In modern criminal law, the scope of criminalization in different legal systems is considered an important part of the description of these systems. This fact is not surprising, since criminalization and possible changes in its scope are closely related to the assessment of the situation of the individual, both in the context of the rights and freedoms to which he is entitled, and when the issue of criminalization is dealt with by looking at this phenomenon from the perspective of the protection to which individuals and societies are entitled (not only, but to a large extent, criminal law protection) in relation to individual goods, the violation or exposure of which is considered socially harmful. This article takes as its object of analysis the changes in criminalization in Poland in the last decade (2012 – 2022). It analyzes and evaluates both changes in criminalization in the sense of expanding or narrowing the catalog of crimes, as well as changes in the intensity of criminalization, by which the author understands the tightening or softening of statutory threats of punishment. The latter is also discussed taking into account the use of legislative technique, aimed at shifting the emphasis from the judicial power to shape the punishment imposed in a specific criminal case, to the power of the legislature to set the statutory threat so that this power is exaggeratedly limited, mainly through the narrow inclusion in the law itself of the possibility of choosing the type of punishment and its lower and upper limits of the statutory threat.
The study concerns the linguistic form in which the elements of an action are captured in the process of criminalization. One of the problems raised in this context is the use of colloquial language and the degree to which this way of formulating elements of crimes ensures the clarity of the description of prohibited acts. This is particularly important for the implementation of the guarantee function of criminal law. The author attempts to define a legislative technique that would ensure the protection of individuals against arbitrary interpretation of the provisions of criminal law.
The binding Polish Criminal Code from 1997 contains no definition of offence. It can, however,be constructed on the basis of the provisions of art. 1, 2, 7 and 9 of the code. It sounds: 1) anoffence is constituted by an act (action or omission) of a man, forbidden under the threat of penaltyby a statute, which is a felony or a misdemeanour, culpable intentionally or unintentionally andsocially harmful in a degree higher than minimal; 2) special role in the definition is played by theconcept of an act as the basis of criminal responsibility.The most important classifications of offences in Polish criminal law are made on the basis ofthe following criteria: a) the seriousness of the offence (division into felonies and misdemeanours);b) the presence of the element of consequence in the statutory description of the offence (materialand formal offences); c) the damage or the danger of it (offences causing damage in a legallyprotected value, offences consisting in concrete endangering and offences of abstract endangering);d) type of the offender’s behaviour (action and omission offences); e) form of guilt (intentional andunintentional offences); f) mode of prosecution (offences prosecuted on public indictment, includingoffences prosecuted on the motion of the victim, offences prosecuted on private indictment);g) features of the offender (delicta communia and delicta propria).