Toma M. Personality of a professional criminal, who is serving his sentence at the institutions of confinement (as an object of criminological investigation)

The thesis is devoted to the complex criminological study of the professional criminal’s personality during his sentence serving in the form of imprisonment. The main stages of the professional criminality formation on the territory of Ukraine are being analyzed and systematized. On the basis of the theoretic and methodological approaches, which are the most commonly used in the specific legal literature to define concepts of “professional criminal activities” and “professional criminal”, the corresponding author’s definitions are formulated, and, taking them to the account, the key categories of professional criminals are separated out and systematized. An analysis of personality characteristics of the professional criminal, who is serving his sentence at the institutions of confinement, is being realized. The author emphasizes that the extraordinary majority of modern professional criminals are young and middle-aged unemployed men that do not have a common social origin, although professional criminals quiet often have this common origin, when they specialize in committing identical crimes. Being under the influence of the criminal ideology, professional criminals systematically commit lucrative crimes very often by a group of people and, as a rule, in a sober state and in such a way that indicates the state of their personality moral and psychological elements degradation. Furthermore, the basic criteria for the professional criminal’s reformation during the sentence serving are singled out, as well as characteristic features of the mocked reformation are determined. While investigating comprehensively the principal means for the prevention of professional criminality in Ukraine, the author points at their conceptual defaults and numerous defects of their practical realization. Granting this, a number of propositions have been formulated according the improvement of legal regulation of preventing professional crime, as well as the conception of program strategy for preventing professional criminality in modern Ukraine has been proposed.