Penal Policy, Crime and Political Change

Abstract

This chapter deals with the development of criminal policy, and penal policy in Hungary after the political transformation of 1989–1990. The free parliamentary elections held in the spring of 1990 ended 40 years of ‘socialist rule’ in Hungary. The change of regime significantly affected the problem of crime and penal policy. The number of recorded crimes was 1.7 times higher in 1989 than in 1980, and 1.5 times higher again in 1999 than in 1990. The increase slowed down in the second half of the decade and stopped in 1999; crime rates have been stable ever since. In the first years after the change of regime, the significant increase in crime coincided with the decline in imprisonment rates resulting from the new ‘reductionist’ penal policy. However, in 2009 ‘three strikes’ rules and in 2010 mandatory life imprisonment were introduced to the Hungarian Penal Code. A policy of zero tolerance policy and an ‘expansionist penal policy’ arrived in Hungary with the center-right government which was formed in May 2010. This study pays special attention to the driving forces and features of penal policy over the past 20 years. Sentencing practice is also discussed. In the course of this chapter the characteristics of sentencing practices in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia are compared. The chapter also gives an overview of the changes in crime in Hungary in 1988–2010, particularly with regard to property crimes, economic crimes, murders, alcohol-related crimes and drug offences. The conclusion of the author is that the nature of the political system fundamentally determines the characteristics of penal policy. The latest developments in the field of penal policy indicate that the reaction to crime has become a political issue in Hungary. The reason for extending the scope of criminal law, the stricter penal policy and as a consequence the increasing prison population is not the ‘heritage of the socialist past’, but a phenomenon of ‘governing through crime’ and the penal populism of the government.