ASSIGNMENT 2: How do you change the perception of the society being in the legal

profession towards accepting and not accepting social crimes?

Submitted by-
Divyanshu Gupta
BA LLB (B-1); R450213040

According to me, being in the legal profession, I feel social crime be defined as something which
violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime. Breaches of private
law (torts and breaches of contract) are not automatically punished by the state, but can be
enforced through civil procedure. When informal relationships and sanctions prove insufficient
to establish and maintain a desired social order, a government or a state may impose more
formalized or stricter systems of social control. With institutional and legal machinery at their
disposal, agents of the State can compel populations to conform to codes and can opt to punish or
attempt to reform those who do not conform. As it has been discerned, authorities employ
various mechanisms to regulate (encouraging or discouraging) certain behaviors in general.
Governing or administering agencies may for example codify rules into laws, police citizens and
visitors to ensure that they comply with those laws, and implement other policies and practices
that legislators or administrators have prescribed with the aim of discouraging or preventing
crime. In addition, authorities provide remedies and sanctions, and collectively these constitute
a criminal justice system. Legal sanctions vary widely in their severity; they may include
incarceration of temporary character aimed at reforming the convict. Some jurisdictions have
penal codes written to inflict permanent harsh punishments: legal mutilation, capital punishment
or life without parole. Usually, a natural person perpetrates a crime, but legal persons may also
commit crimes. Conversely, at least under U.S. law, nonpersons such as animals cannot commit
crimes.

Thus what in a nutshell a social crime is, a popular form of lower class social resistance
involving behavior characterized by law as illegal but is supported by wider (usually peasant)
society as being moral and acceptable.
Article 39A of the Constitution of India provides that State shall secure that the operation of the
legal system promotes justice on a basis of equal opportunity, and shall in particular, provide free
legal aid, by suitable legislation or schemes or in any other way, to ensure that opportunities for
securing justice are not denied to any citizen by reason of economic or other disability. Articles
14 and 22(1) also make it obligatory for the State to ensure equality before law and a legal
system which promotes justice on a basis of equal opportunity to all. Legal aid strives to ensure
that constitutional pledge is fulfilled in its letter and spirit and equal justice is made available to
the poor, downtrodden and weaker sections of the society. The Constitutional duty to provide
legal aid arises from the time the accused is produced before the Magistrate for the first time and
continues whenever he is produced for remand.

Social crime Crime is sometimes regarded as social when it represents a conscious challenge to a
prevailing social order and its values. Examples cited by Marxist historians include forms of
popular action and popular customs in early-modern England (including poaching, wood theft,
food riots, and smuggling), which were criminalized by the ruling class, but were not regarded as
blameworthy, either by those committing them, or by the communities from which they came.
The concept is controversial but does point to the fact that there may not be a consensus as to
what constitutes a criminal act.

Legal, political, social sciences are dealing with legal, political and social aspects of the life.
Moral order, political orders, spiritual (religious) order, economic order and others are elements
of social relations. Social order, being a pre-condition of any society, stems out of social
relations existing between individuals. The prime object of law is the regulation of social life.
Law is an instrument or set of techniques of social control with the purpose of regulating social
life. It is achieving this objective by maintaining public order, fostering co-operation, regulating
power and imposing social standards. Law regulates the life of individual as a member of society
and that of society as a whole.

Three theoretical perspectives guide sociological thinking on social problems: functionalist

theory, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionist theory. These perspectives look at the same
social problems, but they do so in different ways. Their views taken together offer a fuller
understanding of social problems than any of the views can offer alone and can be targeted by
me to change their perspectives on accepting and non-accepting social crimes-

Functionalism:

Social stability is necessary for a strong society, and adequate socialization and social integration
are necessary for social stability. Society’s social institutions perform important functions to help
ensure social stability. Slow social change is desirable, but rapid social change threatens social
order.

Social problems weaken a society’s stability but do not reflect fundamental faults in how the
society is structured. Solutions to social problems should take the form of gradual social reform
rather than sudden and far-reaching change. Despite their negative effects, social problems often
also serve important functions for society.

Conclusion

In our society, in everyday life and in criminal law, the context of crime rests on the notion of
attributing personal responsibility for the social transgression – there are one or more clearly
identifiable individuals to hold accountable for their actions. Consequently, the social, political
and cultural context in which the problem occurs tends to disappear into the background.

Crime is a normal aspect of society is based on his belief that crime itself serves a social
function. That social function is to support or reassure the social norms of a society by the fact
that crime is considered going against the norm. Put simply, crime is simply deviant behaviour
that goes against social norms. It is with that model that law is created, from the adverse
reactions of criminal behaviour by society. As Pavlich (2011) states, “law is conceived of as the
product of a given society”. Durkheim’s main focus was the idea of ‘social solidarity’, or how
society works together as a whole and how society is organized. He rejected the idea of
individualism in the sense that society is the sum of its individual members; rather that it should
be studied collectively. Another principle of Durkheim’s that keeps society stable is ‘social
facts’, that is, “ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual”. It is these social
facts that hold control and authority over individuals to keep society stable.