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the article presents results of the empirical study conducted in the period from October 2021 to February 2022 with the participation of 167 minors aged 14 to 17 years who committed offenses and (or) crimes. Purpose: to identify personal characteristics of juvenile offenders underlying the formation of defects in legal socialization (legal negativism, legal infantilism, legal nihilism, conscious criminal behavior) for further construction of adapted (depending on the form of defectiveness) psycho-correction programs aimed at preventing recommission of crimes. Methods: to solve the tasks, the appropriate methodological tools are selected: Rogers-Diamond Methodology for Diagnosing Socio-Psychological Adaptation, High School Personality Questionnaire by R. Cattell, the Strategic Approach to Coping Scale (SACS) (as adapted by N.V. Vodop’yanova and E.A. Starchenkova), questionnaire “Diagnostics of Value Orientations of Adolescents” by V.F. Sopova and L.V. Karpushina, methodology “Attitude to Law” by S.P. Beznosov. Statistical processing of the empirical study results was carried out using Microsoft Excel 2010 and IBM SPSS Statistics 22. The obtained results were subjected to primary, frequency, and correlation analysis. Results: it is established that legal socialization of a person is understood as person’s acquirement of lawful ways of behavior, formation of a sense of legal and social responsibility, and solidarity with the norms of law, provided by the transfer of values protected by society and law into the value-normative system of the individual. The highest level of legal socialization is the law-abiding behavior of a person as a result of a stable moral need to follow norms of law. Forms of defectiveness of legal socialization are models of attitude to norms of law, expressed in legal negativism, legal infantilism, legal nihilism, and conscious criminal behavior. Personal characteristics contributing to the formation of defects in legal socialization of minors are revealed. Conclusions: defects of legal socialization in the form of legal skepticism, cynicism, nihilism and infantilism are established in the sphere of legal awareness of juvenile offenders. At the same time, juvenile offenders who reject law are emotionally unstable, communicatively closed, externalized and maladapted. While juvenile offenders with an infantile attitude to law are communicatively open, adapted to the environment, and differ in conformity and accountability.
