On the Constitutional and Legal Foundations of Criminal Policy and Its System

In this study, the authors address the problem of determining constitutional and legal foundations and the possibility of using various criminal policy management tools in order to increase the policy's effectiveness and strengthen the rule of law. The subject matter of this study is the description of essential features of individual elements of the content of criminal policy and the directions of its constitutional and legal development in Russia at different stages of the country's historical development. The aim of this article is to determine the place of criminal policy in the system of state and international policies. The study is based on the theoretical material from a number of researchers (P.V. Zhesterov, A.P. Kuznetsov, E.V. Kunts, R.A. Romashov, V.P. Salnikov, and others). The Constitution of the Russian Federation and the laws of the country were also used. The methodological basis of the study is dialectic, comparative legal and formal legal methods. In particular, the use of the dialectical method contributed to the study of law enforcement problems at different stages of the development of legislation in the field of the constitutional foundations of the criminal policy of Russia, the pre-revolutionary, Soviet, and modern periods of its development. The use of comparative legal and formal legal methods helped to identify approaches to the conduct of criminal policy in the countries participating in the United Nations, and the prospects for using various criminal policy measures to develop the constitutional system of Russia. As a result, the authors came to the conclusion that Russian policy at all stages of its formation was based on the delimitation and isolation of government bodies and officials from society as a whole and its individual representatives in particular. In the political practice of Russia, the people at all historical stages were not subjects of political power but, rather, objects of public administration, whose vital activity was always determined by a "higher will". Unconscious resistance to this will in a number of cases resulted in "blind and merciless Russian riots", representing the so-called "conflicts of hopelessness", inherently doomed and destructive in essence. A feature of the criminal policy of the state, as applied to modern Russia, is its "focus" on the personality of the head of state-the president, who owns both the prerogatives in the field of legislative, organizational, and personnel support of anti-criminal activity and the "final word" in the field of criminal prosecution and justice. In relation to criminal policy at the international level, Russia acts as one of the member states, which in the formal sense does not differ from other UN member states, but in reality claims to have the same central place in international politics that the USSR had before.

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