Soviet penal law of the 1920s stressed, as we saw, reintegration into the social order on a basis that would have the individual become a contributing member, rather than one who acted at cross-purposes to the goals of the society. The idea that criminal penalties should serve rehabilitation instead of, or in addition to, retribution and deterrence gained strength in the West in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1926, the International Association of Penal Law, representing European penalists, called for a move away from punishment as retribution. European penal law began to focus on the individual and reintegration or re-education.

Soviet practice gave a major boost to the concept that crime is a product of social causes and led to a re-evaluation of traditional techniques in dealing with crime. The idea that crime was only in part associated with moral shortcomings of the individual led to a search for social causes of crime and an effort to eliminate them. The move to welfarism was prompted in part by concern over the crime that was generated by a society in which large numbers of poor were left to fend for themselves. Crime, wrote one analyst of the welfare state, “is a sign of sickness in the individual and sickness in the society that breeds him.”

Soviet law may have exerted an influence as well in regard to the conception of how law influences human conduct in the criminal process.