MODERN PREVENTIVE STRATEGIES ARE AIMED AT PREVENTING CRIMINAL ACTS

In recent decades, not only the institution of punishment has undergone significant transformations, turning from a means of responding to criminal offenses into a preventive mechanism. In addition to punishment, the criminal justice system uses a wide range of other coercive measures, the main objective of which is prevention. In order to distinguish between these two types of coercion, the term «preventive justice» was proposed to denote a set of state coercive mechanisms aimed at ensuring anti-criminal security. It should be noted that the problems that are considered within the framework of «preventive justice» are not new, characteristic of the 21st century. The need to prevent criminal offenses committed by «habitual» or professional offenders and the difficulties that the criminal justice system faces in solving this problem were of interest to lawyers and criminologists in the XIX and XX centuries. However, the renewal of interest in this issue is associated with the transformation of modern society into a «risk society», in which securitization, bringing to the fore the problems of risk and security is becoming increasingly widespread. Recently, more and more foreign criminologists have come to the conclusion about the limited capabilities of the official system of fighting crime. First of all, this was due to the constant increase in the cost of this struggle. This circumstance gave impetus to the study and analysis of informal social control measures. Such activities fall under the general category of «crime prevention», which covers a very wide range of possible measures. Despite the significant progress made in the last ten years, states have to face many problems that impede the full potential of crime prevention. These are mainly the result of unresolved ethical issues, implementation difficulties and technical difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness of crime prevention. Therefore, modern preventive crime prevention strategies are mainly recognized in developed countries. This situation is likely to change as a result of the widespread dissemination of information about the theory and practice of crime prevention.