What a crime is: its definition, its elements and the kinds of offence

What this chapter is for

This chapter teaches what a crime is, the word every other chapter in this subject stands on. It answers a plain question: how does a country decide that an act is a crime? The answer comes from three Pakistani laws, the Pakistan Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Constitution, and from the scholars who have argued about the word for more than two centuries. By the end you should be able to define a crime from the law itself, take one offence apart into its elements, sort offences in the three ways Pakistani law and criminology use, and say fairly why some scholars think the legal definition is too narrow.

The chapter has four parts: the idea of a crime, how that idea works in Pakistani law, three real cases with the critics of the legal definition, and the exam block.

Two Part-II questions have asked about this chapter’s ground directly, CE-2016 (“Define the term Crime and Criminals”) and CE-2022 (the difference between crime, deviance, sin and vice), and almost every other answer in the paper opens by saying what the law makes an offence.¹

Before you start

The words

Crime. Conduct that the law of a country makes punishable by the state.

Offence. The word the Pakistani codes use in place of crime. The Code of Criminal Procedure defines it as “any act or omission made punishable by any law for the time being in force”.⁴

Act and omission. An act is something a person does. An omission is a failure to do something the law requires.

Actus reus. Latin for “guilty act”. It is the outward part of a crime, the act or omission the law forbids.

Mens rea. Latin for “guilty mind”. It is the mental part of a crime, such as an intention to take something dishonestly.

Element of a crime. One of the parts the prosecution must prove before a court can convict.

Statute. A law passed by a legislature, such as an Act of the Parliament of Pakistan.

The Code. In this chapter, the Pakistan Penal Code of 1860, unless another code is named. The Code of Criminal Procedure of 1898 is a separate law that says how offences are investigated and tried.

Cognizable offence. An offence for which a police officer may arrest without a warrant from a magistrate.

Bailable offence. An offence for which the accused has a right to bail. Bail is the release of an accused person before the trial ends, on a promise to come back to court.

Compounding. Settling an offence by agreement with the victim or the victim’s heirs, so that the case ends.

Civil wrong. A wrong for which the injured person sues for money, such as a broken contract. A civil wrong that is not a breach of contract is called a tort.

The places

Islamabad Capital Territory. The federal territory around the capital, where federal criminal laws apply directly. Some Acts passed in 2025 and 2026 extend only to it.

Vienna. The seat of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which published the international classification of crime used in this chapter.

England. The country whose common law Pakistan’s criminal law grew from, and where William Blackstone wrote his Commentaries on the Laws of England in the 1760s.

The story in plain words

1. People in every society agree that some acts are wrong. They do not all agree on which wrongs the state should punish.
2. In early societies a wrong was often a private matter. The injured family settled it with the wrongdoer.
3. Over time the state took the power to punish. It began to treat serious wrongs as harm done to the whole community.
4. Today a crime is an act or omission that a law makes punishable.
5. To convict, a court usually needs three things: a forbidden act, a guilty mind, and a law that existed when the act was done.
6. The law excuses some people, such as young children and persons of unsound mind.
7. Offences can be sorted by the wrong they attack, by how the police and courts must treat them, and by whether the act is wrong in itself.
8. Some scholars say the legal definition is too narrow. They offer wider tests, such as harm and human rights.
9. The list of crimes keeps changing. Pakistan changed it in 2016, in 2025 and again in 2026.

1. What a crime is

A crime is conduct that the law of a country makes punishable by the state. That is the definition courts work with, and the whole criminal justice system rests on it. The Pakistani codes never define the word crime itself. They define the word offence, and they define it by punishment. The Code of Criminal Procedure says an offence is “any act or omission made punishable by any law for the time being in force”.⁴ The Penal Code adds that every person is liable to punishment “under this Code and not otherwise”, so nothing that a law has not made punishable can be punished as an offence.³

The same definition is used when crime is counted across the world. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime needed a definition that would work in every country when it built a common classification of crime. It accepted that harm and wrongfulness are usually present in a crime, but found that “they cannot wholly and operationally define it”, because countries make their criminal laws in very different ways. Its answer is the working definition this chapter uses. “The common denominator of what constitutes a ‘crime’ is that it consists of behaviours which are defined as criminal offences and are punishable as such by law.”¹⁰

Because people make the law, the line between crime and lawful conduct moves. Pakistan raised the age below which a child cannot commit an offence from seven to ten in 2016.³ In 2025 Parliament removed death as a punishment for stripping a woman of her clothes in public.¹⁵ In January 2026 it made domestic violence an offence in the Islamabad Capital Territory.¹⁶ A list of crimes learnt today will be partly out of date within a few years. What lasts is knowing how the law defines a crime and why its lines fall where they do.

