Prevalence of acts as an optional characteristic of their public danger

When dealing with the questions relating to criminalization (decriminalization) of acts, most of Russian researchers consider it necessary to proceed from the public danger of the act itself. Public danger of an act is determined by its external expression: the objective aspect of a concrete act (and, primarily, by the harm inflicted to the protected social relations) and the object of offence. The subject and the subjective aspect of an act are not the determining elements of its public danger. Public danger of the personality as a social and psychological category cannot also be considered as the basis for criminal liability since the act itself but not certain categories of the persons possessing concrete social and psychological characteristics is criminalized. There is an opinion in criminal law and criminology that public danger of a crime is in the possibility of its repetition. This approach deserves support under the observance of the following conditions. Firstly, if an act does not have an extremely high degree of public danger, the fact that this act should not be too widespread must be taken into account in the course of criminalization. Secondly, a criminalized act should be neither extremely widespread nor a single one without possibility to be repeated in the future. When writing the present article, the author set the task to determine the relationship between the prevalence (repetition) of an act and its public danger. He used the following methods: dialectical, formal and logical, system and structural as well as analysis and synthesis. The subject matter of the article is the influence of the prevalence of acts on their public danger when resolving the issue of criminalization (decriminalization) of acts in the Russian Federation. The research showed that prevalence of any acts should be considered as an optional characteristic of their public danger based on the danger of infliction of harm to the protected social relations. In other words, prevalence of concrete acts can serve as an optional, but not a dominant argument when substantiating the need of criminalization (decriminalization) of certain acts. Legislators define concrete acts as socially dangerous (crimes) only after separate cases of these wrongful acts become socially noticeable (both qualitatively and quantitatively). However, former (current) criminal law stipulations, which are unable to support a stable condition of social and economic system in both the society and the state, are insufficient for their prevention.

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