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Criminology
Previous Year Question Paper with Solution
LLM · Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration
2025-26 Examination
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LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Criminology 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions
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First published on munotes.in on 13 August 2026.
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Model answers written and edited by the munotes.in editorial desk.
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The University does not publish an official answer key for this paper. The answers in this volume are model answers, written to show how a full-mark answer is built. They are a study aid, not an authority on what an examiner marked.
The question paper reproduced here is the paper as set by the University of Mumbai at the 2025-26 examination.
The law in these answers is stated as at August 2026, and four points date most textbooks on this subject. Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act survived a split verdict in Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, 2026 INSC 55, in January 2026 and stands referred to a larger Bench, so it remains in force. The four to ten year punishment in section 13(2) was raised not by the 2018 amendment but by the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 on 16 January 2014. Union of India v. Ganpati Dealcom was recalled on 18 October 2024 and is not citable. And the Maharashtra Lokayukta Act, 2022, which covers the Chief Minister, had assent and was still not in force at the time of writing.
Contents
The questions below are the paper as the University of Mumbai set it at the 2025-26 examination, in the order it was set.
MarksPage
The Paper as Set
The questions in this volume are the questions asked at the 2025-26 examination, reproduced as the University of Mumbai set them, in the order it set them. Nothing has been reworded, added or left out. Only the answers are ours. See the original question paper.
Duration 3 hours · Total marks 100 · 7 questions answered
How to use this volume
Solve the paper first, under exam conditions and against the clock. Then read the answers here and mark your own. Reading a solution before attempting the question feels productive and teaches very little, because recognising an answer is not the same as being able to write one.
SECTION I
Paper Subject Code 26917, printer's form 16767, English and Marathi on the same page, sat 08/07/2026. Solve ANY FOUR questions, all questions carry equal marks, cite relevant case laws wherever required
any four of seven · 100 Marks
1.Define Criminology as a Science. Explain its nature, scope, objectives and relationship with Criminal Law. Discuss the impact of development on changing crime patterns.[25]
Answer
For full marks, cover: five limbs, and the last is the one that dates an answer, so it must be given properly with Indian material from the last decade. Define criminology and take the science question in a compact paragraph; then nature, scope and objectives, which can be done crisply; then the relationship with criminal law, which is a genuine analytical question and not a formality; then development and changing crime patterns, worked with the categories that have actually changed in India.
Definition, and the science question
Criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon, and in Sutherland and Cressey's formulation it includes within its scope the processes of making laws, breaking laws and reacting towards the breaking of laws. That definition is the one to use, because its three processes structure everything that follows.
Whether it is a science admits of a precise answer. A science requires a defined subject matter, a systematic and repeatable method, propositions that can be tested and shown false, and theory that accumulates. Criminology has the second, the third and the fourth: its method runs from Quetelet's statistics of the 1830s through the Gluecks' matched design of 1950 to the prospective cohort and the evaluated trial; it has advanced and abandoned central claims, Lombroso's born criminal having been tested by Charles Goring in The English Convict, 1913, against three thousand convicts with controls and found unsupported; and its theories arose by correcting one another.
It lacks the first, and that is the honest qualification. Crime is defined by legislatures and changes when they change it: adultery ceased to be an offence with Joseph Shine v. Union of India, (2019) 3 SCC 39, consensual homosexual conduct with Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, (2018) 10 SCC 1, and attempt to suicide effectively with section 115 of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017. Its data are also incomplete in a patterned way, since official statistics record what was reported and registered, and figures rose after Lalita Kumari v. Government of Uttar Pradesh, (2014) 2 SCC 1, made registration mandatory without any change in conduct. Criminology is therefore a science on the terms of economics and epidemiology and not on those of chemistry: reliable about rates and patterns, probabilistic about individuals.
Nature
Its nature is fourfold. It is an empirical discipline, resting on observation rather than on doctrine. It is interdisciplinary, drawing on sociology, psychology, law, statistics, economics and medicine. It is dynamic, because its subject matter changes with legislation and with technology. And it is normative at its edges, since its penological branch asks what ought to be done and not only what is.
Scope
Its scope follows the three processes. The sociology of criminal law asks how conduct comes to be criminalised and whose interests the definitions serve. Criminal aetiology asks why people offend, and contains the schools: classical, cartographic, positivist, socialist, sociological and modern. Penology and criminal justice administration ask what is done in response, covering punishment, prison, probation, parole and the working of the police, prosecution and courts. To these are conventionally added victimology and crime prevention.
Objectives
Five objectives are stated in every standard account and each has an Indian instance. To ascertain the causes of crime, which is what the multiple factor and sociological literatures attempt. To develop principles of prevention, which is what situational prevention and hot spot policing do. To evaluate methods of treatment of offenders, which is what the probation and juvenile systems rest on. To assist law reform, which is what the Law Commission's 29th and 47th Reports on socio economic offences did. And to inform criminal policy, which is what the National Crime Records Bureau's data are collected for.
Relationship with criminal law
The relationship is one of dependence in one direction and influence in the other, and stating it that way is what makes the limb analytical.
Criminology depends on criminal law for its subject matter. There is no criminological object called crime independent of what the law prohibits; a criminologist studying theft in India is studying the definitions in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. That dependence is what makes the subject matter unstable, as Joseph Shine and Navtej Singh Johar show.
