Imposition of Legal Punishments: Current Status, Problems and Prospects (Based on the Materials of a Sociological Study of the Opinions of Prosecutors)

Introduction. The imposition of punishment is an important type of law enforcement activity, which is of fundamental importance for achieving the required indicators of law and order in the Russian Federation and any other state. High-quality monitoring of intermediate and final results of the imposition of penalties requires that the subjects assess their deep involvement in the relevant processes and objectivity in their views. The Prosecutor’s Office of Russia, by virtue of the powers exercised and its specific constitutional and legal status, is a unique body whose employees provide supervisory support for the imposition of penalties and their subsequent execution. The purpose of the study is to identify and summarize the opinion of prosecutors on the problems and prospects of the relevant activities for the further practical use of the obtained data.

Methodology and materials. In the course of the study, the author refers to the doctrinal positions and the results of a sociological survey of prosecutors conducted at the Irkutsk Law Institute (branch) of the University of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation in 2023. Using the IBM SPSS Software software product, the obtained sociological data were formed in the form of visual tables, their primary analysis was carried out. In addition to general scientific and sociological methods, the study involved special legal methods, including formal-legal and system-legal, and used the tools of legal hermeneutics to identify legal meanings in the obtained array of information.

The results of the study and their discussion. Based on the results, conceptual provisions were formulated regarding the factors influencing the process of imposing penalties and related issues. The problem of taking into account the legal positions of higher judicial authorities in law enforcement activities on imposing penalties, as well as the effectiveness of individual law enforcement agencies, is partially considered.

Conclusions. The author concludes that the effect of optimizing the procedures associated with imposing penalties should be associated with a decrease in the burden on the law enforcement system with a simultaneous increase in the preventive effect of imposing (threat of imposing) penalties. Further prospects for using the results of sociological research in the field of imposing penalties are outlined.

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