Features of National Penitentiary Policy and Their Methodological Significance

Introduction: modern legal science has not sufficiently developed methodological foundations of penitentiary policy, which is understood as a socio-legal phenomenon explaining the patterns and processes of applying criminal law measures in order to ensure law and order in society and the state. Purpose: to formulate ontological features of national penitentiary policy, as well as to reveal their essence and methodological significance. Tasks: to study theoretical approaches to understanding the essence of penitentiary policy; determine vectors of development of scientific penitentiary thought; identify trajectories of the evolution of penitentiary policy features. Methods: induction and deduction, abstraction, historical and legal, comparative, modeling. Results: to comprehend the essence of penitentiary policy is possible through the prism of understanding the content of its structural elements outlining the contours of this concept. The penitentiary doctrine, legal regulation of measures of criminal legal impact, the procedure for their execution, as well as indicators of penitentiary statistics most fully characterize the essence of national penitentiary policy. Conclusion: the author substantiates the essence and methodological significance of features of national penitentiary policy, which determine it as an integral political and legal phenomenon, different from other related categories used in criminal law science. It is noted that methodological aspects of penitentiary policy took shape in the second half of the XIX century – the first quarter of the XX century, thanks to the scientific schools of England, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Russia.