario laws. They were enacted in 1965. Later, the principles of Ontario Training Schools Act were accepted by other Provinces of Canada and influenced federal legislation.
In the period 1965-1978, Dr. Grygier undertook an extensive study of juvenile delinquency legislation and administration and their consequences in Canada, the United States and a dozen European countries, both Western and Eastern. The study was based not so much on the perusal of legal texts as on interviews and numerous discussions with judges, lawyers, treatment personnel, officials of the relevant ministries and, whenever possible, on personal interviews with the delinquents themselves. His presentation of the early findings of his research to the House of Commons Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs resulted in a suspension for over 10 years (“death on the order papers”) of the Bill proposed by the Government, and subsequent major modification of the Bill which was eventually enacted.
In 1981, Grygier appeared as an expert witness before the Canadian Parliament, this time at a Joint Committee of the Senate and the House of Commons formed to consider the new Constitution of Canada. He presented a number of amendments to its Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They were all accepted and are now a part of the Canadian Constitution.
Model Criminal Codes
Life experience, even more than books, made Grygier an advocate of fair and flexible justice. One common theme of his work is his interest in rehabilitation and a humanitarian approach to justice. He asks: “Could we be safer if we were less ruthless?”
When addressing the Benchers (senior judges) of Upper Canada (1963), Grygier suggested the retributive philosophy be replaced by the concept of the protection of society. In 1969 his concept was adopted by the Canadian Committee on Corrections. Later, Grygier embodied it in a model criminal code (the Social Protection Code), published in the American Series of Foreign Criminal Codes in 1977. In 1976 Grygier presented his model of criminal code to the House of Commons Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs. The code was well received but no legislative action was initiated .
The philosophy of the Social Protection Code follows David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and other “utilitarians” as opposed to Immannuel Kant. When Kant’s philosophy was adopted by the Canadian Sentencing Commission (1987), he wrote: “Since my arrival in Canada in 1960 I have been telling people to do something else instead”.
“Mercy is an element of justice and of protection ... Fairness includes flexibility, understanding and compassion”
The Social Protection Code (1977) aimed at the protection of society and so, inadvertently, stressed the difference between “them” (offenders) and “us” (society). The new version of Grygier’s penal code, which he called the “Code of Humanist Justice” (Fairness and Justice: the essence of morality, law and health, 2008), aims at the reconstruction and restoration of society through greater cooperation and trust among all the parties involved: the court, those defined as perpetrators and victims, and the whole society. It recognizes that law very rarely leads to happiness. The new justice code forsakes Bentham’s principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers as the aim of morality and legislation, and instead returns to the Epicurean model, which recognizes that pleasure and pain have different weights and that “the utmost pleasure we are capable of is unequal to severe physical or moral pain or fear of pain.” The new code is designed to replace penal codes based on retribution and recognises that rewards have more influence than punishments. It proposes “task sentences” acceptable to society and the offender – an option that Grygier believed could be used in any democratic legal system. Once the task was completed by the offender, the original sentence would be removed by the court to promote the offender’s new, legitimate self-definition. The new code of humanist justice tries to reduce the pain of sanctions, especially to limit the use of prison to the very minimum necessary for peace and order. Grygier does not call for a hasty implementation of his ideas, but for experiments and thinking.
Dr. Maria Łoś, Professor Emeritus of the University of Ottawa and a long-time friend and colleague, notes that: “Grygier’s model code was consistent with his philosophy. All his life, he strived to minimize suffering rather than maximize happiness, to negotiate rather than impose, to promote sanctions that helped to heal and repair instead of avenging and punishing. His Model Code, like his life philosophy, combined the utilitarian imperative of pragmatic altruism with the Epicurean moral philosophy of common sense, friendship and internal harmony. The ideas behind the code were also influenced by his pioneering investigations of concepts of justice and law among the Inuit of northern Manitoba. ….. It is not often remembered that the now celebrated idea of “restorative justice” was introduced and elaborated in 1962 by W. T. McGrath and Tadeusz Grygier at a national conference of criminal justice organizations.”