Validity of criminal provisions with administrative prejudice

The subject of the study is criminal provisions with administrative prejudice, views of researchers setting forth their stances on adopting such provisions, as well as statistics and law enforcement, that allows assessing their validity. The article addresses several problems. (1) The views of researchers on introducing the institution of administrative prejudice into the criminal law have been considered. The first viewpoint reveals the fact that further offenses cannot constitute the public danger of an act. The second viewpoint, on the contrary, suggests that the public danger of a criminal act is determined not just by material elements but also by mental ones, in particular, the persistence of its offending behavior. (2) The reasons for legislators' return to the institution of administrative prejudice, which they initially refused to adopt in the 1996 Russian Criminal Code, have been analyzed. The first viewpoint of researchers laid the basis for this refusal. However, legislators again came to use this institution for the following reasons. Firstly, administrative prejudice is a way to partially decriminalize acts. Secondly, it contributes to a clearer delineation between a criminal act and a wrongdoing, especially the cases wherein judgmental elements are deemed to be criminogenic elements of an act. Thirdly, the need to adopt some cases with administrative prejudice is due to a failure to influence certain types of socially dangerous behavior through administrative measures. (3) The public danger of criminal provisions with administrative prejudice has been justified, which is expressed in the nature and degree of the public danger of an act, as well as in the antisocial traits of a person being the source of criminal misbehavior. Alongside general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, system approach), specific scientific methods (studying court verdicts available in the "Justice" state automatic system, as well as judicial statistics analysis) have been used in the study. The article concludes that the public danger of a criminal provision with administrative prejudice reveals in the nature and degree of the public danger of the act, as well as in antisocial traits of a person being the source of criminal misbehavior. Imposing such bans allows decriminalizing criminal acts of minor gravity, wherein a first wrongful act leads to administrative liability, and only further offenses qualify as a criminal act. At the same time, their application is feasible with regard to certain types of socially dangerous acts allowing to distinguish crimes and administrative offenses more efficiently, as well as those that have a preventive nature allowing to prevent more serious criminal consequences than the act which incurs criminal liability.

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