Traditional criminological science has long stood firmly in the position that the prevailing majority of criminal offenses, including corruption, in their genesis are due to the social environment in which criminal
behavior is formed. Personality features of a genetic nature have been sidelined. At the same time, during the Soviet period of the development of law, ideas about the genetic conditioning of individual criminal behavior
were severely criticized and assessed as harmful, anti-Marxist, referred to pseudoscientific directions reflecting the bourgeois class fragmentation of society. In modern conditions, the question of a more
complex structure of the nature of this phenomenon is updated, combining not only socially significant prerequisites for the formation of a criminal-oriented personality, but also personality features with hereditary features. Researchers conventionally call this approach the "binary singularity of the causes of crime." The legitimacy and validity of this approach to the study of the causes of corruption allows us to see new prospects for developing effective measures in the process of implementing national priorities to combat
crime in general and corruption in particular.