The legal definition is the right place to start, for three reasons. It is exact, so a court can apply it to one accused person on one day. It is the only definition on which crime statistics and co-operation between countries can be built. It also protects the citizen, because nobody can be punished for conduct that no law forbade when it happened. The wider definitions taught later in this chapter, built on social norms, human rights and harm, work best as tests of the law rather than as replacements for it. A criminologist who studies only what the law calls crime will miss harms the law has not yet named, while one who ignores the law has no way to say who is a criminal.

2. How the state came to punish wrongs

In many early societies a wrong done to a person was for that person and his family to settle. The family took revenge or accepted a payment, and the matter ended there. Edwin Sutherland, the American sociologist whose Principles of Criminology shaped the field, set out the older scholarly account of how this changed. On that account “the criminal law was regarded as originating in torts”, meaning private wrongs. Step by step, “the group took charge of the treatment, and the wrongs came to be regarded as injuries to the group or to the state.”⁷

The steps were gradual. First the avenger had to announce that he meant to take revenge and win the consent of the group. Then the group limited how much injury he could do, and when and where he could do it. Later the case was examined in public, and other members of the group joined the injured party.⁷ A Pakistani reader will recognise the pattern in the way a feud is brought first before elders and later before a court.

Sutherland also showed why this account cannot be the whole truth. He accepted that “some crimes did originate in torts and became crimes through one or more of the steps described”. The theory went wrong, he argued, because it “assumes the priority of the individual to the group and this is not justified, for it is certain that in early societies some wrongs were regarded as wrongs against the group.” Some of those wrongs threatened the group directly, such as treason and breaking the hunting rules. Others threatened it indirectly, such as sacrilege and witchcraft.⁷ So the criminal law grew along two roads. Some wrongs began as private injuries and became public, while others were public from the start.

By the eighteenth century English law drew a firm line between the two kinds of wrong. William Blackstone, the Oxford law teacher whose Commentaries on the Laws of England became the standard account of that law, wrote in 1769 that a crime is an act “committed, or omitted, in violation of a public law, either forbidding or commanding it”. A private or civil injury, he explained, infringes rights that belong to people “considered merely as individuals”, while a crime breaks duties owed to the whole community. Keeping another man’s field from him is a civil injury. Treason, murder and robbery are crimes, because besides injuring a person they strike at society itself.⁶

Pakistan’s Penal Code belongs to this family of law. It was enacted on 6 October 1860 for British India, and its preamble says “it is expedient to provide a general Penal Code”.³ It began as the Indian Penal Code and was renamed after independence. Its structure has stayed the same since then, while its details have been amended many times.

The older idea of a private claim has not wholly gone from Pakistani law. The Penal Code treats a killing with intention, qatl-i-amd, partly as a claim that belongs to the victim’s heirs. An adult and sane wali, the heir who stands for the victim, may waive the right of qisas “at any time and without any compensation”. The state keeps a claim of its own as well. Where not every heir waives, or where the manner of the offence shocks the community, the court “may” still punish the offender as ta’zir, with death, life imprisonment or up to fourteen years.³ The first of the three cases later in this chapter takes this apart. For now, notice that in a Pakistani killing the private claim and the public claim stand side by side, much as they did in the early societies Sutherland described.

3. Four ways of defining crime

Scholars have defined crime in four main ways, and each answers a different question. The legal definition asks what the law forbids. The social definition asks what the community condemns. The human rights definition asks whose basic rights have been denied, and the social harm definition asks who has been injured. Each is set out below with its strengths and its limits.

The legal definition: what the law forbids

The legal definition equates crime with a breach of the criminal law. Sutherland gave the standard form of it in plain words. “Crime is defined legally as a violation of law.” What makes a law a criminal law, he explained, is that it is “a body of specific rules regarding human conduct which have been promulgated by political authority, which apply uniformly to all members of the classes to which the rules refer, and which are enforced by punishment administered by the state.” Four features follow from that sentence, which he named “politicality, specificity, uniformity, and penal sanction”. He added that a breach of such a law “requires both an overt act and a culpable intent.”⁷

The four features are worth learning one by one, because examiners reward them. Politicality means the rule is made by the state and not by a family, a tribe or a club. Specificity means the rule says exactly what conduct is forbidden. Uniformity means it applies to everyone in the class it names, rich or poor. Penal sanction means the state, not the victim, punishes the breach.

