Modern Patterns of Sentencing Juvenile Offenders to Sanctions Not Involving the Restriction or Deprivation of Liberty

Crimes and punishments of juvenile delinquents have always been the focus of attention of the society and the state. Due to objective and subjective reasons, and its qualitative and quantitative characteristics, this type of crime acts as a “breeding ground” for youth, adult, repeat and other offences. In this connection, the state policy of counteracting crime in general and juvenile crime in particular should be based on the analysis of the experience of enforcing the measures of state coercion, including criminal punishment. High-quality, complex analysis of the vectors of state criminal and penitentiary policy, substantiated from the standpoint of criminal law and criminological doctrines, will make it possible to work out the most effective algorithms of implementing the measures of criminal liability for juvenile offenders. Juveniles, who are convicted to the strictest form of criminal liability — criminal punishment. Although there seems to be a wide range of criminal punishments applicable to the age group under analysis, it should be recognized that the specific weight of the so-called “alternatives” to the restriction and deprivation of liberty hardly reaches a third in the court practice. On the one hand, the announced more humane attitude to teenagers guilty of criminal offences is reflected in the formal clauses of criminal law. On the other hand, the practice of law enforcement, as proven by the official court statistics, demonstrates certain objective and, sometimes, subjective difficulties connected with making decisions on sentencing juveniles to criminal punishments not connected with the restriction or deprivation of liberty. Besides, according to numerous criminological studies, these types of punishments are characterized by a heightened level of danger in terms of the possible and actual level of repeat offences in the term and process of their execution. Currently, when the criminal activities of juveniles are on the rise due to, among other things, structural demographic changes, there is an evident need for criminological research connected with determining the policy of the state aimed at preventing juvenile crime.