The personality of a penitentiary criminal: the concept and criminalistic significance of its properties

The subject of the study was the forensic aspects of the concept and properties of the personality of the prison offender. The article presents the solution of the following tasks: identification of the problems of criminalistic understanding of the definition "personality of prison offender", which is widely spread in the legal literature; establishment of criminalistic interrelations and interdependencies between the personality features of prison offender and individual circumstances of crimes committed by them; identification of the main directions of using personality features in tactics and methods of investigation of unlawful acts committed by persons staying in The research is conducted on the basis of analysis of the works of scientists who have previously analyzed some aspects of the penitentiary crime and personality of the penitentiary criminal, as well as the forensic significance of the personality properties of the criminal and the related methodological recommendations for the investigation of penitentiary crimes. The research used the dialectical method of scientific knowledge, private-scientific methods of analysis and generalization, the method of comparison, the method of modelling, the sociological method used in the survey of correctional officers who attended advanced training courses at the Academy of the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service in 2014-2018. The results obtained were systematised and compared in order to identify interrelations and interdependencies. As a result of the study the author's concept of understanding the penitentiary offender is formulated. The arguments in favour of generalisation under this concept of all categories of persons (convicts, suspects, defendants) staying in conditions of isolation in correctional institutions and pre-trial detention centres are given. The main groups of properties of the personality of a penal offender were analyzed. Identified criminally relevant tasks, solved with the use of information about these properties, the main sources of information about the personality of prison criminals. An attempt to comprehend the process of formation of crimi-nologically significant information concerning the penitentiary criminals was made. We analyzed changes in the penitentiary crime situation that indicate the biological, psychological and social characteristics of the personality of the penitentiary offender. Five main types of personality of prison criminals were identified. Possibilities of use of the mentioned properties for construction of the criminalistic characteristic of penitentiary crimes, serving as the starting point in formation of the corresponding criminalistic recommendations are shown.

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