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Babanina D.V. An empirical approach to understanding the «criminal subculture» (based on the results of a sociological survey). Journal of Social Policy, Population Preservation and Reproductivity. 2025; 4(3). Available at: https://spnjournal.ru/PDF/07SPN325.pdf (in Russian).

An empirical approach to understanding the «criminal subculture» (based on the results of a sociological survey)

Babanina Darya Vasilyevna
Krasnodar University of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, Stavropol, Russia
E-mail: darbabanina@yandex.ru
RSCI: https://elibrary.ru/author_profile.asp?id=1169049

Abstract. The problems of studying criminal communities have been among the priorities over the past decades. This is due to the multi-scientific nature of the social education under consideration. Formally, it is determined by the relevant legal and criminological parameters, which is not fully capable of revealing the patterns of its existence and vital activity. Traditionally, criminology and sociology consider criminal communities through the prism of the basic (consolidating) element — the «criminal subculture». It is its presence that determines the peculiarities of perception of the surrounding reality by members of criminal communities. Despite the fact that this problem is not new, most experts agree that this phenomenon does not have clear criteria, as a result, different specialists understand its content in different ways. The author of the proposed article has been researching the specifics of the criminal subculture of minors for many years. As part of a specific sociological study conducted by the author, two groups of respondents were interviewed: (1) employees of various structural divisions of the internal affairs bodies (N = 420): the respondents were selected in such a way that their professional activities were directly related to minors who adhere to certain types of «criminal subculture»; (2) juvenile offenders from among the persons registered in the juvenile affairs units of the Department of Internal Affairs (N = 202). The formation of complex ideas about this took place in several stages — practical (direct work with difficult teenagers) and scientific (conducting a special criminological study, which resulted in writing a dissertation). The amount of data obtained both during the period of law enforcement and research activities allowed not only to formulate the author’s concept of «criminal subculture», but also to provide an exhaustive classification of its main features-indicators. Based on the author’s position, this social phenomenon is considered from the point of view of its phenomenological position in the structure of knowledge about minors leading an antisocial lifestyle.

Keywords: criminal community; subculture of the criminal community; minors as a social group; subculture of minors; criminal subculture; destructive subculture; informal subculture; subcultural relations

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