The Concept, Legal Framework, Sources, and Instruments for Implementing Criminal Policy Doctrine

Strategic planning is an important stage of Russian state policy. In this study, the author examines the organizational problems involved in constructing a modern criminal policy and analyzes approaches to the formation of its normative and political and legal sources. The author seeks to analyze certain issues related to defining the concept of a criminal law and political doctrine, which remains insufficiently studied in the science of criminal law. The paper concludes that it is necessary to clarify the conceptual and categorical apparatus of strategic planning in criminal policy by distinguishing among the concepts of the legal framework, the sources, and the acts implementing the criminal and political doctrine. The paper provides for the definitions of the concepts under study, systemizes the existing normative and political and legal sources of criminal policy according to the function they perform in the process of strategic criminal-policy planning. The author takes a critical view of the absence of a unified concept of Russian criminal policy and, through specific examples, assesses the extensive cluster of programmatic and strategic documents serving as sources of the criminal and political doctrine as disharmonious, unsystematic, and fragmentary. The author calls for the phased development of a system of legal foundations, sources, and acts implementing the criminal-political doctrine and proposes a specific methodology for carrying out this work.

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