Helga Einsele

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Helga Einsele (born June 9, 1910 as Helga Hackmann in Dölau near Halle (Saale) ; † February 13, 2005 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German criminologist, prison director and criminal law reformer.

Live and act

Einsele came from a liberal family (her father was a school principal and later by the Nazis removed from office), grew up in Lüneburg and studied in Heidelberg Gustav Radbruch law . Although she passed her first state examination with distinction in 1935, she was not accepted into the legal preparatory service due to political unreliability. Later she worked with and for the Frankfurt public prosecutor Fritz Bauer .

In 1947, the Hessian Prime Minister Georg August Zinn made her head of the Hessian women's penal institution in Frankfurt-Preungesheim , which she remained until 1975. During this time, she implemented numerous reforms, for example - with the support of Hilda Heinemann , the wife of the then Federal President Gustav Heinemann  - she was the first to install a mother-and-child house in a German prison and began a model experiment in which female prisoners No longer automatically had to hand over their babies and toddlers to a home. The prisoners were no longer used by the officers, were allowed to wear normal clothing and each was looked after by a social worker . At Einsele's time, the recidivism rate in her prison was significantly lower than elsewhere.

In 1969 she was the first recipient of the newly founded Fritz Bauer Prize of the Humanist Union . She also received numerous other awards for her efforts to ensure humane penal systems, including the 1976 Humanitarian Prize of the German Freemasons. She was awarded the Wilhelm Leuschner Medal .

After her retirement in 1975 she was honorary professor for criminology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main .

Einsele protested in the 1960s against the exclusion of the Socialist German Student Union from the SPD and was himself excluded from the party for this. As part of the peace movement , she took part in the resistance against the stationing of Pershing II missiles on the Mutlanger Heide in the early 1980s and accepted a judicial conviction for coercion .

Works (selection)

  • My life with women in prison . Quell-Verlag, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-7918-1712-4 (autobiography)
  • Women in prison . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1985, ISBN 3-499-14855-2 (together with Gisela Rothe )
  • The crime of locking up criminals. Helga Einsele answers Ernst Klee (The Theological Interview; 20). Patmos-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1970.

literature

  • Bernd Maelicke , Renate Simmedinger (Ed.): For the sake of conviction. Swimming against the current. A commemorative publication for Helga Einsele . ISS self-published, Frankfurt / M. 1990, ISBN 3-88493-087-7 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Einsele, Helga
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hackmann, Helga
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German criminologist and criminal law reformer
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Dölau near Halle
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 2005
Place of death Frankfurt am Main