Social conditionality and legal problems of penitentiary prevention

Abstract

The execution of criminal penalties in the form of imprisonment traditionally belongs to the most problematic form of social activity. The main issue to be resolved is the effectiveness of isolating a criminal from society in order to change his legal consciousness. For this purpose, in conditions of closed social education, penitentiary prevention is applied to convicts, designed to realize the goals of punishment stated by the legislator. The authors of the article raise a logical question: how much does the modern system of execution of punishment in the form of imprisonment correspond to those social goals that are most in demand in society. Two independent problems are manifested here: the first is directly related to the social demand for the return of a law-abiding person after serving his sentence, and the second is related to the problem of legislative regulation of the entire process of execution of criminal punishment in the form of imprisonment. The main methodological issue, according to the authors of the article, is the change in the nature of the application of specialized penitentiary practices. To date, they continue to retain the law enforcement component, which significantly reduces its social conditionality, increasing the recidivism of punishment in the form of imprisonment. The authors propose, through penitentiary prevention, to change the nature of the activities of the domestic penal enforcement system from law enforcement to social. In part, this approach can be traced in the context of recent legislative innovations that have established the priority of social activity over law enforcement. The social conditionality of penitentiary prevention should be understood from the standpoint of the social significance of the process of execution of criminal punishment in the form of deprivation of liberty. This is necessary to understand the expediency of isolating a criminal from society.