LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Criminology Apr 2025 - ATKT Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: the three tests the question names, in its order, each answered on the evidence rather than by assertion. Define criminology and say what a science requires. Then methodology, objectivity and theoretical framework, each with what criminology has and what it lacks. End with a reasoned verdict: a science of the kind economics and epidemiology are, not of the kind chemistry is.

What criminology is, and what "science" asks of it

Criminology is the study of crime as a social phenomenon. In Sutherland and Cressey's classic formulation, it covers the making of laws, the breaking of laws and society's reaction to the breaking of laws. Each of the three processes can be studied empirically.

Its methods have refuted its own early claims, which is the strongest evidence of a science. Cesare Lombroso claimed in 1876 that criminals were a distinct physical type. Charles Goring tested the claim in The English Convict, 1913, measuring about three thousand convicts against controls, and found no such type. A discipline whose method can defeat its founder's theory is working as a science.

The limit is that controlled experiment is rarely possible. A criminologist cannot assign children to poverty or to good parents at random. Much of the evidence is therefore correlational, and correlation does not prove cause. Criminology shares this limit with economics and epidemiology.

Objectivity

Objectivity is where the claim is weakest, for two reasons.

Yet criminology has tools to protect objectivity. It publishes its methods, so others can check them. It uses victimisation surveys and self-report studies to correct the bias of police records. It distinguishes the question "what is" from the question "what ought to be done". Objectivity in criminology is therefore an aim pursued by method, not a state already reached.

Theoretical framework

Criminology has theories, and they have developed by correcting one another. The classical school of Beccaria, in 1764, treated crime as a rational choice and prescribed certain and proportionate punishment. The positivist school of Lombroso looked for causes in the offender. The sociological theories looked to society: Shaw and McKay's social disorganisation, Merton's strain theory of 1938, Sutherland's differential association, labelling and control theory. Rational choice theory, from Cornish and Clarke in 1986, revived the classical premise in a bounded form.

The weakness is that no single theory explains crime. Each explains some offences and some offenders. That led to the multiple factor approach, which some critics say is a list rather than a theory. A mature science would have a framework that unites its findings.

The Indian evidence base, and its gaps

Indian criminology depends heavily on official figures. The National Crime Records Bureau publishes annual statistics of recorded crime. These are counts of cases registered by the police, which is exactly the kind of data whose objectivity was questioned above. A rise in recorded offences against women, for instance, may reflect more reporting and more registration as much as more offending.

India has no regular national victimisation survey. Countries that run one can compare what victims say happened with what the police recorded. Without it, the dark figure of unreported crime in India can only be estimated. That is a gap in method, not a failure of the discipline, and it shows where the scientific claim is weakest in practice.

Courts have noticed the problem. In Lalita Kumari, the Supreme Court made registration mandatory partly because refusal to register distorted the record. A criminologist reading Indian data must therefore ask, for every trend, whether conduct changed or recording changed.

The three tests, side by side

What would strengthen the claim

Three things would make Indian criminology more scientific. First, a national victimisation survey, repeated at intervals, to measure crime independently of the police. Second, evaluation of programmes before they are expanded, so that policy rests on evidence of what works. Third, open access to anonymised court and police data, so that findings can be checked by others. Each of these is a matter of method, which confirms that criminology's scientific status depends on how it is practised.

Verdict

Criminology is a science in the sense in which economics and epidemiology are sciences. It has a systematic and repeatable method, testable propositions and theories that are revised by evidence. It is not a science in the sense of physics or chemistry. Its subject matter is defined by law, its data are shaped by the institutions that collect them, and it can rarely run controlled experiments. Its findings are reliable about rates and patterns, and only probabilistic about individuals.