Strategic Confessions Under Dual-Track Punishment: Institutional Design and Adaptive Behaviour in China’s Compulsory Detoxification System

This study investigates how China’s dual-track drug punishment system—comprising administrative and criminal sanctions—unintentionally incentivizes false or strategic confessions. Drawing on 299 court cases involving detainees in compulsory detoxification centres between 2019 and 2021, we identify a recurring behavioural pattern: individuals deliberately fabricate confessions to minor crimes such as ‘assisting others to use drugs’ or petty theft to trigger a shift from the administrative to the criminal justice track. The criminal route, while punitive, offers greater predictability, shorter sentencing and clearer procedural safeguards than the opaque and discretionary administrative track. Through mixed-methods analysis and institutional modelling, we show how legal actors, enforcement incentives and bounded rationality co-produce this adaptive practice. This strategic confession is not merely an anomaly but a rational response to asymmetrical institutional pressures. Our findings challenge conventional theories of false confession that focus primarily on police coercion, and instead propose a structural explanation grounded in the design of dual punishment regimes. We argue that when legal systems create overlapping yet uneven sanctioning frameworks, they may inadvertently reward fabricated confessions and distort the meaning of guilt.