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.
Highlights
In the legal doctrine, the individualization of punishment is considered as a principle of criminal responsibility [1]
The point is the Russian criminal justice system does not consider the victimological component of a crime, ignoring the fears of citizens before certain criminal manifestations
Public opinion in the part of the fears experienced by residents of municipalities before crime should be used in the implementation of both criminal and criminological policy
Summary
The individualization of punishment is considered as a principle of criminal responsibility [1]. The effectiveness of individualization of punishment is seen in achieving effective crime prevention through influencing the will of individuals, coercion, the use of legal restrictions, and social reaction [8, 9]. The application of a fair personified punishment generates anti-criminal incentives in society, forms a state of satisfaction with the state, a belief in the inevitability of responsibility, reducing the fear of criminal manifestations. It should be remembered that judges are specific people who impose punishments with regard to the public danger of the act, the individual characteristics of the guilty person, on the basis of legal awareness and internal conviction. The life positions of judges partly depend on the opinions of other people, who, influencing their psychology, determine the social attitudes of the mentioned category of law enforcement officers and the evaluation criteria used by them. One of the factors influencing the mentality of the judge is the public’s fears of crime and individual criminal manifestations [10]
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