Abstract: The article discusses the historical and pedagogical aspects of the activities of the penitentiary Commission of the St. Petersburg Law Society, aimed at ensuring the staffing of prison staff during the period under review, and designed in the form of preparatory work for the ivth International Prison Congress, held in the Russian capital in 1890.The methodological basis of the study was made up of a set of conceptual provisions of pedagogical and historical sciences, as well as general scientific methods of cognition - objectivity, scientific and historicism, a systematic approach, logical analysis and synthesis based on the variability of the historical and pedagogical process. This approach is based on the mutual integration of the subject fields of the three sciences – pedagogy, history and jurisprudence.

  Scientific novelty is considered by us based on the priority of introducing into scientific circulation previously unexplored factual material of the primary source. The presented work is one of the first attempts to reveal the historical and pedagogical heritage of the St. Petersburg Law Society (its penitentiary Commission) in preparation for the ivth International Prison Congress held in St. Petersburg in 1890, to determine the role of this commission in the theoretical justification of the need to train prison staff in Russia.The appeal to the activities of the penitentiary commission of the St. Petersburg Law Society, which were not previously studied by teachers–researchers in 1890, allows us to actualize the issues of the past, to see from new sides the activities of famous Russian scientists (for example, the chairman of the penitentiary commission - I. Ya. Foynitsky), to help understand the most important initial stage in the theoretical justification of the need for training prison staff in Russia.

Abstract: The research subject is the actualization of organizational and pedagogic peculiarities of professional training of penal institutions personnel during the Great Patriotic War. Professional training of penitentiary personnel in today’s Russia, aimed at the formation of competent professionals, traditionally deals with the question of continuity of education fundamentals at particular time line.  
The research is based on archive materials of the State Archive of the Russian Federation. The research methodology includes the method of historicism, and the system approach, the chronological method (historical periodisation), the methods of historical retrospective and historical comparison, which help to analyze archive sources from the viewpoint of contemporary historical and pedagogical science. 
The authors study the historical and pedagogical materials and analyze the experience, as well as theoretical and practical results of the search for new approaches, means and methods of professional training and improvement of conceptual background of the educational sphere of penal service of Russia. 
During the period under study (the years of the Great Patriotic War), the most effective organizational and pedagogical models were searched for, as well as their orientation towards school education with prevailing in-service training.