The Place of Forced Labor in the Alternative Punishment System

With the introduction of criminal penalties not related to isolation from society, the scientific literature increasingly began to use the phraseology "alternative punishments", which has become common today. However, it was only with the beginning of the use of punishment in the form of forced labor in 2017 that the phrase "alternative punishment" became legally fixed and thus began to correspond to the essence of the punishment itself. According to the position of the authors stated in this article, the term "alternative punishments", and even more so their "system", is used incorrectly. Forming a subsystem, punishments that are not related to isolation from society (not including forced labor) can act as alternatives only to each other. Actually, it is in this capacity that they are considered in judicial practice. The difficulties faced by judicial and law enforcement practice in the first 6 years since the beginning of the use of forced labor were due not so much to the novelty of the punishment itself (similar measures were used in the Soviet period as probation and conditional release with mandatory labor), but rather to the organizational and legal shortcomings inherent in this punishment. As a result, forced labor still cannot fully meet the purpose assigned to it by the legislator.