Crime Prevention as One of the Court’s Objectives in Criminal Proceedings

The article examines the problem of the court’s realization of its function of prevention when carrying out justice from the standpoint of the implementation of criminal policy. According to the authors, criminal procedure policy is its constituent part, it has its own legal mechanism and instruments of preventing unlawful actions that could and should be effectively utilized by courts in criminal proceedings. Due to this, an important activity for the courts is crime prevention through criminal procedure methods, which is manifested at both general social and special levels of prevention, and in the framework of which the role of the court is paramount. The conducted analysis of current and previous criminal procedure codes and other normative legal acts, legal positions of supreme courts and the existing practice allowed the authors to single out a number of problems of legal regulation of the courts’ implementation of these activities, as well as to outline the key vectors for the development of research ideas on the implementation of criminal and criminal procedure policy on crime prevention in our country. Criminal procedure means of prevention used in court proceedings are singled out: using measures of criminal procedure coercion, making a prejudication or a ruling, establishing circumstances that contributed to the crime, etc. It is claimed that the circumstances under Part 2 Art. 73 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation should be viewed as the procedural duty of the court. In their research, the authors analyzed court practice and statistical data on the application of such means to assess the effectiveness of their preventive potential. All suggestions on introducing amendments to the Russian legislation with the goal of strengthening the role of the court in crime prevention are based on the opinions of judges of general jurisdiction surveyed on the questions under consideration.