On some problems of using individual postulates of the "economic theory of crimes and punishments" for the purposes of "optimizing the level of crime
Authors: Osipov Mikhail 
Published: October 2023

The problem of optimizing the level of crime is one of the urgent problems facing domestic and foreign criminology. The relevance of this problem is due to the fact that crime is a phenomenon that causes enormous damage to society, which, on the one hand, reduces the income of the population, and on the other hand, requires certain expenses for the maintenance of the law enforcement system to prevent it, which leads to an increase in the social costs of society.

The purpose of the study is to determine to what extent certain postulates of the "economic theory of crimes and punishments" proposed by scientists - economists can be used in order to optimize the level of crime.

The subject of research in this article are the features and patterns of criminal and law enforcement activities, the knowledge of which allows us to conclude that there are or are no problems when using certain postulates of the "economic theory of crimes and punishments" to optimize the level of crime

Methodology and methods. In the course of the study, an analysis was made of the possibilities of using certain postulates of the "economic theory of crimes and punishments" in order to optimize the level of crime. The implementation of this kind of analysis involves the use of a number of research methods, which include: the method of modeling the behavior of a criminal; a method of testing models of economic postulates of the economic theory of crimes and punishments in specific situations, followed by the formulation of conclusions about the validity or inconsistency of these models, including the use of mathematical and statistical research methods. At the same time, mathematical and statistical research methods were used to determine the level of detection of crimes, as well as to analyze the dependence of the costs of law enforcement and the actual level of crime.

Research results and their scientific novelty. The study found that in a number of cases the postulates of the economic theory of crimes and punishments do not adequately reflect the existing socio-legal reality. The reason for this is the presence of dubious postulates underlying this or that model of criminal and law enforcement activities. Among such dubious postulates are the following postulates: the postulate that the behavior of the criminal is rational In reality, the behavior of the criminal is not always rational; 2 the postulate that the level of crime is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the costs of law enforcement (in other words, the higher the costs of law enforcement, the lower the level of crime, in reality, in some cases this is far from an obvious fact; 3 the damage from organized crime is always lower than the damage from unorganized crime, since the level of organized crime is allegedly lower than the level of unorganized crime, which is also far from obvious. Based on the analysis of individual postulates of the economic theory of crimes and punishments, it was concluded that the use of these postulates does not always lead to optimization the level of crime, because these postulates do not always adequately reflect the legal reality.