The True Purpose of Criminal Punishment and the Criteria for Its Attainability
The purposes of punishment were officially fixed in the domestic criminal legislation in the beginning of the last century. However, due to the high degree of the description's abstractness, none of them has until now received universal approval in the domestic criminal law doctrine. At the same time, the official goal of punishment is a reflection of the current criminal policy. It allows determination of the law enforcement activities' effectiveness and identification of shortcomings in normative regulation both in the field of criminal law relations and in crime prevention in general. Therefore, in order to formulate the actual goal of criminal punishment, it is necessary to determine the set of criteria for the real attainability of the punishment types provided for by criminal law. This study assumes the formulation of criminal punishment's actual purpose, which can be achieved as a result of established criminal-legal prohibition. To achieve this goal, it is necessary, firstly, to formulate the criteria for the attainability of the objectives of criminal punishment, and, secondly, to evaluate all the purposes of criminal punishment proposed by modern research and the current legislation for compliance with the criteria. The achievement of the research's declared results is provided by the use of the dialectical method of scientific cognition, as well as by a number of other private scientific methods: classification, generalization, analysis, induction and deduction. As a result of the conducted research, it was concluded that none of the officially stated goals of criminal punishment can be achieved as a result of the establishment of a criminal-legal prohibition and the realization of responsibility for its violation. To formulate the actual goal of criminal punishment, two criteria for its attainability are defined: formal and material. The formal criterion is to affirm that the purpose of criminal punishment should be achieved as a result of the implementation of criminal law norms only. The material criterion can be summarized by saying that the purpose of criminal punishment is the result that is to be fixed and recorded as being done in real life. Taking into account the content of the identified attainability criteria, it is concluded that the only purpose of criminal punishment is to determine the nature and degree of the public danger of a specific criminal assault.