Paul Tappan, an American lawyer and sociologist, gave the sharpest version in 1947. “Crime is an intentional act in violation of the criminal law (statutory and case law), committed without defense or excuse, and penalized by the state as a felony or misdemeanor.” He drew a hard conclusion from it. In his view “only those are criminals who have been adjudicated as such by the courts”.⁹ That rule protects the accused, because a person does not become a criminal on a neighbour’s word or a newspaper’s. Its cost is that it leaves out a person who did the act and was acquitted, or was never caught.

The social definition: what the community condemns

The social definition asks what the community disapproves of. Émile Durkheim, the French sociologist, gave it its strongest form in 1893. He asked his readers to reverse the usual order of thought. “We must not say that an action shocks the common conscience because it is criminal, but rather that it is criminal because it shocks the common conscience. We do not reprove it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we reprove it.”⁸ For Durkheim a crime is whatever offends the strong feelings that the members of a society share, and the law only records that judgment.

Thorsten Sellin, an American criminologist, went further in 1938. As Sutherland reports, Sellin “proceeds to re-define crime as a violation of any conduct norm whatever”. A conduct norm is a rule of behaviour that a group holds. Sellin argued that a science of crime needs definitions drawn up by scientists, not “the arbitrary definitions of the legislatures”. Sutherland did not accept that this solved anything. He replied that “the methodological problems are by no means solved when crime is redefined as a violation of any conduct norm.”⁷ The difficulty is that every group has conduct norms, from a family to a street gang, so a definition built on them has no edge.

The human rights definition: whose rights are denied

Herman and Julia Schwendinger proposed a third definition in 1970. In their words, as a later scholar quotes them, “Any person, social system, or social relationship that denied or abrogated basic rights are criminal.” They counted the rights to racial, sexual and economic equality among those basic rights.⁹ On this test an act is criminal because it takes away someone’s rights, even where the law of the country allows it.

The strength of this definition is that it lets a criminologist condemn a harm that a law permits, such as a law that shuts one group out of rights that others enjoy. Its weakness is that there is no agreed list of basic rights, so two scholars can reach two different lists of crimes. The Schwendingers wrote during the Vietnam War, and the definition carries the political edge of that time.⁹

The social harm definition: who is injured

The fourth approach sets the word crime aside and speaks of harm. Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic proposed what they called a “constitutive definition” in 1996. It sorts harms into two kinds. In a crime of reduction the injured person loses something they already had, such as their property, their health or their standing. In a crime of repression the person is prevented from reaching a position they want in society. The aim is to widen criminology to “all actions which injure somebody else”, with injury understood “in the broadest sense”.⁹

This approach asks criminologists to study the harms of poverty, pollution and unsafe work as seriously as they study theft. It meets the same difficulty as the social and human rights definitions. If everything harmful is in scope, the subject has no boundary and no test a court could apply to one accused person. That is why this chapter keeps the legal definition as its base and uses the other three to test it.

4. How the Pakistani codes and the Constitution define an offence

The Pakistani codes define offence, not crime, and they do it in two sentences that differ in reach. The Penal Code says that, with some exceptions, “the word ‘offence’ denotes a thing made punishable by this Code.” In its chapter on general exceptions, in Chapter V-A and in a list of named sections, the word also covers a thing punishable under any “special or local law”. A special law is one passed for a particular subject, such as narcotics. A local law is one that applies only to a part of the country.³ The Code of Criminal Procedure uses the wider sentence. An offence “means any act or omission made punishable by any law for the time being in force”.⁴

The wider sentence matters because Pakistan has far more criminal law than the Penal Code. The Code of Criminal Procedure says that offences under the Penal Code are investigated, inquired into and tried by its rules. It says the same of “all offences under any other law”, subject to any law that sets its own manner or place of trial.⁴ So the definition holds wherever the offence is found, in the Penal Code or in a separate Act on terrorism, narcotics or cyber crime. A thing is an offence if some law in force makes it punishable.

