The Concept of an Innovative Model of Combating Organized Crime: Background and Opportunities

Abstract

An intensive digitization of all social processes (including criminogenic ones) demanded such a degree of rapidity, effectiveness, efficiency and relevance for the decisions taken by modern states that could not be provided using the dominant model of state policy for combating crime. This new civilizational challenge is especially evident for the problem of counteracting organized crime. The authors conclude that the contemporary model of criminal policy against organized crime, whose main idea is a constant strengthening of liability for organized criminal activities, is undergoing a crisis. An indicator of this crisis is a recent amendment of Art. 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation by a norm that considerably limits criminal prosecution of owners, participants, beneficiaries and managers of judicial persons (or their divisions) for organizing a criminal group or participating in it if the corresponding judicial persons were not originally created with the purpose of committing grave or very grave crimes. The same norm limits criminal prosecution of the above-mentioned categories of physical persons if the latter did not possess direct knowledge of the criminal purposes for which such judicial persons were created. The authors believe that the crisis of the current model of combating organized crime is also proven by a lack of any significant correlation between the changes in the criminal legislation on liability for organized criminal activities during the last 24 years and changes in the intensity of the practice of its enforcement. This conclusion, according to the authors, makes it possible to infer that goals that the lawmakers set while trying to improve the effectiveness of combating organized crime were probably not achieved. The authors claim that the key causes of the unproductive reaction of lawmakers and law enforcers to the growing activities of organized crime, including its influence on the general state of law and order and the economic security of the state, include a selective post factum reaction to the growth of specific manifestations of organized crimes based on the intuitive trial and error approach. The authors suggest using the following ideas for the concept of an innovative model of influencing organized crime: it is necessary to use mathematical modeling of the planned amendments to criminal or other connected legislation and their influence both on the system of legal norms of the amended act and the system of legal norms as a whole, on the practice of law enforcement and criminal activity; the state should react to all the specific reasons for the initiation of criminal cases on organized criminal activities using automated systems of collecting, processing and evaluating information, making predictions of the changes in the intensity of organized criminal behavior; the causes and conditions of specific organized criminal infringements should be revealed and measures should be taken to eliminate them.