On the necessity of accounting for criminological conditions in criminalization of acts

The article states that changes in criminal law are related to the corresponding changes in the economic, political, social and other spheres of social life. However, important for criminalization (decriminalization) of acts are criminological conditions, which include: the relative incidence of the offence; criminal-political adequacy of penal prohibition, etc. By examples of some changes to the Criminal Code in recent years the author tries to show that ignoring of criminological conditions in criminalization of acts casts doubt on the appropriateness of introduction of specific criminal law norms. One can still watch the attempts to change the criminal law only on the basis of the subjective attitude to the act without considering scientific developments. Still, the author notes that the level of legal culture of our society suggests that such attempts remain unfulfilled in a particular penal prohibition. Criminal law not based on social reality is usually ineffective and does not correspond to the condition that underlies the adoption of any rule of law, the essence of which is that the benefit from the accepted norm should be greater than the potential harm from it. Criminalization and decriminalization of acts should also be considered from the perspective of benefits and social adequacy. An important condition of criminalization is nonredundancy of penal prohibition. The problem of nonredundancy of penal legal prohibition can be attributed to one of the most important theoretical foundations of criminalization. This condition implies, first, avoidance of the possible duplication of criminal law norms providing penalties for committing a specific socially dangerous act, and, second, correspondence of the volumes of penal prohibition to the nature and degree of social danger of the act. It should be noted that modern lawmaking suffers from criminalization redundancy. High dynamism of legislative changes, which can generally be attributed to the merits of legislative activity, in cases of making decisions that are not thoughtful enough, contradictory, ignoring social change and scientific basis, turns into its opposite, becomes a disadvantage, destroying the stability of law, which is an even more important condition of its effectiveness than variability.

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