Three articles of the Constitution set the outer limits within which any such law must work. Article 12 forbids retrospective punishment, which means punishing a person under a law made after the act. Its first clause reads: “No law shall authorize the punishment of a person (a) for an act or omission that was not punishable by law at the time of the act or omission; or (b) for an offence by a penalty greater than, or of a kind different from, the penalty prescribed by law for that offence at the time the offence was committed.” The only exception, in its second clause, covers laws that punish the abrogation or subversion of the Constitution, for acts since 23 March 1956.⁵

Article 13 protects the accused in two further ways. No person “shall be prosecuted or punished for the same offence more than once”, and no person accused of an offence shall “be compelled to be a witness against himself”. Article 14 adds that “No person shall be subjected to torture for the purpose of extracting evidence.”⁵ Together these articles show that a Pakistani crime is more than an act the legislature dislikes. The legislature must act first and in writing, and the state must then treat the accused in the ways the Constitution allows.

5. Theft, one offence taken apart

The definition becomes clearer when one offence is followed closely, and theft is the best one to follow. Section 378 of the Penal Code defines it. “Whoever, intending to take dishonestly any moveable property out of the possession of any person without that person’s consent, moves that property in order to such taking, is said to commit theft.” Section 379 sets the punishment. “Whoever commits theft shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine or with both.”³

Count the parts of that definition and you find five. There is an act, which is moving the property. There is a thing taken, which is moveable property in someone’s possession. The owner has not consented. The taker intends to take dishonestly. Last, a law fixes the punishment. Remove any one part and there is no theft, which is exactly how a defence lawyer approaches the charge.

The hardest word is “dishonestly”, and the Code defines it. A thing is done dishonestly when it is done “with the intention of causing wrongful gain to one person or wrongful loss to another person”.³ That is a test of the mind, not of the hands. The Code’s own illustrations show the test at work. In one of them A, who is on friendly terms with Z, goes into Z’s library while Z is away and takes a book without Z’s express consent, “for the purpose merely of reading it, and with the intention of returning it”. The Code says A probably believed he had Z’s implied consent, and adds: “If this was A’s impression, A has not committed theft.”³

In another illustration A believes in good faith that some property is his own and takes it out of B’s possession. “Here, as A does not take dishonestly, he does not commit theft.”³ Both men moved someone else’s property, and neither is a thief, because the guilty mind is missing. The Code also says what good faith requires. “Nothing is said to be done or believed in ‘good faith’ which is done or believed without due care and attention.”³ A careless belief does not protect a person, while an honest and careful one does. Keep theft in mind through the rest of the chapter, because it returns in the elements, in the kinds of offence and in the line between a crime and a civil wrong.

6. The three things a court must find

Theft showed that an offence is made of parts. Lawyers group those parts into three elements, and a court must find all three before it convicts. The first is an act or omission that the law forbids, the actus reus. The second is the state of mind the law requires for that offence, the mens rea. The third is a law that made the conduct punishable before it happened. Even when all three are present, the court must also be satisfied that no general exception applies, such as the accused’s young age. Figure 1 shows how the parts fit together, with theft as the example.

The act or the failure to act

A crime begins with conduct, and the law punishes doing as well as failing to do. Article 12 of the Constitution speaks of “an act or omission”, and the Code of Criminal Procedure of “any act or omission”.⁵⁴ The Penal Code defines both words so that one act and a chain of acts are treated alike. “The word ‘act’ denotes as well a series of acts as a single act: the word ‘omission’ denotes as well a series of omissions as a single omission.” It also says that, unless the context shows otherwise, “words which refer to acts done extend also to illegal omissions”.³

Not every failure to act is a crime, and the Code says which ones are. The word “illegal” applies “to everything which is an offence or which is prohibited by law, or which furnishes ground for a civil action”, and a person is “legally bound to do” whatever it is illegal for him to omit.³ So an omission is criminal only where the law first places a duty on the person. A parent who must feed a child, a jailer who must feed a prisoner and a driver who must stop after an accident all carry such a duty, and a passer-by who walks past a stranger in trouble usually does not. The Code’s own illustration shows a duty broken. A causes the death of Z partly by beating him and partly by “illegally omitting to give Z food”, and the Code says “A has committed murder.”³

The act must also be one the person chose to make, so a reflex or a movement made in a fit is not the act of a criminal. The law punishes conduct, not thoughts, and a person who only plans to steal has not committed theft. It does reach some conduct before any harm is done, though. The Penal Code has whole chapters on abetment, on criminal conspiracy and on attempts, which punish steps on the road to an offence.³

Most offences also involve harm, and the Code defines injury widely. It is “any harm whatever illegally caused to any person, in body, mind, reputation or property”.³ The harm may fall on a body, a mind, a good name or a possession. Attempt and conspiracy show that an offence can be complete before any harm follows, which is why harm is part of most offences without being an element of all of them.

