The core move in the framework is definitional, and it is more consequential than it might first appear. Prunckun defines non-crime as the absence of a specified criminal act during an identifiable episode, even though the person had a practicable opportunity to commit it and faced a relevant incentive, provocation, or occasion. An episode, in this scheme, specifies the person, the possible act, the setting, and the period under examination. This episode-level focus deliberately separates non-crime from two related concepts that criminologists have long studied: long-term abstention, in which a person never offends across repeated observations, and desistance, the process by which people with offending histories stop. One honest expense claim, the framework insists, establishes neither a lifetime of virtue nor a turning point in a criminal career. It is a single outcome that demands its own explanation.

The definitional work also draws careful boundaries around what counts as an opportunity. A practicable opportunity exists when a person has the ability and access needed to commit the specified act during the study period, and the situation presents a potential benefit, grievance, or temptation connected to the offense. Crucially, the person need not consciously consider offending at all. An employee might recognize a chance for financial gain without ever viewing dishonesty as an acceptable route to it, a distinction that echoes Per-Olof Wikström’s Situational Action Theory, which separates seeing an act as a possible choice from selecting it. Complete elimination of opportunity, such as an access restriction that renders theft impossible, is treated as a distinct and valid form of prevention but is excluded from the comparison, because the framework is interested in episodes where the offense remains genuinely possible and yet does not occur.

At the heart of the theory are five categories of restraint that may explain why the offense does not happen. Moral restraint operates when a person rejects an act because it violates an ethical standard they accept or conflicts with the kind of person they believe themselves to be, whether or not discovery is likely. Prudential restraint stems from expected costs, including legal punishment, dismissal, loss of income, or damage to future prospects; a narrower version, detection-only restraint, depends specifically on the perceived risk of being caught and the consequences expected to follow. Relational restraint arises from obligations, trust, belonging, and accountability to particular people, so that deception feels unacceptable because it would betray a colleague even if no practical loss would result. Situational restraint covers practical barriers that make an offense harder but still possible, such as extra procedural effort, guardians who might interrupt, or delays that sap the appeal of completing the act. Legitimacy-based restraint, finally, operates when a person follows a rule because they regard it as proper or believe the authority issuing it has the right to do so, a mechanism long associated with Tom Tyler’s procedural justice research.

None of these categories is entirely new, and Prunckun is explicit that the contribution lies elsewhere. The framework builds on Travis Hirschi’s social control theory, in which attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief explain conformity; on Walter Reckless’s containment theory, with its inner and outer buffers against delinquency; and on Anthony Bottoms’s distinction between prudential, normative, situational, and habitual compliance. What the new framework adds is the insistence that these processes be treated as separable, measured independently, and compared within a single episode. A social bond such as employment, the article notes, can supply several kinds of restraint at once: fear of losing a career is prudential, obligation to colleagues is relational, commitment to professional integrity is moral, and respect for the institution’s right to regulate conduct is legitimacy-based. Treating the bond as a single protective force, the argument goes, obscures which process actually did the work.

The framework’s most provocative claims are four conditional propositions about what happens when restraints change. The first holds that when one restraint weakens, the probability of non-offending should decline less among people whose conduct is also supported by other relevant restraints, and more among those who depended primarily on the weakened one. The second proposition is a detection-focused version: an equally large drop in perceived risk of being caught should produce a bigger decline in non-offending among people whose restraint depends mainly on detection, while leaving others largely unaffected, particularly where a moral filter prevents the offense from even entering consideration. The third proposition turns within-person, predicting that weakening a restraint in one setting, compared with another setting where the same person faces comparable opportunities, should reduce non-offending only when that restraint’s activation conditions are present. The fourth extends the logic to desistance, proposing that increases in separately measured restraints should predict continued non-offending among people with offending histories, with the greatest benefit appearing after a previously dominant restraint has weakened.

These propositions are framed as empirical questions rather than settled findings, and the article is candid about conflicting evidence. David Nagin’s review of deterrence research found more consistent support for the likelihood of being caught than for punishment severity as a deterrent, while studies of whether morality conditions deterrence have produced mixed results: Raymond Paternoster and Sally Simpson found sanction threats mattered most when moral inhibitions were weak in corporate crime scenarios, whereas later work found perceived certainty associated with offending even among participants with stronger moral beliefs. The framework also warns against circular reasoning. Inferring that someone depended on detection merely because they offended after monitoring was reduced would render the explanation unfalsifiable. Restraints must be measured before conduct, using indicators such as moral judgments about the specific offense, perceived risk, expected losses, obligations to particular people, beliefs about an authority’s rightness, and observable practical barriers.

