Vailidity of prohibitions and obligations established for convicts to imprisonment
Authors: Savushkin S. M. , Khramov A. A. 
Published: March 2022

The subject of the research. The research focuses on the legal prohibitions and obligations for convicts to imprisonment fixed in the norms of legislation and in subordinate regulatory legal acts adopted in accordance with it.

The purpose of the research is to confirm or refute the hypothesis that there is a current discrepancy between the content of the legal responsibilities of convicts and the goals of the penal enforcement such as rehabilitation and preventing of the commission of new crimes, their social essence and legal nature.

Methods of the research. The research uses retrospective analysis of legislation in the field of execution of criminal punishment in the form of imprisonment, as well as analysis and synthesis of legal literature and empirical research data. To confirm the conclusions of the research authors use sociological survey of 364 citizens and 221 employees of penal institutions located in the Siberian Federal District (the cities of Kemerovo, Novokuznetsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Omsk) aged from 18 to 73 years.

The main results of the research and the scope of their application. On the basis of retrospective analysis of the norms of penal enforcement (formerly correctional labor) law, which establish the penitentiary duties of convicts, the goals and objectives of penal enforcement legal regulation, the results of an empirical study, it is concluded that some of the responsibilities (including prohibitions) of convicts in criminal enforcement law do not have a strict scientific explanation. Their establishment is dictated not only by the need to achieve the purposes of convicts rehabilitation and preventing the commission of new crimes, but also to solve a number of other tasks that do not fit into the existing concept of the execution of punishment in the form of imprisonment and violate the balance between the "punitive" and "correctional-preventive" content of punishment. These include responsibilities that: are a relic of the Soviet socialist society; provide administrative, economic, managerial and other activities of penal institutions; unreasonably "seem" to be an effective way to rehabilitate convicts and prevent the commission of new crimes by both convicts and other persons.

Conclusions. The solution of the mentioned problems in the light of the development of penal enforcement policy in general and of its legislative form in particular is possible in several ways. The first one is that the legal responsibilities of the convicts to imprisonment should be reviewed (excluded, or the content should be changed), taking into account their real impact on the achievement of the goals established by law (or change the latter) and the constantly changing rules and traditions of the human society. The second one is to change the goals of the penal enforcement legislation to its current (and possibly future) norms. The third "middle ground" way consists in simultaneous changing of the goals of the penal enforcement legislation and of the legal responsibilities of convicts in the direction of expanding the dispositive principles of criminal enforcement legal regulation, excluding certain of their responsibilities and prohibitions and expanding their rights.