Prison folklore in the context of criminal subculture

Introduction: the paper discusses prison folklore as an element of criminal subculture of convicted. The authors pay their attention to its components: songs, poetry, stories, sententious sayings, proverbs, sayings, myths, legends, anecdotes etc. Negative influence of prison folklore on the customs and traditions of the modern Russian society is shown. Materials and Methods: works on philosophy, sociology, psychology, deviantology, criminology, criminal and penal law were the basis for the study. Historical, logical, systematic-structure, specific-sociological methods were used in the preparation of studies. Analytical-synthetical methods were used in the search and analyzing of the literature; contrastive analysis helped to determine the essence of the concepts of traditional and prison folklore. Results: comparative analysis of traditional and prison folklore (their aims, forms, subject matter) has made it possible to reaffirm the hypothesis that inspite of fundamental changes of the modern society, prison folklore continues to use traditional folklore perverting its values, adversely affecting the mind of the young generation. Discussion and Conclusions: the authors concluded that it is necessary to study the modern state of the prison folklore with the view of arranging of preventive measures to the younger generation and opposition to expansion of these ideas in the modern society. The basic branches of study of the issue of the given paper.