A hypothetical workplace example illustrates the machinery. Imagine two employees who both submit accurate expense claims, though each could profit from a false one. Independent evidence shows the first is supported by moral objections, workplace attachment, and acceptance of the rule’s legitimacy, while the second relies mainly on the expected risk and consequences of detection. If reduced monitoring lowers both employees’ perceived risk by the same amount, the framework predicts a larger increase in the second employee’s likelihood of offending. Other changes help disentangle the processes: a breakdown in workplace relationships weakens accountability without touching expected sanctions, perceived unfairness erodes legitimacy without altering moral objections, and relaxed verification makes the false claim easier without changing either. By contrast, an access restriction that makes the false claim impossible for both employees removes the episode from the comparison entirely, because prevention by eliminating opportunity is a different phenomenon from restraint while opportunity remains.

The framework also situates individual restraint within broader social conditions, assigning them three distinct roles. Social influences may act as antecedents that help develop restraints, as contextual conditions affecting access to opportunities and resources, or as moderators that alter when and how strongly restraints operate. Research linking neighborhood collective efficacy to lower violence, for example, does not by itself identify what prevents violence in a particular episode; the framework asks whether the mechanism runs through supervision, valued obligations, or something else. Gendered patterns of access to positions of trust shape opportunities for corporate fraud, suggesting that observed sex differences may reflect roles and exposure rather than inherent differences in moral restraint. Childhood self-control, linked in a New Zealand birth cohort to later criminal conviction, may affect whether a person can follow through on a commitment when competing motives arise, while genetic associations with self-regulation traits do not by themselves establish a biological pathway to non-crime.

The practical implications cut in uncomfortable directions. Evidence that multiple restraints are present does not show that withdrawing an effective restriction would be safe, because moral commitments, relationships, and perceived legitimacy may weaken or conflict, and apparently distinct restraints may depend on the same institutional arrangement and fail together. The framework likewise cautions against labeling people as uniformly risky or safe: prior offending may improve average-risk predictions, but explaining a specific episode requires evidence about the processes operating at that moment. The author acknowledges real limitations, including overlapping categories, self-reports that may overstate principled motives, and the difficulty of establishing that a practicable opportunity existed independently of motivation and conduct. Yet the central challenge stands. Offending has causes, and so, the article argues, does its absence. When a realistic opportunity remains and the crime still does not occur, that outcome is not a null result to be ignored but a phenomenon requiring its own evidence, its own measurement, and, at last, its own theory.

Subject of Research: A criminological theory of non-crime explaining why offenses do not occur when opportunities remain available

Article Title: Why Crime Does Not Occur: Toward a Theory of Non-crime

Article References: Prunckun, H. (2026). Why Crime Does Not Occur: Toward a Theory of Non-crime. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-026-09954-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12103-026-09954-8

Keywords: criminology, non-crime, restraint, social control theory, deterrence, compliance, desistance, legitimacy, situational action theory, crime prevention, self-control, criminal justice

Penal populism first entered the scholarly vocabulary through the work of criminologist Anthony Bottoms, who described populist punitiveness as one of the main forces operating within contemporary criminal justice systems. The term captured how politicians, perceiving a deeply punitive public, pursue harsh penal policies for their own political gain. Later scholars broadened the concept. John Pratt described populism as a fundamental shift in the axis of penal power under the conditions of late modernity, while Mark Fenwick showed in the Japanese context that penal populism can also produce non-punitive policies, driven by an unmet demand for justice and security. What unites these accounts is the way penal policy becomes a reactive undertaking, supported not by evidence of effectiveness but by emotional resonance.

The authors illustrate the pattern with three contemporary cases. In the United States, following the murder of political activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump argued on Fox News for what he called quick trials, complaining that criminal proceedings stretching over seven or eight years allow defendants to blame their circumstances. The authors note that such statements run directly against the presumption of innocence and against criminology’s core mission of understanding why crimes are committed. In Morocco, public debate over Article 507 of the Penal Code, which prescribes life imprisonment for robbery involving a weapon, revealed how a broad statutory definition of a weapon, one that could in theory include a screwdriver, allows punishment to jump from a five-year maximum to life imprisonment, a severity that provoked a rare counter-movement by the mothers of convicted defendants. In India, the brutal 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman known to the public as Nirbhaya generated massive protests and a government-appointed reform committee, yet the resulting 2013 criminal law amendments went further than the Verma Committee recommended, expanding the death penalty despite the committee’s explicit advice against it.

