Social and Legal Studios

Imprisonment for a determinate term is one of the oldest penalties. At the beginning of its application, it performed the function of a simple isolation and few people considered the consequences of its application both for the convicted, and for the whole society. But today, it is a generally accepted fact that the penalty of imprisonment for a determinate term causes both physical and mental suffering to the convicted in the course of its execution. For an adult person, after serving this sentence, it is difficult and takes a long time to adapt to regular life and forget all the negative effects he or she has suffered as a result of being placed in a penitentiary institution. As for minors, the problem of applying this penalty is much more crucial. Even more acute is the issue of application of life imprisonment, which has come to replace the death penalty. Nowadays, there are many publications on the need for humanization of this penalty or even refusal of its application. It should be admitted that the penalties of imprisonment for a determinate term, life imprisonment, as well as all the other penalties involving isolation of a person, must be treated as a forced and inevitable phenomenon at the current stage of development of society, which has not come up with an equivalent replacement for them yet. In the current Criminal Code of Ukraine, there are many institutions allowing the court to choose a form of criminal liability in the course of its individualization that would not be related to the actual serving of a prison sentence by the convicted. At the same time, it is important to understand that when the court still decides to apply an imprisonment sentence to the convicted and to impose it for actual execution, this penalty should fully comply with its functional purpose and goals. Unarguably, the issue of the death penalty, as well as of life imprisonment and the perspectives of its humanization in current conditions can be discussed from different points of view, especially if one takes into account not only the formal and legal component but also the philosophical aspect. At the same time, it is claimed that even if to suppose that the upcoming Criminal Code of Ukraine will prescribe the provision allowing the application of parole to persons serving life imprisonment, the conditions of such parole should be as strict as possible and provide for, at least, a mandatory actual serving of forty years of imprisonment by the convicted