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 article considers the problem of preservation and upgrading of historical and pedagogical legacy of teachers of the earliest professional training schools and courses for penitentiary personnel in Russia. The author considers the quality characteristics (the staffing level and competence of teachers, the participation of practitioners and scientists, etc.) of personalities of teachers of the earliest educational institutions (schools and courses) involved in professional training of penitentiary personnel. The author notes that the personalities of particular teachers are well-known in the scientific world, some are known only among domain experts (particularly those specialized in jurisprudence), some were known only to their contemporaries, while about others there’s no available scientifically important information at all. The author raises the question about the necessity to admit the role of personalities in professional training of penitentiary personnel in Russia. This research is one of the first attempts to introduce the personalities of the earliest professional training schools and courses for penitentiary personnel to the scientific world. The research is based on the archive materials. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the systematization of tendencies of recruiting teachers of the earliest professional training schools and courses for penitentiary personnel: firstly, the absence of permanent teachers even in schools opened upon the adoption of the Law of 1913; secondly, highly positioned civil servants and qualified practitioners were involved in teaching; thirdly, starting with temporary readings, highly competent and well-known specialists had been involved in the educational process, many of them current or would-be leading scientists and acknowledged scholars. The admission of the role of personalities makes it possible to conduct historical research using biographical methods and personalistics.