Across these cases, the authors identify a recurring architecture of claims. Populists insist the system is too lenient and demand severity. They place the victim and public safety at the center of debate, framed in zero-sum terms against legal safeguards. They reject criminological inquiry into the social determinants of crime as elitist indulgence. They position themselves as the authentic voice of ordinary people against out-of-touch experts. And they appeal to emotion rather than reason, mobilising outrage and fear as political capital. The murder of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993, framed as the loss of America’s innocent child, exemplifies how such emotional mobilisation can drive rapid legal change, producing California’s Three-Strikes law within months of the abduction.

The criminological case against these claims is stark. The most widely diffused populist assumption holds that harsher penalties deter crime because rational actors weigh potential gains against potential losses. Yet the empirical literature points the other way. Anthony Doob and Cheryl Webster’s examination of numerous studies found that most reviews do not support the claim that harsher sanctions deter, and the few studies that did were found to suffer from serious methodological or conceptual problems. Daniel Nagin’s assessment of deterrence research found that evidence for the certainty of punishment, particularly the probability of apprehension, is far more consistent than evidence for the severity of punishment. A meta-analysis by Travis Pratt and colleagues reached a similar conclusion, finding that the deterrent effects of formal legal sanctions are at best modest to negligible, and that punishment effects often shrink to zero when researchers control for factors such as self-control, peer influence, and antisocial attitudes. Strikingly, the most robust deterrents identified were informal sanctions such as shame and loss of respect, suggesting that fear of social costs outweighs fear of legal punishment.

Punitive sanctions do not merely fail to deter; they can actively undermine interventions that work. Mark Lipsey’s meta-analysis of 443 studies on juvenile delinquency treatment found that outcomes favoured treatment in 64.3 percent of studies, with the best programs reducing recidivism by ten to twenty percentage points. Some punitive interventions, notably deterrence-oriented programs such as shock incarceration and Scared Straight, produced negative effects, meaning that the tools promoted as making streets safer may be making them less safe. A review by Lipsey and Francis Cullen covering both juvenile and adult offending confirmed that supervision and sanctions show at best modest reductions in recidivism and sometimes increase reoffending, while rehabilitation treatments yield consistently positive and relatively large effects. Evidence-based frameworks such as the Risk-Need-Responsivity model, which tailors interventions to an offender’s risk level, criminogenic needs, and learning style, have been shown to reduce recidivism by an average of 17 percent in custodial settings and 35 percent in community settings when all three principles are properly implemented. Research on more than 55,000 prisoners released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2011 found that warehousing inmates without programming increased the odds of recidivism by 13 percent, while participation in effective interventions lowered those odds by 12 to 26 percent.

The authors anticipate an obvious objection: even if punitiveness fails as crime control, punishment serves other purposes. Here they draw on David Garland’s sociology of punishment, which treats punishment as a complex social institution, like the family or the economy, whose meaning cannot be reduced to any single instrumental goal. Populists are entitled, the authors concede, to demand justice and just deserts. But retribution, properly understood, does not license punitiveness. Andrew von Hirsch’s principle of commensurate deserts calls for proportion between the seriousness of a crime and the severity of punishment, and raising penalties for particular offences disrupts the internal ranking of the sentencing scale while overstating an offender’s blameworthiness. As Douglas Husak argues, retribution understood as the infliction of deserved punishment producing intrinsic value can be compatible with a restrictive, even abolitionist, stance toward imprisonment. The populist move from desert to ever-greater severity thus fails on moral as well as empirical grounds.

The democratic claim fares no better. Penal populism presents itself as the voice of the people, but public opinion research suggests that the punitive consensus politicians invoke is largely manufactured. Pierre Bourdieu famously argued that public opinion does not exist in the form its purveyors claim. Julian Roberts and colleagues, drawing on data from five countries, found a wide disjuncture between superficial opinion polls and more sophisticated measures, concluding that support for punitive policies is far less solid than politicians suggest, even though crude polls carry more weight with policymakers. Katherine Beckett’s research showed that public concern about crime and drugs is strongly associated with prior political initiative on those issues, indicating that concern is often politically fabricated rather than spontaneously held. Moreover, when members of the public are given information about the consequences of punitive policies, their support for punitiveness tends to decline, and surveys consistently show public support for rehabilitation alongside other goals of punishment.

