Correlation of Goals and Tasks of Criminal Law, Punishment and Its Execution

The article analyzes criminal and penal legislation norms, their tasks, goals of punishment and its execution, as well as determines their correlation. It is argued that the main social task of these legislations is to protect a person, society and the state from criminal encroachments, while their main legal task is to prevent crimes. All institutions and norms of criminal and penal legislation, as well as purposes of punishment, including correction of the convicted person, should be subordinated to this task. Correction is the main way to prevent new crimes. The problem of convicts’ resocialization is also considered in this context. Correction should be part of resocialization of convicts. Purpose: on the basis of generalized historical and modern legislative experience in the formation of goals, tasks of criminal law, punishment and its execution, to identify their common and distinctive features, determine their optimization and draw attention of the legislator and law enforcement practice to them. Methods: the research is based on the use of methods traditional for criminal and penal law: analysis and synthesis, logical, retrospective, formal-logical, and comparative-legal ones, as well as interpretation of legal norms. Results: the author comes to the conclusion that the tasks of criminal law, punishment and its execution should not coincide. The main task that punishment and its execution should focus on is a socio-legal task, which is defined in Part 1 of Article 2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation: protection of the individual, state and society’s interests from criminal encroachments. At the same time, prevention of new crimes should be the main goal of punishment, and re-socialization – the key goal of penal legislation ensuring punishment execution. It is crucial to restore the effect of the prohibitive norm of the criminal law (the state of positive criminal liability). All this is determined by the current trend to optimize the goals that can be achieved in the penal system conditions, shift efforts from correcting the offender to his/her re-socialization and adoption to the conditions of life in society, which meets international law recommendations. The tasks of penal law should go beyond the goals of punishment, and penal law should include not only penal, but also post-penal blocks of norms. Conclusions: conducting the research, the author substantiates the necessity of revising the goals and objectives of the criminal law and penal legal systems, optimizing them in accordance with the requirements of new trends in social development and international norms of law, directing activities of criminal justice on fulfilling the tasks in demand.