Criminological Policy of the Russian Federation: the Concept of Judicial Reform and Justice of the Peace

The article presents a legal approach to the problem of the influence of the judicial system segment of Russian criminological policy on the effectiveness of the general prevention of deviant behavior. Within this framework, the authors compare the assumptions of the program documents that described the criminological parameters of justice of the peace during its introduction in the contemporary judicial system, and the results achieved by this introduction. By analyzing the Decree of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR «On the Concept of Judicial Reform in the RSFSR», the authors demonstrate that this document was aimed at legitimizing confederative relationships in the Russian Federation with the design of the judicial system of «cooperative federalism» type. The justice of the peace, whose status and jurisdiction are only schematically outlined in the Concept of Judicial Reform, was to play a decorative role in the political and ideological support of the achievement of a far more ambitious goal. The transformation of Russia into a state of «cooperative federalism» with extreme asymmetry of its subjects would have meant the removal of the opportunity for the justices of the peace to perform the criminological function of courts. The introduction of justices of the peace simultaneously with the adoption of their own codes of material and procedural law in the republics of the RSFSR predetermined the creation of legal systems independent of the federal center in each Russian subject and the blocking of the criminological function of the courts. At the same time, a retrospect reference to the legal tradition of the Russian Empire formed an erroneous understanding of Russian justice of the peace as a unified (since 1864) judicial system, and lead to the development of abstract projects that hindered the implementation of the crime prevention potential of justice of the peace. The result of the criminological policy of the Russian Federation in 1991–1996 was the structuring of the court system of the Russian Federation which was different from the model presented in the Concept of Judicial Reform. The conducted research showed that justice of the peace in Russia duly influences crime prevention.