Features of the Interpretation of Certain Categories of Criminology

Abstract

The article deals with the peculiarities of the interpretation of the conceptual apparatus of science of criminology, in particular concerning the subject of criminology, its connection, synthesis with the definitions of the science of criminal law. Criminology needs a kind of scientific instrument that serves it, that is, its conceptual apparatus. Criminological concepts are a reflection of the most significant means and relations, phenomena, processes, as constituent of crime, and interacting with crime. Under this interaction, as well as interaction in general, the dialectic state of «cooperation» and «confrontation» is understood. That is, on the one hand, it is a favor, and on the other – the fight against crime. Hence, the complex composition of the conceptual apparatus of criminology, which has developed today due to involuntary «sponsorship» of jurisprudence, sociology, philosophy, psychology, economics, statistics and other sciences. Such a large number of notions of non -legal origin in criminology conceals the danger of the destruction of the mechanism of legal assessments and conclusions about crime, its causes, the identity of the offender, measures to prevent crime and the significance of criminological knowledge to «ordinary» national education, but not to scientific substantiation of the application of legal and non-legal measures of preventive influence on the causes of crime. The sociological stratification of the conceptual apparatus of criminology, for example, provides a basis for the scientific substantiation of the orientation of the police on the excessively wide coverage of the content of educational and preventive activities, including the fact that it does not act as a police officer as an armed law enforcement agency (we recall the employment of people who returned from places of deprivation of liberty, treatment of alcoholics, drug addicts, control over adherence to trade rules, participation in work with mentally ill, etc.). Therefore, in studying criminology, the application of criminological knowledge, the student should be guided by the legal significance of problems related to crime. Social problems, no matter how important they are to society, require the development of social but not criminological measures, that is, those that are reduced to very important tasks. Criminology studies facts and phenomena of a legal nature: crime, crimes, criminals, persons who have committed crimes, victims of criminal encroachment, legal and illegal means of preventive influence on the causes and conditions of crime, crime. However, the criminological approach to the criteria for assessing the elements of these factors and phenomena is not adequate to the criminal-law approach. Although both criminal law and criminology are ultimately aimed at ensuring law and order through the prevention of crime and the preventive effect in general on crime. In contrast to the criminal -law concepts that determine the guilt and punishment through the legal assessment of the elements of the act, the objectives of the criminological concepts are to establish the causes of these elements and hence – measures of preventive influence on them.