LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Criminology 2016 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: the question divides itself. The first sentence needs a compact statement of what the theory is and why it arose, and no more, because the words "at length" put the marks in the second sentence. Then give the psychological factors as a worked set, each with its author and its evidence, and the social factors likewise, with Indian material in the social half. Close on how the two interact, since the theory's whole claim is that they do not act separately, and add the Indian cases in which a court has actually weighed a psychological factor.

The theory's structure matters for what follows. It sorts causes into groups and insists that the groups interact. The two groups the question asks about, the psychological and the social, are the two on which the modern evidence is strongest, and each is worth taking in turn.

The psychological factors

Intelligence was the first psychological factor advanced and the first discarded. Henry Goddard's studies of institutionalised delinquents around 1914 claimed that a very high proportion were feeble minded, and the claim was influential enough to drive sterilisation laws abroad. It did not survive the mass intelligence testing of army recruits in the First World War, which found comparable distributions in the general population. The modern position is that measured intelligence has a weak association with recorded delinquency, most of which is explained by school failure and by differential detection, since the less able offender is more often caught.

Maternal deprivation is the most durable of the developmental claims. John Bowlby's study of forty four juvenile thieves, published in 1944, found that a substantial proportion had suffered prolonged separation from the mother in the first five years, and that a subgroup showed what he called the affectionless character. Later work has qualified the claim considerably, replacing separation with disrupted and inconsistent care as the operative variable, but the core finding, that early attachment failure predicts later antisocial conduct, has held up in the longitudinal studies.

Psychopathy is the factor with the strongest predictive record and the worst reputation. Hervey Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity, 1941, described a personality marked by superficial charm, absence of remorse or shame, pathological egocentricity, poor judgment and failure to learn from experience. Robert Hare's checklist turned that description into a measurable instrument, and scores on it predict violent reoffending better than most other variables. Two cautions belong in the answer: psychopathy is rare, and the great majority of offenders are not psychopaths.

Mental illness deserves a separate paragraph because the public overestimates it. Serious mental illness explains a small fraction of crime, and the mentally ill are more often victims than offenders. Its legal significance is nevertheless considerable, and Indian law confines it narrowly. Section 22 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 exempts a person who, by reason of unsoundness of mind, is incapable of knowing the nature of the act or that it is wrong or contrary to law, which is the McNaughten test in Indian dress.

In Surendra Mishra v. State of Jharkhand, (2011) 11 SCC 495, the Supreme Court drew the distinction that decides these cases. The accused had a history of psychiatric treatment and killed a man in public. The Court held that every person of unsound mind is not exempted: what the section requires is legal insanity and not medical insanity, the material time is the moment of the act, and the burden under section 105 of the Evidence Act lies on the accused, though only to the standard of preponderance of probabilities. On the facts, the conduct before and after the killing showed knowledge of its nature, and the conviction stood.

The social factors

The family is the first and the most consistently supported social factor. What matters is less the intact structure than the quality of what happens inside it: parental criminality, harsh or erratic discipline, neglect, conflict and the absence of supervision. The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, which followed a cohort of London boys from 1961 across decades under David Farrington, found convicted fathers, poor parental supervision and large family size among the strongest childhood predictors of later conviction.

The peer group is the mechanism by which most delinquency is actually transmitted. Sutherland's differential association, in the nine propositions of the 1947 edition of his Principles of Criminology, holds that criminal behaviour is learned in interaction within intimate personal groups, and that a person offends because of an excess of definitions favourable to violation of law over definitions unfavourable to it. The great majority of juvenile offences in every recorded society are committed in company, which is the plainest support the proposition has.

Urbanisation, migration and anomie belong together. Movement to the city dissolves the informal control of the village without replacing it, produces populations of young men living without families, and concentrates them in settlements with no public services and no policing worth the name. Mumbai is the standing Indian illustration, and every commission that has looked at organised crime in the city has begun with its settlements.

Education operates in two directions. School attachment protects, and school failure and dropout are among the strongest correlates of delinquency. But the educational system is also a site of offending in its own right, from capitation to organised examination fraud, which is dealt with elsewhere in this paper.

Alcohol and drugs are the most immediate situational factor in Indian violence. Consumption precedes a large proportion of assaults and domestic violence, and the mechanism is well understood: disinhibition, the impairment of risk assessment, and, for dependent users of expensive drugs, acquisitive crime to fund the habit.

The direction of causation is also mixed, and honesty requires saying so. Parental criminality is partly a social transmission and partly a shared temperament. School failure may be a cause of delinquency and a consequence of the same impulsivity that produces it. Criminology's inability to disentangle these is precisely Sutherland's objection to the multiple factor approach: it lists correlates without stating a mechanism.

Conclusion. The multiple factor theory answers the question "what is associated with crime" very well and the question "why" hardly at all. On the psychological side the durable findings are early attachment failure, poor impulse control and the small but powerful contribution of psychopathy, with mental illness playing a far smaller causal role than public opinion assumes and a much larger legal one, as Surendra Mishra, Devidas Loka Rathod and Accused X show. On the social side the durable findings are family supervision, the delinquent peer group, the disorganised neighbourhood and relative deprivation, to which Indian conditions add caste, communal division, land disputes and dowry. The two sets are not alternatives: they multiply, and the practical value of the theory is that Indian sentencing law, in the probation report and in the mitigation material a capital trial must now gather, requires a court to look at both.