Modern Penalization and Criminal Punishment: the Problem of a Conflict of Goals

Setting strictly defined goals directly in the text of the law before criminal punishment necessarily implies that the state’s treatment of punishment will be subordinated to these goals. The State’s penalization strategy should be based on the goals of punishment and serve to ensure their proper provision. When penalizing socially dangerous acts, the state must take into account that the punishment it imposes on the guilty person is designed to correct him and prevent the commission of new crimes. Meanwhile, an analysis of the legislator’s intentions, reflected in explanatory notes to draft laws that change the parameters of criminalization of crimes and the rules for sentencing, shows that in most cases the legislator’s intentions were to ensure non-specific goals for criminal law. Among them: a) the use of penalization to solve general social problems (stimulating business activity, replenishing the revenue side of the budget, supporting motherhood and childhood, strengthening the authority of the authorities, protecting victims of crime); b) the desire to compensate or minimize the social costs caused by excessive criminalization and increased punitive nature of the criminal law (to reduce the number of convicts, the cost of their maintenance, to minimize the number of convicted persons). In such conditions, there is an acute conflict between the goals of punishment and the goals of penalization, whichindicates an internal mismatch of the objectives of criminal policy, generating deep and unacceptable contradictions in its implementation.