Classification of Criminals

A seventeen-year-old snatches a phone outside Dadar station. A forty-year-old with nine cases behind him does the same. A company director in Nariman Point quietly siphons off investors' money. A man plants a bomb in a crowded market. The law calls all of them offenders, but nobody thinks they should be handled the same way. Why do we sort criminals into classes, and what does the law do differently for each class?

In two minutes

Criminals are classified so that punishment, treatment and prevention can be fitted to the kind of offender: first-time and habitual, women, juveniles, white-collar, cyber and terrorist offenders each get a different legal response.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Criminology and Penology on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.