The guilty mind

The second element is the state of mind that the law requires for a particular offence, and it differs from one offence to the next. Theft needs an intention to take dishonestly. Other offences need knowledge, and some are satisfied by carelessness. Lawyers therefore arrange the states of mind in a ladder, from the most blameworthy to the least, and the Penal Code builds its own ladder in its law of killing.³ Figure 2 sets it out.

At the top is qatl-i-amd, which section 300 defines as causing death “with the intention of causing death”, or with the intention of causing an injury likely in the ordinary course of nature to cause death, or “with the knowledge that his act is so imminently dangerous that it must in all probability cause death”. Intention and knowledge share the top rung because the law treats them as almost equally blameworthy. One rung down is qatl shibh-i-amd under section 315, where the offender meant to cause harm but used a means “not likely to cause death”. The Code’s illustration is a man who strikes another with a stick or a stone to hurt him, and the man dies.³

The lowest rungs are qatl-i-khata under section 318, a death caused “without any intention to cause the death of, or cause harm to” anyone, by a mistake of act or of fact. The Code’s illustration is a hunter who aims at a deer, misses and kills a man standing by. Where the death comes from a rash or negligent act the Code adds a prison term to the diyat, up to five years under section 319 and up to ten for rash or negligent driving under section 320.³ So the same result, a death, carries anything from qisas to diyat alone, and the only thing that changes is the mind.

The Code also defines the words that describe a state of mind in its opening chapter, and an answer that quotes them reads as the work of someone who has opened the Code. Intention is at the top, knowledge comes next, and “reason to believe” reaches down to what a careful person would have realised. The table gathers the words that matter most, with their section numbers.

The Code’s illustration of “voluntarily” shows how close knowledge comes to intention. A sets fire by night to an inhabited house in a large town “for the purpose of facilitating robbery”, and a person dies in the fire. A may not have wanted anyone to die, and may even regret it. “Yet, if he knew that he was likely to cause death, he has caused death voluntarily.”³ The law treats knowing that harm is likely as almost as blameworthy as aiming at it.

A few offences need no guilty mind at all, and these are called offences of strict liability. The idea comes from the common law that Pakistan’s codes grew out of. A person is liable for the act whatever their intention or state of mind. In criminal law such offences are mostly limited to minor matters, and they usually carry lighter punishments than offences that need a guilty mind.¹⁴ Scholars are divided over them. Some oppose strict liability because it is unfair to punish a person for something unrelated to their intention. Others accept it, reasoning that the lighter punishments reduce the unfairness.¹⁴ A candidate who writes about strict liability should give both views.

A law made before the act

The third element is the law itself. The act and the mind are not enough, because the conduct must have been forbidden, and its punishment fixed, before it happened. Lawyers express this with the Latin maxim nullum crimen sine lege, “no crime without a law”. Pakistan holds the rule in its Constitution. Article 12 bars punishment for an act “that was not punishable by law at the time”, and bars a penalty “greater than, or of a kind different from” the one the law prescribed when the offence was committed.⁵

The Penal Code states the same rule in its own words. “Every person shall be liable to punishment under this Code and not otherwise for every act or omission contrary to the provisions thereof, of which he shall be guilty within Pakistan.”³ The words “and not otherwise” shut out any punishment the Code does not authorise. The next section of the Code carries the rule to persons tried in Pakistan for offences committed abroad, who “shall be dealt with according to the provision of this Code”.³

The rule has a clear purpose. A citizen must be able to know in advance what is forbidden, so that he can obey. A court must not invent a crime after the event, and a government must not punish an opponent for something that was lawful when he did it. The Constitution makes one narrow exception, for the abrogation or subversion of the Constitution itself.⁵

A rule need not sit in a statute book for people to feel its force, and this is where the third element gets difficult. Sutherland noted that groups outside the state also have rules and penalties. A travelling people with no territory and no written law, whom he called by the older name of gypsies, had “customs, taboos, and a semi-judicial council” that decided what conduct was proper and could impose penalties. The Chinese immigrants in Chicago had an unofficial court which “in practice exercises the functions of an authorized court in controversies among the Chinese people”.⁷ Sutherland used these cases to argue that the element of politicality in the legal definition “is arbitrary and is not sharply defined”. The jirga in Pakistan raises the same question, and the chapter on the formal and informal agencies of justice takes it up.

