Approaches to Assessing Life-Sentenced Prisoners’ Readiness for Parole Abroad and their Application in Russia

Introduction. In Russia, there is an increase in the number of people sentenced to life imprisonment, who have served a 25- year term of imprisonment and have the right, under the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, to apply for parole, but due to the lack of methods for their anti-recidivism and other assessment, there are difficulties observed in penitentiary practice and in the courts. Materials, Results and Discussion. Basing on the provisions of international normative legal acts and taking into account the legislation of fifteen foreign countries with different legal systems, the authors carried out a comparative analysis of approaches to assessing the life-sentenced prisoners’ readiness for release, which made it possible to identify the causes and features of the use of actuarial or clinical models in solving the issue of early release of this category of prison special contingent. Conclusions. The paper substantiates an integral approach to assessing the life-sentenced prisoners’ readiness for the release with regard to psychologists’ monitoring of the transformation of the personality of the special contingent, evidence-based data on their subjective activity in resocialization and stability of prosocial behaviour.