LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Criminology 2023 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: explain the theory by showing it at work rather than by listing what it contains, because a list is the very thing the theory is criticised for. Begin with the problem it was invented to solve; set out the method its authors actually used, which is the case history and the matched comparison; work a concrete example through the method; then give the classification of factors as the output of the method rather than as its statement; and close with the criticism and with what Indian law does with the theory.

The problem it was invented to solve

Between 1876 and about 1920 criminology proposed and lost a series of single causes. Lombroso's atavistic born criminal, from L'uomo delinquente, 1876, was tested by Charles Goring in The English Convict, 1913, who compared some three thousand convicts with control groups and found no anthropological criminal type once age and social class were controlled. Henry Goddard's claim that feeble mindedness caused crime did not survive the mass intelligence testing of army recruits. Bonger's economic determinism could not account for offending among the prosperous. Psychoanalytic explanations were unfalsifiable.

Cyril Burt applied the method at scale in The Young Delinquent, 1925. Comparing delinquent and non delinquent London schoolchildren, he identified about one hundred and seventy distinct contributory conditions and found that in the average case a considerable number were present together. His formulation, that delinquency is the product of a multiplicity of converging influences, is the classic statement.

Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck added the control in Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency, 1950. They matched five hundred delinquent boys with five hundred non delinquents on age, ethnic origin, measured intelligence and residence in underprivileged neighbourhoods, and compared the two groups across physical, temperamental, psychological and social measures. The matching is what makes the study still worth citing: it answers in advance the objection that the delinquents differed simply because they were poorer, since both groups were poor.

The factors as the method produces them

Biological and constitutional. Age, since offending peaks in late adolescence; sex; physique; health; a modest heritable component in antisocial conduct shown by twin and adoption studies; low autonomic reactivity.

Psychological. Intelligence, whose association with recorded delinquency is weak and largely explained by school failure and differential detection; temperament, in Eysenck's extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism; impulsivity and low self control; early attachment failure, from Bowlby's forty four juvenile thieves in 1944; personality disorder and psychopathy; and mental illness, which contributes far less than public opinion assumes.

Familial. Supervision, discipline, conflict, neglect, parental criminality, family size and early separation, which the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development found among the strongest childhood predictors of adult conviction.

Educational and economic. School failure and dropout; poverty and, more precisely, relative deprivation; unemployment; indebtedness.

The partial answer is its successor. Developmental criminology replaced the list with the risk factor paradigm, which measures conditions prospectively in a birth cohort, counts them and relates the count to later offending. That supplies the ranking the older approach lacked and demonstrates that risks combine more than additively, which is the one proposition the multiple factor writers asserted and could not prove.

What Indian law does with it

Indian law uses the method wherever a court must decide about a person rather than explain a population.

In sentencing generally, Mohd. Giasuddin v. State of Andhra Pradesh, (1977) 3 SCC 287, decided on 6 May 1977, is the statement of principle. A man convicted under section 420 of the Indian Penal Code for cheating unemployed young men with false promises of work had been sentenced to three years' rigorous imprisonment. Krishna Iyer J. held that the pre sentence hearing carries a penological significance of far reaching importance, that the court must weigh the offender's antecedents, age, circumstances and prospects of reform and not the offence alone, and that punishment should be therapeutic rather than merely retributive; the sentence was reduced to eighteen months with directions for rehabilitation.

The theories that replaced it

A complete explanation should name what criminology did instead, because the multiple factor approach was not so much refuted as superseded.

Sutherland's differential association, in nine propositions in the 1947 edition of his Principles of Criminology, holds that criminal behaviour is learned in interaction within intimate personal groups, that what is learned includes techniques and the direction of motives and rationalisations, and that a person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favourable to violation of law over definitions unfavourable to it, associations varying in frequency, duration, priority and intensity. It is a single mechanism through which many of the listed factors operate.

Merton's strain theory, from Social Structure and Anomie, 1938, holds that a society prescribing a common goal of material success while distributing legitimate means unequally generates pressure, with five adaptations: conformity, innovation, which is the criminal one, ritualism, retreatism and rebellion.

Conclusion. The multiple factor theory is best explained as a method rather than as a doctrine. Healy's case history, Burt's enumeration and the Gluecks' matched comparison were designed to answer a question about an individual, and the question they answer is which conditions combined in this case and which of them can be altered. As an explanation of crime it fails, because a list assigns no weights, states no mechanism and can be refuted by nothing, which is what Sutherland and Cohen said and what the risk factor paradigm has since partly repaired. As a method it is what Indian sentencing law requires at every point where a person is to be assessed, from the probation officer's report to the mitigation material without which, after Manoj, a court may not pass a sentence of death.