7. Whom the law excuses

The law treats some people as unable to commit a crime, even when they do what the law forbids. The Penal Code collects these cases in its chapter of general exceptions, which runs from section 76 to section 106.³ The two that matter most to a criminologist are age and the state of the mind. Others cover a mistake of fact made in good faith, an accident in doing a lawful act with proper care, and the right of private defence.

Age comes first. Section 82 says: “Nothing is an offence which is done by a child under ten years of age.” Section 83 extends the protection to a child above ten and under fourteen “who has not attained sufficient maturity of understanding to judge of the nature and consequences of his conduct on that occasion.”³ These ages are recent. The figures were substituted by Act X of 2016, and before that the Code said seven and twelve.³ So a child of eight who was mature enough could have been charged under the old law, and cannot be charged today. The chapters on juvenile delinquency teach what happens to a child who is above these ages.

The mind comes second. Section 84 excuses “a person who, at the time of doing it, by reason of unsoundness of mind, is incapable of knowing the nature of the act, or that he is doing what is either wrong or contrary to law.”³ The test looks at the person’s mind at the moment of the act and asks whether he could know what he was doing, or that it was wrong. Intoxication is handled in two sections. Section 85 excuses a person whose intoxication was caused against his will, for example by a drink given to him without his knowledge. Section 86 says a person who chose to become intoxicated is treated “as if he had the same knowledge as he would have had if he had not been intoxicated”.³ A man cannot drink his way out of responsibility.

The right of private defence is the exception a citizen meets most often. Section 96 says: “Nothing is an offence which is done in the exercise of the right of private defence.” The right covers defence of one’s own body and property and those of another person. It is limited, because it never extends to inflicting more harm than is necessary for defence.³ A shopkeeper may push away a robber, but may not chase and kill him once the danger has passed.

The law also has to say who counts as a person at all. The Penal Code says the word “person” “includes any Company or Association, or body of persons, whether incorporated or not.”³ So a company can be a person under the Code. The United Nations classification agrees that every offence has a perpetrator, who may be a “person, corporation or institution”.¹⁰ The chapter on corporate crime builds on this.

8. Sorting offences by the wrong they attack

Once a crime is defined, the next task is to sort the many crimes into kinds, and the first way to sort them is by the wrong each one does. This is how the Penal Code itself is arranged. Its chapters group offences by the interest the law protects, whether that is the state, public peace, the human body or property.³ The table lists the chapters that matter most to a student of criminology.

The chapter on offences against property shows how the sorting continues inside a chapter. It is divided under further headings for theft, extortion, robbery and dacoity, criminal misappropriation of property, criminal breach of trust, cheating, mischief and criminal trespass.³ Theft is the simplest of these, and the others add something to it. Robbery is theft or extortion carried out with violence or the fear of instant violence, and dacoity is robbery committed by five or more persons together. Criminal breach of trust is the dishonest use of property that was handed over in trust, which is why an employee who spends his employer’s money commits it rather than theft.

The pattern behind the table is simple. Each chapter answers one question, which is what the offence attacks. It may attack the state, the public peace, a public office, a person’s body, a person’s property or a person’s good name. A reader who knows the pattern can place an unfamiliar offence. Hijacking, for instance, sits in the chapter on property under its own heading just after robbery and dacoity, while bribing a voter sits in the chapter on elections.

This way of sorting suits a court, which needs to find the one section that fits the facts in front of it. It suits a statistician less well. The chapters reflect the history of one country’s law, including chapters on religion, on marriage and on electricity that another country would not have. The third of the three cases later in this chapter shows how the United Nations sorts offences instead, so that countries with different laws can be compared.

