What This Paper Is About, and What a Crime Is

Try the obvious definition. A crime is an act forbidden by law and punishable by the State. This is the formal or legal definition, and it is exact. Anything the Sanhita punishes is a crime; anything it does not is not. A court can apply it. A police officer can apply it.

But notice what it cannot do. It cannot tell you whether something ought to be a crime. It cannot explain why adultery was an offence in India until 2018 and is not now, although nothing about the conduct changed. It cannot explain why a factory owner whose negligence kills forty workers is often dealt with under a licensing statute while a man who kills one person in a fight is tried for culpable homicide.

The formal definition, in other words, is a description of the law's output. It is not a description of the thing the law is trying to catch.

The sociological answer, and its own problem

So the sociologists tried the other direction. A crime is conduct that seriously offends the collective conscience of a society, or, in a more modern form, conduct that causes serious social harm.

That definition explains the changes the formal one cannot. Adultery stopped being an offence because Indian society stopped agreeing that it was the State's business. It also lets a criminologist criticise the law: if a factory owner's negligence causes more harm than a street robbery, a definition based on harm says the law has got its priorities wrong.

But it has its own defect, and it is a serious one. Whose conscience? Which society? India in 2026 does not have one collective conscience about drinking, about caste, about what a woman may wear or whom she may marry. A definition that rests on general agreement fails exactly where the interesting cases are.

Where this book stands

The honest position, and the one to write in an exam, is that crime has no single definition because the word does two different jobs. As a lawyer's word it means what the statute says. As a criminologist's word it means socially harmful conduct that a society has decided to control through punishment.

The two overlap heavily and they are not the same. Most of what the Sanhita punishes is socially harmful. Some socially harmful conduct is not punished at all, and that gap is what the third module of this paper is about. Some punished conduct harms nobody in particular, and that gap is what decriminalisation is about.

Hold both definitions and say which one you are using. A student who insists that only one is correct has misunderstood the question.

A worked example

Ramesh Patil runs a small chemical unit in Dombivli. To save money he pipes untreated effluent into a nullah at night. Over two years the water in three neighbouring wells becomes unfit to drink and a number of residents fall ill, although nobody can prove which illness came from which well.

On the formal definition, ask what statute Ramesh has broken. Discharging a pollutant beyond prescribed standards is punishable under the environmental legislation. If a prosecution is launched and proved, this is a crime; if the pollution control board issues a direction and Ramesh complies, there may be no crime at all, because no court has been asked to punish anybody.

On the sociological definition, ask what harm has been caused. Three wells and an unknown number of illnesses is a larger harm than most of what the criminal courts of Dombivli handle in a month. On this definition the conduct is criminal in substance whatever the pollution board decides.

And now notice the third question, which is the criminological one. Why does the legal system treat Ramesh differently from a man who poisons one well deliberately? Not because the harm is smaller. Because the conduct is diffuse, the victims are unorganised, the proof is technical, and the offender is respectable. That observation is the whole of Module III of this paper, and you have just made it from a definition.

What "crime" does not mean

It does not mean the same as sin. Sin is an offence against a religious or moral order and its sanction is not imposed by the State. Many sins are not crimes, and some crimes, such as a technical breach of a licensing rule, involve no moral fault at all.

It does not mean the same as anti-social behaviour. Rudeness, dishonesty in private dealings and cruelty within a family may be deeply anti-social and may still not be punishable. The criminal law is a narrow and expensive instrument and a society uses it for a fraction of the conduct it dislikes.

And it does not mean the same as "what the police record". Recorded crime is the crime that was noticed, reported, believed and written down. The gap between crime committed and crime recorded is large and is dealt with separately in this book.

Quick revision

• Criminology is the study of crime as a social phenomenon: law-making, law-breaking and the reaction to law-breaking.
• The formal or legal definition: crime is an act forbidden by law and punishable by the State. Exact, but it cannot say what ought to be criminal.
• The sociological definition: crime is seriously harmful conduct that offends the collective conscience. Explanatory, but there is no single conscience to appeal to.
• Both are correct for their own purpose. Say which one you are using.
• Crime is not sin, not all anti-social behaviour, and not the same as recorded crime.
• The seven printed topics of this paper: concept of crime and criminology as a science; criminology from ancient to modern thought; multiple factor theory; causes of crimes; privileged class deviance; professional deviance; response of the Indian legal order.

Test yourself

1. Give the formal definition of crime and state its principal weakness. An act or omission forbidden by law and made punishable by the State. Its weakness is that it is purely descriptive: it tells you what the law has criminalised but gives no standard by which to judge whether the law was right to do so, so it cannot explain or criticise any change in the law.

2. Why can a definition based on the collective conscience not be applied mechanically? Because a modern society has no single collective conscience. On drinking, on sexual conduct, on caste practices and on speech, Indian opinion is divided, so the definition gives no answer exactly where the disputed cases lie.

3. A company sells a cough syrup contaminated during manufacture and several children die. Is this a crime? Answer on both definitions. On the formal definition, only if a statute makes it punishable and a prosecution is brought; the drugs legislation and the culpable homicide provisions are both candidates, and the answer turns on proof of knowledge or negligence. On the sociological definition it is plainly criminal: the harm is grave and the conduct is one no society would tolerate. The difference between the two answers is itself the subject matter of this paper.