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.