9. Sorting offences by what the police and courts may do

The Code of Criminal Procedure sorts offences in a second way, by what the police and the courts may do about them. Four sorts matter to a student, and the first is the most important in practice. A cognizable offence is one for which a police officer “may, in accordance with the second schedule, or under any law for the time being in force, arrest without warrant”. A non-cognizable offence is one for which he may not.⁴ The difference reaches beyond arrest. An officer in charge of a police station “may, without the order of a Magistrate, investigate any cognizable case”, but “No police-officer shall investigate a non-cognizable case without the order of a Magistrate” of the first or second class.⁴ In a cognizable case the police act on their own, and in a non-cognizable one they must first go to a magistrate.

The other three sorts follow the same logic of asking what the system may do. The second is bailable and non-bailable. A bailable offence “means an offence shown as bailable in the second schedule, or which is made bailable by any other law for the time being in force; and ‘non-bailable offence’ means any other offence”.⁴ In a bailable offence the accused has a right to bail, and in a non-bailable one bail is at the court’s discretion. The third sort is compoundable and non-compoundable, which asks whether the persons named in the Code may settle the case by agreement so that it ends. The fourth is the court that may try the offence, which depends on how grave the offence is.

The Second Schedule to the Code puts all four sorts on one table, with eight columns.⁴

1. The section of the Penal Code.
2. The offence.
3. Whether the police may arrest without a warrant.
4. Whether a warrant or a summons issues first.
5. Whether the offence is bailable.
6. Whether it is compoundable.
7. The punishment under the Penal Code.
8. The court that may try it.

The Schedule warns that its entries “are not intended as definitions of the offences and punishments”, because the definitions stay in the Penal Code.⁴ Its row for theft under section 379 shows how a row reads. The police “May arrest without warrant”, a warrant issues, the offence is “Not bailable” and “Not compoundable”, the punishment is up to three years or a fine or both, and “Any Judicial Magistrate” may try it.⁴ So a thief can be arrested at once, has no right to bail and cannot buy his way out of the case by settling with the owner. Rows change when Parliament amends the law, and a province may amend the Code for its own territory, so learn the rows from the current official text, as this chapter does.

English law has a traditional sort of its own, which Pakistani law does not use. “Crimes are ranked as greater violations of public order (felony) or as lesser violations (misdemeanor).”¹¹ Blackstone noted that in strict speech the two words meant the same thing, and that in common use “crimes” meant the deeper and more atrocious offences.⁶ Tappan’s definition uses the felony and misdemeanour pair because he wrote about American law. In a Pakistani answer the working sorts are cognizable, bailable and compoundable, as the Second Schedule sets them out.

10. Wrong in itself, or wrong because forbidden

A third way of sorting offences asks where the wrong comes from, and lawyers name its two sorts in Latin. Malum in se means “wrong in itself”. It is an act that is wrong by its nature, whether or not a law forbids it, such as murder, rape or arson. Malum prohibitum means “wrong because forbidden”. It is an act that is not wrong by its nature but is forbidden by a statute, such as crossing a road against the signal or running a business without a licence.¹²¹³ The plurals are mala in se and mala prohibita.

The pair tells a student why people obey different laws for different reasons. A community would condemn a murder even if no law existed, so the law against it only confirms a judgment people already hold. A rule about licences is obeyed because the state made it, and most people would not think the act wrong without the rule. That is why so many mala prohibita are offences of strict liability, which need no guilty mind, as the subsection on the guilty mind explained.¹³

The pair is not a sharp wall, and a candidate should not write as if it were. Many crimes that statutes now define were mala in se first, and the idea of acts wrong in themselves was the original justification for the common-law crimes.¹¹ Theft is one example, because it was condemned long before the Penal Code defined it in section 378. The pair also helps with the examiners’ question on crime, deviance, sin and vice. An act that is malum in se is often a sin and a deviance as well as a crime, while an act that is malum prohibitum is a crime and may be none of the others. The chapters on deviance and on sin, vice and evil build on this.

The three ways of sorting answer different questions, so one offence takes a place in each of them. Figure 3 places theft and qatl-i-amd in the first two. Both are also mala in se, so the third way would put them side by side.

