Differentiation and individualization of punishment as a principle of the penitentiary law: the problem of interpretation in modern science

The current Criminal Executive Code of the Russian Federation in Art. 8 fixed the list of principles of penitentiary legislation without revealing their content, in contrast to the RF Criminal Code. This, in turn, gave scope for doctrinal interpretation which is characterized not only by the diversity of approaches to the interpretation of the content of certain principles (which are cornerstones of a kind and must be perfectly clear and monosemantic), but also to the definition of the principles of what (branch of law, legislation, policy, regulation, or something else) they are, or even what the number of these principles is. The noted above can almost fully be attributed to the requirements to differentiation and individualization of punishment specified in Art. 8 of the RF Criminal Executive Code. The paper deals with an understanding of differentiation and individualization of punishment as a principle of the penitentiary law. It examines the interpretation of the content of the principle that exists in modern professional literature on the topic, its attribution to the branch-specific or inter-branch principles; options to consider differentiation and individualization of punishment as a principle that consists of two requirements, or their assessment as two independent principles; questions of the relation of the correctional and criminal differentiation and individualization; the problem of correlation of the principle of differentiation and individualization of punishment with the requirements of equality of all before the law, etc. The analysis of the available positions revealed that the literature on the topic does not have a generally accepted approach to this principle. The paper attempts to identify the reasons for this, as well as areas in the study of the relevant requirements of various scopes of punitive-educational impact to the inhomogeneous contingent of convicts, which can be evaluated as a principle of a legal phenomenon.

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