The chapter analyses how Hungary’s political transformation since the late socialist era has shaped criminal and penal policy, crime trends, sentencing, and imprisonment. It shows that the democratic transition initially produced a liberal, rule-of-law-based criminal justice model, with a strong Constitutional Court, abolition of the death penalty, and reforms to the 1978 Criminal Code that reduced reliance on imprisonment and expanded alternatives, even as crime surged sharply in the 1990s. Long-term data reveal several crime phases: a gradual increase under socialism, an explosive post-transition rise driven by property offences and declining clearance rates, stabilization at a high level in the 2000s, and then a significant decline after 2012, partly due to legislative reclassification of offences, followed by a renewed increase in property crime after 2021, while violent crime remains relatively stable.Criminal policy has cycled through liberal, divergent, punitive, left-realist, and, finally, punitive-populist phases, closely trackable by changes in government. Early post-1990 governments pursued decriminalization, lenient sentencing, juvenile protection, diversion, and, later, a penal-welfarist agenda that promoted restorative justice, probation, crime prevention, and victim support, briefly reducing prison use. The decisive break comes with the FIDESZ–KDNP governments after 2010, whose two-thirds parliamentary majority enabled the adoption of a new Fundamental Law and a new Criminal Code that constitutionalized life imprisonment without parole, lowered the age of criminal responsibility for serious violent crimes, repeatedly tightened sanctions and parole, and introduced highly symbolic criminalization in response to migration, the COVID-19 pandemic, and paedophile scandals. Although conviction numbers have fallen from their early 2000s peak and fines again dominate sentencing, incarceration rates now exceed 200 per 100,000 – among the highest in Europe and comparable to late Kádár-era levels – because of longer sentences, narrower release, and punitive policy choices. The chapter concludes that Hungary has moved from a phase of penal moderation grounded in democratic and European norms to a punitive-populist regime in which criminal law is increasingly instrumentalized for political gain and crisis management rather than evidence-based crime control, contributing to a broader shift from liberal democracy to a constrained, hybrid, illiberal order.

This volume examines the evolution of criminal policy, focusing on penal policy in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries from the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the present and analysing the policy decisions, regulations, and specific conditions that have influenced these developments.The chapters analyse penal policy across ten countries, highlighting the principal characteristics of each nation’s approach and examining their differences, with particular attention to criminal law, criminalization, sentencing practices, and criminal justice. Focusing on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Bulgaria, the Czechia, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia, the book demonstrates how state responses to crime and penal policy have evolved and provides insight into the underlying processes and significant events that have driven these changes.Employing a comparative methodology and incorporating two cross-cutting chapters on penal policy, sentencing practices, and the rise of penal populism, Development of Criminal Policy in Central and Eastern European Countries is intended for students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, and political science.

The introductory chapter consists of five sections. The first section outlines the political character of the transition in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the perspective from which the volume examines the penal policies of the ten countries selected. The second examines the region’s main features from a historical and social perspective. It includes a brief overview of crime development in the region over the last 30 years. The third section presents in detail the criminological theoretical framework and concepts that serve as a basis for interpreting the penal policies of the ten countries and their changes and for identifying the common features and differences between these policies. The benchmark for change is the degree of punitiveness. The fourth section guides the structure and content of each country chapter, and the fifth section covers the volume’s structure.

The chapter examines how ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries moved from late socialism through democratization, market transition, and EU accession and how these shifts have shaped crime trends and penal policy. After 1989, constitutional reform, Council of Europe and EU requirements, and expert-led discourse produced less punitive, more rights-oriented penal systems: death penalties were abolished, imprisonment was reframed as a last resort, and community sanctions expanded, with falling prison populations in many states. At the same time, regime change generated severe social dislocation, rising inequality, corruption, and new forms of crime, which gradually eroded early optimism. The chapter also discusses crime trends, changes in the structure of crime, and incarceration rates. The chapter concludes that a persistent “penal gap” separates East and West despite decades of legal and institutional convergence. In CEE, incomplete Westernization, socialist legal legacies, deep socio-economic inequalities, weak civil society, and populist governance all support more punitive penal policies and higher incarceration. Early post-transition moderation gave way to “authoritarian crime governance within democracy”, especially in Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Echoing Dahrendorf, the chapter argues that while political and economic systems can change relatively quickly, the civic culture needed for stable, moderate penal policy may take generations to develop, which helps explain why many pre-transition features – most notably high prison rates – endure.