Legal Education and Legal Culture as a Means of Crime Prevention in the Youth Environment

The article considers a range of issues related to the current problems of legal education and raising the level of legal culture from the standpoint of preventing youth crime. Legal statistics, various scientific approaches to the problem of finding the most effective measures of influencing youth crime and juvenile crime through legal education, as well as the proposals of modern criminological science regarding the issue under consideration are summarized and analyzed. The authors formulate and substantiate the thesis that legal education should be considered the best and most effective of all possible means of anti-criminal influence on young people today. At the same time, it is noted that the existing syllabi of academic disciplines in higher educational institutions designed to address this problem for students of non-legal specialties are not able to fully solve this problem. In this regard, the authors propose to develop and introduce into the educational process of universities preparing students of non-legal specialties a discipline of an integrated interdisciplinary nature, which will accumulate the basic knowledge not only in the field of jurisprudence, but also legal psychology, history, as well as some other social sciences. According to the authors, the main goal of such a discipline lies in providing the students of non-legal specialties not so much with the knowledge of legal theory of a purely scientific nature, but rather with applied knowledge, skills and ability to defend their rights and legitimate interests in cases of violation, and in forming a stable inner conviction among young people regarding the necessity and lack of alternatives to lawful behavior, as well as an understanding of the jurisdictions of various law enforcement agencies, and how the citizens in need of legal protection may appeal to them.