The questions of the internal structure and system of the special part of criminal law remain relevant in spite of a large number of scientific works on this topic. One of the complicated theoretical questions is the characteristics of the initial element of the branch of law’s system in criminal law. Scholars suggest using either the legal norm or the regulatory prescription as such an element. The discussion of their correlation is of much significance within the framework of the positivist theory of law. The author supports the ideas of the logical model of correlation between the norm and the prescription and claims that the criminal law norm, as a holistic rule of behavior determining the rights and liabilities of the participants of criminal law relations, consists of several regulatory prescriptions. From this position, the norm is a logical form of expressing some aggregate of regulatory legal prescriptions. The regulatory prescription of the special part of criminal law is the core determining the contents and structure of the criminal law norm. A significant theoretical issue is the correlation between the regulatory prescription and the text of the criminal law article. Using the logical categories of «concept» and «proposition», the author proves that criminal law prescription of the special part is not to be equated with the text of criminal law because their relationship is that of content and form. The logical form for the expression of a prescription is a separate sentence in the text of the Criminal Code’ Article, a proposition that expresses a complete legislative thought. The contents of the regulatory prescription of the special part of criminal law consist in establishing the grounds and limits of using measures of criminal law reaction against persons who committed crimes. The structure of such prescriptions includes the hypothesis that defines characteristic features of specific crimes, and the disposition that described the degree to which the state is free to decide on the choice of the type and amount of punishment that can be imposed on the guilty person. In order to observe the constitutional rules of formulating the criminal law prohibition and ensuring the logical norms of their expression in the text of the law, the author proves the necessity of phasing out the use of simple dispositions and the repetition of the title of the crime in the disposition.
The individualization of punishment is largely formalized and axiomatically limited by the normative prescriptions of the General and Special parts of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Meanwhile, when assigning punishment, judges always consider all the circumstances related to the commission of a crime and the identity of the perpetrator, not to mention consideration of public opinion, social and group victimization, and the fear of the population before criminal manifestations. Unlike in Russia, the foreign criminal justice system for a long time accepts the opinion of ordinary citizens on this matter, focusing on their fears of separate crimes. Sometimes, within the framework of this system, there is a manipulation of the individualization of punishment to demonstrate a preventive effect to society. Based on the above, this article is aimed at generating a discourse on the need to study and consider victimological information in the formation of criminal law policy in general and the individualization of punishment, in particular. The statistical and sociological research methods used in the study allowed obtaining and summarizing information on the indicators of the fear of residents of Gelendzhik and Novorossiysk (2017-2018) regarding ordinary crimes; reflecting the relationship between these data and the types of punishment imposed by the courts for the commission of theft, robbery, hooliganism. Systemic synthesis and analysis allowed identifying a number of patterns in this area, and justifying them. The novelty of the article is that it represents one of the few attempts to fill the gap in scientific knowledge about the mechanism of individualization of punishment as a tool of social protection, implemented through general and private prevention and requiring consideration of political-social and ethnocultural peculiarities. The results of the study allowed to articulate proposals for optimizing the activities of federal and regional coordinating councils for the prevention of offenses.
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