In September 1989, a four-year-old girl, Anikó O., disappeared from a flat-house in Komló. The authorities were searching her for three days. On the fourth day, her stabbed body was found in one of the basement storerooms of the flat-house. The systematic, thorough investigation brought success after one week. The authorities identified the perpetrator, who lived in the flat-house. She also made a full confession. Besides, many hard evidence and expert opinion supported her guilt. The court did not have any doubt, and the punishment was severe.
Ferenc Finkey's scientific achievements and human qualities have made him one of the most prominent personalities in the field of legal sciences and prison affairs. He did not, of course, begin his epoch-making activity in a "vacuum", so we consider it important to present the antecedents, the penological initiatives of the early 19th century, focusing on youth protection and work in prisons, and we describe the social and political reasons that supported or made it difficult for Finkey's ideas to emerge. The fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic had tragic consequences for criminal pedagogy trying its wings. We have gathered a bouquet of human and professional reasons why Finkey has distanced himself from the spirituality, events, and aspirations of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in every way. Fortunately for criminal pedagogy, Finkey's professional career and scientific aspirations were not broken by the proletarian dictatorship and the subsequent ideological retaliation. Finally, we prove the greatness of Ferenc Finkey's theoretical system in criminal pedagogy by using the ideas formulated in his own work Punishment and Pedagogy, which is considered to be the most important one for the topic of our study.