Sociology of Criminal Law: Methods of Studying Public Opinion and their Interpretation in Criminal Law Research

Abstract

The article presents a special methodology of the sociology of criminal law aimed at establishing the parameters of public perception of the justice of punishments imposed by courts. It is generally believed that we are facing a crisis of excessive criminalization: our criminal law has become chaotic, unprincipled and overly expansive, while attempts to make criminal law orderly, principled and restrained are being made in almost every criminal law study, but the significance of these attempts for lawmaking today is negligible. The traditional direction of criminal policy research rests on the absence of a concept of reforming the criminal law; the latest theoretical models of such concepts were also not in demand by the legislator. It can be concluded that the main concept of modern state policy is precisely the absence of such a concept. The study of public knowledge showed that the public knows little about crime, as well as about the system of responding to it, including statistics: crime rate, recidivism rate and average sentences.