Methodological Dead Ends of Modern Criminology

The main source of methodological dead ends in science is the rigidity of its key theoretical construct determined by the accepted methodology. Such rigidity hinders the natural development of science that spreads it competencies to new unknown spheres of reality. Any attempts to apply a common concept to reality invariably come across its variety. The science resolves contradictions between the general and the specific by finding intermediary links between them. In all situations when a common concept is problematic, methodology plays the part of a high point that makes it possible to observe all shifts in the contradiction between the essence and the phenomenon. Criminology is based on the hypothesis of a society that generates crime. The contents of this society include the whole aggregate of public circumstances that have a criminological significance. Russian criminological mainstream views criminogenic circumstances as those in the sphere of socially negative public relations. The use of the criterion of socially negative relations to identify criminologically relevant public circumstances is the key obstacle for the criminological research in many directions. A true challenge for such research is explaining the nature of economic, corruption and information crimes. Their basics form public relations that are, for the most part, in the realm of the criminological unknown. Hence, it is problematic to produce well-founded recommendations on the development and implementation of a crime suppression policy. In the process of research, the authors determined that criminologically relevant circumstances may, in principle, belong to any of the possible aspects of analyzing the social environment. To prevent the general scheme aimed at identifying criminogenic circumstances from being stuck in the close and the immediate, it is necessary, first of all, to take into consideration a growing significance of independent actions of the community in its interaction with the state when determining the boundaries of the socially negative phenomena. Secondly, it is suggested that local social systems should be used as an intermediary link between the general scheme and specific local social interactions for representing the process of forming criminogenic circumstances in it entirety, in the interconnection of positive, negative and «grey» interactions.