The authors are careful to acknowledge context. Criminology itself bears some responsibility for the populist backlash. Robert Martinson’s famous 1974 claim that nothing works in rehabilitation eroded public trust in expert-led penal policy, and although Martinson later retracted much of his conclusion, the damage contributed to what Garland calls the culture of control, in which states abandoned the rehabilitative ideal for risk management and punitive display. Garland has since asked whether criminologists are doing enough to communicate their knowledge credibly, warning that failing to do so leaves the way open for dangerous populist alternatives. The authors also note that a level of genuine public punitiveness exists and is substantial; their point is that opinions formed in the absence of crucial information about consequences are difficult to justify as a basis for policy.

The study’s central contribution is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. By integrating criminology, restrained retributivism, the sociology of punishment, and public opinion research, Bourekkadi and Elarraj demonstrate that penal populism invokes criminology, morality, and democracy selectively yet satisfies none of them. Its policies appeal to emotion while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy through claims of effectiveness and popular support that do not hold. The authors do not argue that punitive policies can never be defended, only that the usual justifications offered for them cannot survive scrutiny, and they hypothesise that reframing the debate around the genuine justification of punishment would drain much of the emotional appeal politicians exploit. Future research, they argue, should develop an alternative framework for penal policy, one grounded in evidence-based practice, proportionality, and democratic integrity, while addressing the structural conditions that allow populist penal policies to persist despite the fallacy of their claims.

Subject of Research: The justificatory failure of penal populism in contemporary criminal justice policy

Article Title: Penal Populism and the Failure of Its Core Claims

Article References: Penal Populism and the Failure of Its Core Claims. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00588-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00588-z

Keywords: penal populism, criminology, criminal justice, deterrence, rehabilitation, retribution, public opinion, punishment, evidence-based policy, populism, sentencing, sociology of punishment

The quantitative contrast between NATO’s first and most recent strategic documents is striking. The 1991 Strategic Concept, drafted amid the disintegration of the Soviet Union, described the security environment as fundamentally transformed and mentioned Russia only twice, each time in the context of cooperation. The word cooperation appeared 37 times in that document, while deterrence appeared just 14 times. The 2022 Strategic Concept, adopted at the Madrid Summit after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, references Russia 23 times and characterizes it as the most significant and direct threat to Allied security. In that document, deterrence appears 31 times while cooperation appears only 12. These word-level shifts, the study argues, quantify a deep reorientation of the alliance’s institutional identity from partnership-building toward territorial defense and deterrence.

The study emphasizes that this transformation did not begin in February 2022. Warning signs accumulated over years, starting with Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008, followed by the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the conflict in the Donbas region. At the 2016 Warsaw Summit, NATO agreed to deploy four multinational battlegroups to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland under the Enhanced Forward Presence framework, a move described in the literature as a historic day for the Baltic states. These battalion-sized units, each led by a framework nation such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, or the United States, were deliberately designed as tripwires: forces too small to repel an invasion alone but large enough to guarantee that any attack would immediately draw the entire alliance into conflict. Since 2022, all four battlegroups have been expanded to brigade level, and NATO’s overall response force has grown to 300,000 troops on high readiness.

The composition and capability of these forward deployments vary considerably, and the study documents these disparities in detail. The British-led battlegroup in Estonia has maintained roughly 1,200 troops with heavy armor including Challenger 2 tanks, while the Canadian-led group in Latvia has struggled with force generation and depends heavily on contributions from Spain, Italy, and Poland. The German-led battlegroup in Lithuania is notable for incorporating Patriot air defense systems, reflecting Berlin’s deepening commitment since 2022, and the American-led formation in Poland is the largest, supported by artillery, aviation assets, and a division-level headquarters. Total forward-deployed personnel on NATO’s eastern flank rose from approximately 5,000 in 2014 to more than 40,000 in 2024, although the study notes that quality remains inconsistent across contributors.

