CRIMINOLOGY AND CRIMINAL ASPECTS UNECONOMIC USE OF LANDS

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of criminological and criminal aspects of uneconomic use of lands. This corpus of the criminal offense provides in Article 254 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine and requires detailed research. The author identified a system of determinants of this criminal offense by next: 1) the low ecological culture of the offender; 2) the desire to obtain increased profit due to the violation of technological processes of a certain production; 3) the low amount of punishment in the Criminal Code of Ukraine for committing the specified criminal offense; 4) the concealment of the process of land pollution due to the sparse population of the place of the criminal offense; 5) the procedural complexity of holding to criminal responsibility the persons who were not caught at the place of a criminal offense. The author studied the statistical data of the General Prosecutor’s Office for Article 254 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine over the last three years. The author established that criminal offenses of uneconomic use of lands are detected in small quantity by law enforcement agencies. In particular, 161 cases were detected in 2022, 207 cases were detected in 2021, and 149 cases were detected in 2020 on the territory of Ukraine. The author analyzed that only in 50% of cases specific persons were served with a notice of suspicion of a crime and the group of criminal activity was revealed only 1 time during the investigated three-year period. In order to eliminate the determinants of weak criminal responsibility for this criminal offense the author proposes to define such punishment as imprisonment for up to two years in Part 1 of Article 254 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine that corresponds to the negative consequences of land pollution in the kind of «long-term loss of soil fertility». The author thinks that “long-term loss of soil fertility” (for a period of 30 to 50 years) is an important socially dangerous criterion that increases the serious of this environmental criminal offense. Imprisonment as a type of punishment should be applied not only in qualified cases of committing this criminal offense (to commit by a group of offenders; to cause damage in the amount of more than 1,342,000 UAH), but also in the basic (initial) version. Therefore, the increase in the amount of punishment in part 1 of Article 254 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine to real imprisonment together with the improvement of the structure of environmental law police, the improvement of mechanism of their work to identify the organizers and cases of group commission of this criminal offense should be implemented by the state in its own criminal law policy.