INTRODUCTION

Social control of criminality is a major problem in the contemporary world. Street crime, organized crime, violent crime, terrorism and so forth affect people and give rise to “moral panics” and “fear of crime”. Legislators, politicians, police and criminal justice officials try (often habitually) repressive methods to gain control over criminality. However, traditional measures have not obtained the desired results.

Social control is a mechanism for the self-organization and self-preservation of society through the establishment and maintenance of a normative order, involving the elimination, neutralization or minimization of deviant behavior, including crime. Social control of criminality includes general methods of social control - punishment and crime prevention.

Some have argued that a “crisis of punishment” exists, a crisis of criminal justice, of criminal law's control of criminality, including control of the police. The basic trends in the current western theory (and practice, in some countries) of social control over criminality include recognition of the irrationality and inefficiency of punishment as revenge, a change in social control strategy from “war” to “peacemaking”, a search for non-repressive alternative measures of social reaction and a prioritizing of crime prevention.

Criminal justice, police and penitentiary systems are the result of the general social, economic, cultural and political condition. The contemporary Russian post-Soviet criminal justice system, police and penitentiary systems have a complicated history. They have two main sources: first, the old tsarist system, which was part of the so-called Continental legal system but which had a genuine policy of repression; secondly, the Soviet “socialist” system. It is clear the communist regime was quite terrible. As a result of the unique experiment to establish a social utopia (the slogan on the gate of the Solovki Gulag camp read, “Happiness for everyone through violence”), the country was thrown off the path of civilization.

Gorbachev's perestroika (“reconstruction”) was a necessary attempt to save the State through reform. Khrushchev had made a similar attempt (the so-called Thaw), but Gorbachev's reforms were the most radical. However, these reforms did not bring about their desired end, something that may not have been Gorbachev's fault but certainly was his misfortune.

The contemporary Russian penal system is “better” than the Soviet Gulag but it is still repressive, an offense to human dignity, and especially agonizing for women and adolescents.