Гуманитарные и юридические исследования (Sep 2021)
FORMATION OF PENITENTIARY CONSCIOUSNESS OF CONVICTS AND ITS NEGATIVE IMPACT ON PERSONALITY
Abstract
The article deals with the peculiarities of the formation of penitentiary consciousness of convicts and its negative impact on the personality. The interest to the problem, according to the authors, is preconditioned by the fact that this phenomenon is inherent only in the States of the former Soviet Union. It is here that informal relationships between convicts serving sentences of imprisonment have emerged as a speciic moral imperative. As a basis for the implementation of this kind of informal norms, the features of the hierarchical system of organization and management of the entire penitentiary society are deined. The article analyzes the system of the principles of formation of penitentiary consciousness of convicts by means of use of informal norms of behavior. Such influence is carried out depending on the status and role settings of different groups of convicts. Here, you can see a kind of competition between the requirements of the legal law, declaring the equality of all convicts before the law, and the "selectivity" of informal norms, which can, depending on the speciic situation, change the nature of in-tra-group relations. As a rule, the status-role model is used, in which the level of claims depends on the place occupied by the individual in the informal hierarchical system. The authors convincingly show that this kind of negative moral impact on the personality of the convicted person is dictated by the desire for some compensation in the system of value orientation due to signiicant differences in the life of an ordinary person and a convicted person. This kind of compensation, according to the authors, is carried out at two levels subjective - individual and collective - group. In this regard, as an indicative group, the authors identify the leading group of the penitentiary community, which acts as a subject determining the degree of criminalization of relations in the penitentiary society. The main means, according to the author, is aggressive-violent installation of such social formations. The degree of contradiction between them is due to a certain kind of stereotype of behavior, which is based on the rigid contradictions between a free society and persons in isolation from it. This category of convicts is at the "top level" of the informal hierarchy, which gives it the opportunity to have a signiicant impact on the entire system of relations in the penitentiary society.