Beyond conventional forces, the research highlights how NATO has adapted to a threat environment that is now explicitly multi-domain. The 2016 Warsaw Summit formally recognized cyberspace as an operational domain, and the alliance has acknowledged that cyberattacks can in principle trigger Article 5 collective defense obligations. Attribution, however, remains a formidable technical and legal obstacle, since identifying the origin of a cyber operation with sufficient certainty to justify a collective response is often impossible. NATO has also confronted hybrid threats, a category of aggression that combines cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, economic coercion, and political subversion while deliberately staying below the threshold of armed attack. The alliance established a Hybrid Centre of Excellence in Helsinki and created Cyber Rapid Response Teams, while also setting minimum national resilience standards covering critical infrastructure, supply chain security, and societal resistance to manipulation.

Perhaps the most dramatic empirical evidence of changed threat perceptions came from two countries that had avoided military alliances for decades. Finland, which had pursued neutrality since the Cold War era of Finlandization, saw public support for NATO membership surge from roughly 30 percent in 2021 to more than 80 percent in 2022. Swedish support rose from about 35 percent to over 70 percent. Both nations applied for membership, and their accession fundamentally redrew Europe’s strategic map. Finland’s entry brought a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia inside the alliance, roughly doubling the NATO-Russia frontier and complicating Russian military planning in Northern Europe. Finland contributes a modern air force transitioning to F-35 aircraft, while Sweden brings one of the Baltic region’s most capable navies, including Gotland-class submarines designed for shallow littoral waters, along with extensive Arctic and sub-Arctic operational expertise.

The accession process, however, also exposed the internal frictions that consensus-based decision-making can create. Turkey delayed Sweden’s membership for more than a year over disputes concerning Kurdish organizations and extradition requests, and Hungary’s ratification also lagged for largely political reasons. The study argues that these episodes demonstrate how even strategically urgent decisions can be held hostage by bilateral grievances, a structural vulnerability inherent in an alliance of now 32 members that operates by unanimity. Burden-sharing presents a parallel challenge. At the 2014 Wales Summit, NATO set a guideline of 2 percent of GDP for defense spending, a benchmark met by only three members at the time. By 2024, 23 of 32 members had reached or exceeded the target, with Poland at 4.04 percent, the United States at roughly 3.5 percent, and the United Kingdom at about 2.29 percent. Yet the study notes that spending quality matters as much as quantity: only seven members met the separate 20 percent benchmark for major equipment investment, and much of the new money has gone to personnel costs rather than capabilities.

European defense industrial capacity emerges as a critical weakness. The study cites assessments that Europe’s defense industrial base lacks the scale to sustain a major conflict without American support, a concern underscored by the European Union’s failure to deliver its pledge of one million artillery shells to Ukraine within twelve months. Decades of post-Cold War contraction and fragmentation have left national industries without economies of scale, producing deep reliance on United States equipment. This dependency intersects uncomfortably with Washington’s strategic pivot toward Asia and with ongoing debates over European strategic autonomy. France and others have pushed for the European Union to develop independent military capacity through initiatives such as PESCO and the European Defence Fund, while frontline states including Poland and the Baltic members remain skeptical of anything that might dilute the American security guarantee. The 2022 Strategic Concept attempts to square this circle by welcoming EU defense initiatives while insisting they remain supplementary to NATO, which it declares the cornerstone of Euro-Atlantic security.

Theoretically, the study frames NATO’s endurance through three complementary lenses. Realism, particularly Stephen Walt’s balance of threat theory, explains the alliance’s resurgence as a rational response to Russian power, proximity, and demonstrated intent to use force. Liberal institutionalism, drawing on Robert Keohane’s work, accounts for NATO’s survival after its original adversary vanished, since dense institutionalized relationships generate their own inertia by reducing transaction costs and stabilizing expectations. Constructivism, following Alexander Wendt’s insight that anarchy is what states make of it, explains why former Warsaw Pact states sought membership not merely for security guarantees but to affirm their identities as democratic European nations. The study concludes that NATO’s future relevance will depend on whether it can sustain a political coalition capable of supporting both military deterrence and continuous innovation in technology and strategic thought, a test that an increasingly unpredictable security environment will keep applying for years to come.

Subject of Research: NATO's post-Cold War institutional transformation and its response to Russian revisionism in the European security environment

Article Title: NATO’s evolution and European security dynamics

Article References: Edmond, C. (2026). NATO’s evolution and European security dynamics. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 234. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00594-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00594-1

Keywords: NATO, European security, collective defense, deterrence, Russia, Ukraine war, hybrid threats, cyber defense, Finland, Sweden, burden sharing, strategic autonomy