Criminal law depends on criminology for three things. For the facts on which policy rests, since a legislature deciding whether to raise a sentence needs to know whether severity deters, and the evidence says certainty does and severity does not. For individualisation, since a sentencing court must assess a person and the instruments for doing so are criminological, from the probation officer's report under section 4 of the Probation of Offenders Act, 1958 to the preliminary assessment under section 15 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 and the psychiatric, psychological, social history and jail conduct material required by Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh, (2023) 2 SCC 353. And for evaluation, since only criminology can say whether a legal change achieved anything.
The two differ in method and in question. Criminal law asks whether a defined act was done by this person and what should follow; criminology asks why such acts occur and what would reduce them. Criminal law is normative and reasons from authority; criminology is descriptive and reasons from evidence. A judge applying Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab, (1980) 2 SCC 684, must weigh mitigating circumstances relating to the criminal, which is a criminological inquiry conducted under a legal rule, and that is the point at which the two disciplines meet in practice.
The impact of development on changing crime patterns
Development changes crime in five identifiable ways, and the Indian evidence for each is recent.
Urbanisation dissolves informal control. Migration to cities separates people from the kin and community supervision that restrains conduct in a village, and concentrates young men in settlements where the State's presence is thinnest. Shaw and McKay's finding that delinquency rates remain stable in particular urban zones across changing populations, and Durkheim's anomie, are the theoretical statements of this, and Mumbai has been the standing Indian illustration for a century.
Prosperity changes the target and the motive. Merton's strain theory predicts that a society which raises expectations of material success faster than it distributes the means will produce innovation, which is the criminal adaptation, and the Indian record fits: as incomes have risen, property crime has shifted from subsistence theft towards fraud, and offences of aspiration such as vehicle theft and snatching have grown, which is why the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 gives snatching a separate provision.
Technology creates new offences and new methods for old ones. The largest single change in Indian recorded crime over the past decade has been the growth of cyber enabled offending: online investment and loan application frauds, impersonation and one time password frauds, sextortion, and the use of encrypted communication in organised crime. These are prosecuted under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita's cheating and forgery provisions with the Information Technology Act, 2000, and they defeat conventional policing on jurisdiction and speed, since the money leaves the country faster than a request for assistance can be drafted.
Economic liberalisation shifts crime upwards in the social structure. The securities scam of 1992, the accounting fraud disclosed at Satyam in January 2009, the coal block allocations and the letters of undertaking issued at a public sector bank in 2018 are all offences that could not have occurred in a closed economy of the 1970s, and the legislative response has followed the pattern rather than anticipated it: section 447 of the Companies Act, 2013, the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018, and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, whose machinery was upheld in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary v. Union of India, decided on 27 July 2022, with review petitions being heard on a narrow scope.
Development also produces its own victims and its own conflicts. Displacement by infrastructure and mining, the loss of common land, and disputes over acquisition generate offences that did not exist before the project, and the criminal law arrives after the grievance rather than before it.
The legislative recognition of these shifts is in the new Sanhita itself, and it is worth naming. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, in force from 1 July 2024, creates distinct offences of organised crime and petty organised crime, of terrorist act, of snatching, and of murder by a group on specified grounds, none of which existed as such in the Indian Penal Code of 1860. Those are the offences of an urbanised, mobile and connected society, and they are the clearest evidence that the pattern of Indian crime has changed and that the law has followed it.
A caution belongs at the end of this limb. Recorded crime is not crime, and part of what looks like a change in the pattern is a change in reporting: mobile telephones make complaint easier, registration is now mandatory after Lalita Kumari, and public tolerance of offences against women has fallen, all of which raise the figures without raising the conduct. A criminologist who reports a rise without asking whether the register changed is describing administration rather than behaviour.
The schools, in one paragraph each, since scope requires them
Criminal aetiology is the largest part of the scope and its content is the schools. The classical school, from Beccaria's Dei delitti e delle pene, 1764, treats crime as a rational choice and prescribes certain, prompt and proportionate punishment. The neo classical correction of 1810 admits that children, the insane and the coerced cannot be treated as free calculators. The cartographic school of Guerry and Quetelet, from 1833, finds crime patterned in space and time. Positivism, from Lombroso in 1876, looks for causes in the offender and produced the first hypothesis criminology was able to refute. The socialist and radical traditions ask who writes the definitions. The sociological schools supply the surviving mechanisms: social disorganisation, strain, differential association, subculture, culture conflict, labelling and control. And rational choice, from Cornish and Clarke in 1986, revives the classical premise in bounded form and underlies situational prevention.
Indian law carries several of these at once, which is worth saying in a question on scope: a classical code in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, neo classical exceptions in its sections 20 to 24, positivist sentencing machinery in the probation and juvenile legislation, and cartographic administration in every crime map a commissionerate produces.
Conclusion. Criminology is the empirical study of crime, criminals, victims and the response of the criminal justice system, and it is a science in the sense in which economics and epidemiology are, with the important qualification that its subject matter is defined by legislatures and its data by police registers. Its scope covers the making of law, the breaking of law and the reaction to law breaking; its objectives are causation, prevention, treatment, law reform and policy; and its relationship with criminal law is one of mutual dependence, since criminology takes its subject matter from the law and the law takes its facts and its instruments of individualisation from criminology. Development has changed the Indian pattern in five ways, through urbanisation, prosperity, technology, liberalisation and displacement, and the new offences in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 are the legislature's acknowledgement of it.
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