Abstract
The article considers the principle of proportionality of the severity of punishment to public damage from an offense in terms of law and economics and criminology. It presents an overview of various criminological approaches to assessing social damage from different types of crimes, concluding that it is not possible to measure this damage precisely in each specific case. The methodology proposed by Sellin and Wolfgang (Sellin & Wolfgang 1964), which rates the severity of crimes based on sociological surveys, is highlighted as an effective basis for determining the severity of punishment proportional to public damage, though it has its drawbacks. The conclusion offers proposals for synthesizing all the approaches considered in the article to assess public damage from crime and establish the socially optimal severity of punishment for offenses.