Individualization of punishment in the context of the public’s fear of crime

Abstract

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.