The theory of the dangerous condition of person: one step forward or two steps back?

In this article, from the point of view of a critical analysis of the current criminal legislation of Russia, as well as the doctrine of criminal law and criminology, the question arises of the advisability of introducing criminal liability for occupying a higher position in the criminal hierarchy. n the course of the study, attention is drawn to the fact that the formation of the concept of “dangerous state of the person”, in the context of the development of the sociological school of criminal law, meant classifying in this category not only persons who had an objective danger to society (for example, repeat offenders and professional criminals), but persons who had a certain degree of deviation in relation to other representatives of society (for example, drunkards, prostitutes and drug addicts). Moreover, if the intensification of criminal repression against the former was at least somehow justified from the standpoint of the need to prevent serious crimes, the introduction of preventive measures against the second group of people generated exclusively their stigmatization in the eyes of society. When writing an article, the author also refers to foreign experience (primarily USA), which indicates the presence of certain excesses in the establishment of an internal criminal policy in relation to these categories of people: this is also the introduction of the category “dangerous criminal” for persons who have committed sexual offenses in Canada, and the establishment of the three-strikes law in the United States with extreme of it form in the state of California. It is also possible to attribute the expansion of cases of administrative prejudice to the field of establishing the category of a dangerous state of a person in the current criminal law of Russia, which analyzed in this article too. It is concluded that the introduction of criminal liability for the characterization of the person is contrary to the idea of prohibition of objective imputation established in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, as well as in international acts as one of the fundamental principles of modern criminal law.