Peculiarities of personal qualities of prisoners at relapse of crimes

Annually, the number of detected violators of the criminal law is enormous. In 2013, it was 1012563. There is an obvious trend toward the growth in the number of convicts who previously committed crimes. Their number in 2013 reached 47.7 per cent. With that said, a part of this work is an attempt to establish some features of the signs of the structure of repeat offenders which directly and clearly correlate with the main determinants of crime in general and recurrent one in particular. By leading researchers, among them in modern Russia are high consumption of alcohol, unemployment, high level of food prices, low wages, poor condition of housing, low level of education and other. On this basis, we chose to study some signs of the structure of repeated criminals that directly correlate to these reasons with an aim to establish their real status in the present (alcoholism, drug addiction, educational level, parasitism, absence of a family). We took a sample of the Siberian region for the previous five years from 250 specific criminal cases involving persons who have committed crimes at least a second time and compared them with some of the all-Russian indices. Out of 1219789 criminals identified in Russia in 2009, 186077 people at the time of the crime were in the state of alcoholic intoxication (15.25%). In 2013 those were already 298306 of 1012563, or 29.5%. According to our data about 58% of repeat offenders were in the state of alcoholic intoxication at the moment of committing a crime. As we see, the number of such persons exceeds by almost twice the already very high average rate in the country, which indicates a clear distortion of the perpetrators. The situation is similar with regard to labour. In Russia the number of persons who had no permanent source of income at the time of the crime is constantly growing. In 2009 it was 64.4%, in 2013 -65.7%. As for our data, it was 73.3%, or nearly three quarters. Very poor indicators characterizing the personality of a repeat offender were established in relation to level of education, having a family and drug abuse. Thus, in the result of investigation of specific criminal cases we found that such qualities as lack of desire to work, have a family, to improve education, to cut down drug and alcohol abuse, as well as neglect to the norms of behavior in the society are much more evident in cases of repeat offenders. This means that in the prevention of recurrent criminality they should be given paramount and most serious attention.

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