Attitude towards oneself, criminal punishment and victim of a crime as a predictor of a criminalization personality

Abstract

Introduction. Criminalisation negatively affects the well-being of society and personality, worsening and restricting progress and hindering their functioning and development. Scientific ideas about criminalisation are based on the regulations of individually-psychological and social approaches. The possibilities of the subjective approach are not fully used to study criminalisation, but they are useful, as they can reveal subjective components of the determination and regulation of criminal behavior. The development of subjective approach within the framework of research allows us to substantiate theoretically the combination of relations involved in regulation of behavior and to develop a model of these relations for assessing risk of criminalisation. The aim of study is a theoretical substantiation of set of subjective relations indicating a risk of personality criminalisation and its empirical verification. For this purpose, the study examines a model of personality attitudes affecting its criminalisation, having developed on the basis of theoretical analysis of domestic and foreign researchers' ideas about criminogenic personality, criminogenic orientation and regulation of criminal behavior. Methodology, methods and techniques. The methodological basis of the study is a subjective approach (S.L. Rubinstein, A.V. Brushlinsky, K.A. Abulkhanova), value-normative theory of criminal behavior (A.R. Ratinov), provisions about criminogenic propensity of personality (A.N. Pastushenya). The empirical study is aimed at verifying the interconnection of subjective attitudes indicating the criminalisation of personality. The method of collecting data is the questionnaire "Risk of Criminalisation", the structure of which is formed by five scales which totally include 60 questions. The method of processing results: descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis, nonparametric criterion of differences Kruskal-Wallis-H criteria test. The study sample: 618 people divided into law-abiding (n=202 people) and criminogenic group, having been divided in its turn by the criterion of repeated criminal responsibility into subgroups of situation-criminogenic persons (n=219 people) and consecutive-criminogenic persons (n=197 people). The criminogenic persons were administratively supervised by law enforcement bodies of the Russian Federation. Results: criminalising significance of subjective attitudes set of super-valuable attitude to the self, devaluing attitude to punishment and cynically accusing attitude to the victim was confirmed. As a result of confirmatory factor analysis, an adjusted scale suitable for assessing the risk of criminalisation was obtained, and some information about its reliability and validity was obtained.