Legal culture of security department staff in correctional facilities

the article develops an applied model of the legal culture of correctional facility security department employees as a systemic resource for legality and managed security. Legal culture is interpreted as a combination of professional knowledge, value systems for serving the state, and sustainable lawful practices, operationalized through a triad: standardized justification for decisions (norm—fact—goal—more lenient measure), procedural discipline (deadlines, forms, notifications, accounting, and instrument labeling), and evidentiary transparency (audit trail, event identifiers, and record reproducibility). The methodological framework combines formal-dogmatic, comparative-legal, and systemic approaches; the empirical basis includes generalized department regulations and contemporary publications on penitentiary practice. It is shown that bottlenecks in practice are associated with the discrepancy between the measure and the stated goal and gaps in documentation. Practical solutions are proposed: standard decision and notification forms, a "material inspection" checklist, a registry of protected recipients, target forwarding deadlines with automatic reminders, access control, and immutable action logs. A comparison with Germany and France allows us to identify transferable techniques—a closed list of privileged recipients, the "without delay" imperative, and an independent channel to the supervisory authority—that are compatible with Russian security requirements. The practical significance lies in the ability to directly implement the proposed tools in information systems and local regulations, and integrate metrics (timeliness, completeness of justifications, percentage of confirmed decisions) into personnel certification and audit plans. It is concluded that accurate, verifiable, and procedurally respectful security work strengthens trust in the state, ensuring humane and rigorous enforcement of punishments in the digital age.

legal culture, penitentiary system, security department, personal safety, proportionality, correspondence control, personal data protection, audit trail