The situation with current criminal legislation of Ukraine which we are facing today could not be described otherwise than the crisis. Over 18 years, the number of changes and additions to the current Criminal Code of Ukraine has reached a critical mass. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that very often these changes and additions stem from the specific clan, political, and opportunistic interests, and are often ill-conceived; furthermore, along with being non-contributory to addressing the issues related to combating encroachments on the most essential public relations, goods and interests, on the contrary, they have a negative impact on this activity.

Unfortunately, over the years of existence of the independent Ukrainian State, no national idea has been created, generally, and no national ideology formed, despite the fact that in 1991 there was a change of the socio-economic formation which gave rise to this need. As a consequence, no national legal ideology, with criminal law ideology as its component, has been formed. For this reason, current criminal legislation of Ukraine retains the ideological buildups which were intrinsic to criminal law of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and still largely rests upon the criminal law ideology dating back to the Soviet Union times.

All this is due to the fact that the modern national criminal law policy does not have as its basis the national criminal law ideology and the criminal law doctrine and concept.

The criminal law ideology, which is a component (element) of legal ideology in general, for its part, is an element of criminal law consciousness. It is a set of systematized and coordinated criminal law ideas, theories, concepts, provisions and principles which are characterized by mutual interrelated subordination and aim at forming a criminal legislation and its application practice which would be desirable for society (a separate social group), and at forming, within criminal law consciousness, of a positive assessment of the efforts taken by virtue of criminal-law to combat crime, as well as at formulating well-reasoned requirements for its improvement.

Criminal law ideology is a self-standing political and legal phenomenon which performs the function of setting the role and the boundaries of criminal law extension from the perspective of regulation of conduct of society members and their submission to the most essential and generally accepted rules of conduct, values, and interests. The purpose of this article is to develop the approaches allowing to understand criminal law ideology, its place in the system of legal policy, as well as the concept and place of the criminal law doctrine in the structure of criminal law ideology, the concept of ideology of criminal law policy and the fundamental principles upon which the concept of criminal legislation of Ukraine is based.