The responsibility of corrupt officials and the prevention of criminal law

The subject of the research in the presented article is the criminal law norms that determine the penalization of corruption-related crimes. The issues of sufficiency and effectiveness of sanctions of criminal law norms, their preventive potential, the difference in law enforcement practice in terms of sentencing corrupt officials and ordinary criminals are actively discussed. The issue of compliance of the norms on criminal liability for corruption and the criminological realities of our time is raised. The author examines such aspects of the topic as the influence of the structure of corruption-related crimes on the law enforcement practice of courts, the specifics of criminal proceedings at the judicial and pre-trial stages that affect the sentencing of corrupt officials. The practice of applying additional punishment in the form of deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities, as well as such a measure of a criminal nature as confiscation, is statistically analyzed.The methodological basis of the research is the dialectical method of cognition. The private scientific methods are the summary and grouping of the actual data of criminal statistics, mathematical methods for calculating relative crime rates. The author's special contribution to the study of this problem is the following patterns revealed in the course of the study: three-year cycles of "recruiting the mass of defendants" in corruption-related cases; an indication of certain aspects of the expanded reproduction of corruption-related crimes based on bribery; differences in the types of punishments imposed on corrupt officials and ordinary criminals; deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities and confiscation as preventive measures (sanctions) of the criminal law, contributing to the private prevention of offending corrupt behavior; the result of an analysis of the effectiveness of the application of additional punishment in the form of deprivation of a special right (disqualification) in relation to corrupt officials; the result of an analysis of the effectiveness of the confiscation of corrupt officials; arguments are given regarding the appropriateness of applying a judicial fine to corrupt officials.

criminology, criminal law, corruption, criminal penalty, bribery, corruption crime, punishment for corrupt officials, crime rates, crime trends, criminal statistics