December 2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the life imprisonment application in Russia. As an alternative to the death penalty, which has not been used for over 20 years, life imprisonment has lost most of its connections. Its social and criminal-legal significance in the system of punishments has changed in many ways. However, during this period, there have been no significant changes in the legal regulation of the appointment and execution of this punishment, which negatively affects the effectiveness of its application. Despite such a long absence of the death penalty in the list of actually applied punishments, its impact on society as a whole and on the court in particular has still been preserved. In fact, when choosing a punishment, the court is very limited in its choice. For some acts, the death penalty is a natural and even the only answer from the point of view of the overwhelming majority of citizens of the country for their protection. In such conditions, life imprisonment is inevitably perceived as an alternative to the death penalty, its substitute. As a result, a kind of organizational and legal impasse has arisen, which does not allow us to assert that the main purpose of punishment (the correction of convicts) applies to life imprisonment to the same extent as to other types of punishments. During the entire period of application of life imprisonment, not a single petition of convicts for release from serving their sentence was granted by the court. This article attempts to solve some of the key problems for life imprisonment, which, in the opinion of the authors, will make this punishment effective.
life imprisonment, death penalty, alternative, parole, conditional release from serving a life sentence, progressive system of serving a sentence, changing the conditions of convicts’ detention
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