Against the background of the transformation of the crime structure toward minor offenses and the continued expansion of the active criminal law perspective, environmental and resource-related minor offenses, represented by illegal fishing and illegal logging, have continued to rise in proportion. However, constrained by the traditional idea that “where there is guilt, there must be punishment” and by insufficient institutional supply, their handling is in obvious tension with the criminal policy of “fewer arrests, cautious prosecution, and cautious detention” and the concept of minor offense governance. At present, case handling in this field faces three difficulties: insufficient leniency in compulsory measures, a relatively high rate of arrest, rigid assessment of social danger, and absent consideration of ecological restoration circumstances; deviations in the adaptability of the penal sanction system, including an excessively high proportion of imprisonment, limited deterrent function of fines, and a single type of non-penal sanction; and weak embedding and supervision of ecological restoration measures, poor linkage between restoration responsibility and sentencing discretion, a single restoration measure, and absent supervision and verification mechanisms. The causes lie in insufficient institutional supply, insufficient refinement of sentencing norms, and the institutional absence of embedding ecological restoration into criminal procedure. In view of this, it is necessary to update the case-handling concept, realize the shift from an ecological damage-oriented approach to an ecological restoration-oriented approach, and systematically take measures at three levels: leniency in compulsory measures, optimization of the penal sanction system, and improvement of the whole-process mechanism for ecological restoration, so as to form a systematic case-handling mechanism integrating punishment, prevention, and restoration, and promote the transformation of case handling in this field from “punishing crimes” to “governance.”

Hu Yajie. Practical Challenges and Regulatory Approaches in Handling Misdemeanor Cases in the Field of Environmental Resources. International Journal of Frontiers in Sociology (2026), Vol. 8, Issue 3: 67-72. https://doi.org/10.25236/IJFS.2026.080310.

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