Nature and scope — Crime and Criminology

Someone snatches a phone on a Belapur local and the passengers shout “chor!”. A month later a company director walks out of a boardroom having emptied a provident fund, and almost nobody uses the same word. Both acts hurt people; both are crimes in law. Yet we picture one as crime and not the other. This topic asks what crime actually is, who studies it, and why the answer has shifted across three centuries.

In two minutes

Crime is conduct that the State has prohibited and made punishable; criminology is the organised, empirical study of why that conduct occurs, how laws come to exist and how society reacts; penology studies the response; criminal law supplies the definitions all three work on.

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.