Criminal law management

Introduction: in its essence, criminal law regulation is a kind of social regulation, i. e. influence on society, social groups, individuals aimed at streamlining their activities. Purpose and objectives: to consider criminal law influence (measures, sanctions) and its institutions in the context of patterns and regularities of social management, to reveal contradictions and formulate propositions to resolve them. Methods: the methodological framework of the research is based on methods of formal and dialectical logic, sociological statistic, comparative jurisprudence, system approach, modeling. Results: in order to increase management effectiveness, criminal measures should be considered in the unity of law-making, law enforcement, and law implementation cycles. Thus, it is necessary to clarify the objectives of each cycle and link them into a single "tree of goals ". Criminal law management is performed by means of two levers - limitation (via restrictions) and stimulation (via incentives). Its specific features are as follows: first, limiting measures are leading while positive-stimulating ones play a secondary role; second, implementation of both kinds of measures is legally regulated according to the permissive type. The application of criminal measures and change in their intensity is performed based on the formalized grounds for management, those being juridical facts in the form of criminal act or (and) criminal event. Criminal encroachment, crime and criminal offense must be considered the types of criminal acts. As for juridical facts for positive stimulation, in the paper, it is proposed to introduce a category "criminally significant merit" - an action or event being the ground for the release or mitigation of criminal restrictive measures. Dispositions of articles of Special Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation are interpreted as rules of special security, created by the legislator for special protection of constitutional values. The "periodic system " of legal consequences of violating security rules includes sanctions of punishment, security, restoration and incentive ones, which can be combined in parallel or in succession. Conclusions: the use of categories and principles of social management theory makes it possible to find and eliminate system faults in criminal law regulation, and thereby increase its efficiency.