11. Crime and civil wrong

The oldest way to tell a crime from a civil wrong is to ask whom the wrong injures. Blackstone’s answer, given in the section on how the state came to punish wrongs, was that a civil wrong injures a person as an individual while a crime injures the community. Sutherland put the conventional view this way. “A crime is dealt with as an injury to the state rather than to a private citizen and in this respect differs from a tort or civil injury, for which the injured party may attempt to secure damages.”⁷ In a crime the state brings the case, through a public prosecutor, and the result is punishment. In a civil wrong the injured person brings the case, and the result is compensation.

The Pakistani codes reflect this division in who conducts a criminal case. The Code of Criminal Procedure defines a public prosecutor as a person appointed under its section 492, and the term includes “any person conducting a prosecution on behalf of the State”.⁴ The victim of a theft is a witness in the state’s case. If he wants his money back, he has a separate remedy in the civil courts.

Sutherland also showed that the line between the two is not sharp. “A particular act may be an offense against an individual and also against the state, and is either a tort or a crime or both according to the way it is treated.” He observed that victims often use the criminal law to force the return of their property, which a civil suit could not achieve as easily, and that prosecutors complain about this.⁷ The theft of a motorcycle is a crime, and its owner may also sue the thief for its value.

Pakistani law narrows the gap further than most. Many offences are compoundable, so the victim and the accused can end a criminal case by agreement, which is closer to settling a civil claim than to a state prosecution. In the law of homicide and hurt the Code fixes money payable to the victim or the heirs, called diyat, arsh and daman,³ and the heirs hold rights that the Code treats as theirs, as the first of the three cases below shows. The Code of Criminal Procedure goes further still. Under section 544A a court that convicts a person of an offence that caused death, hurt or loss “shall”, unless it records reasons otherwise, order the convict to pay compensation to the person harmed or to the heirs.⁴ Figure 4 puts the two kinds of wrong side by side and shows where they overlap.

A Pakistani answer on crime and civil wrong should therefore teach the classic line and then show where Pakistani law crosses it.

12. Three cases that show the definition at work

The sections so far have set out the definition, its elements and the ways offences are sorted. Three cases now show the definition at work in real law. The first two are Pakistani and the third is international, and each shows a different feature of the legal definition.

A killing in Pakistan: a public wrong and a private claim

The first case is murder under Pakistani law, and its row in the Second Schedule tells the whole story in one line. For qatl-i-amd under section 302 the police may arrest without a warrant, a warrant issues and the offence is not bailable. Then comes the surprise. The offence is compoundable. The punishment column reads qisas, or death, or imprisonment for life, or imprisonment up to twenty-five years, and the Court of Session tries it.⁴ The Code’s table of compoundable offences says qatl-i-amd may be compounded “by the heirs of the victim, subject to the provisions of section 311”.⁴

The private side of the claim is set out in the Penal Code. An adult and sane wali may waive the right of qisas “without any compensation”, or may compound it for diyat, which is money paid to the heirs.³ So the heirs hold a right that the Code treats as theirs, as the injured family did in the early societies Sutherland described.

The public side survives in section 311. Even after a waiver or a compromise, the court may punish the offender as ta’zir, the punishment the state decides. One of the grounds is fasad-fil-arz, which the Code defines to include “the brutal or shocking manner in which the offence has been committed which is outrageous to the public conscience”.³ That phrase echoes Durkheim’s view that a crime is what shocks the common conscience.⁸ A Pakistani court uses it as the test for when the state’s own claim outweighs the family’s settlement.

The case shows that the legal definition can hold two ideas of crime at once. Murder is an offence because a law makes it punishable, which is the legal definition. Within that law, it is both a wrong against a family that the family may forgive and a wrong against the community that the state may still punish. The chapter on hudud, qisas, diyat and ta’zir teaches this system in full.

Vani and swara: a custom made into a crime

The second case shows the legislature drawing a new line against a custom that communities had long accepted. In parts of Pakistan a dispute between families, even a killing, was sometimes settled by giving a girl from the offender’s family in marriage to the victim’s family. The practice has local names, vani in Punjab and swara in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Penal Code now forbids it in so many words. A section in the chapter on offences affecting the human body begins: “Whoever gives a female in marriage or otherwise compels her to enter into marriage, as badla-e-sulh, wanni, or swara or any other custom or practice under any name, in consideration of settling a civil dispute or a criminal liability”. It punishes the offence with imprisonment of three to seven years and a fine of five hundred thousand rupees.³

Other chapters of the Code treat customs in the same way. The first section of the chapter on offences against women forbids depriving a woman of her share of inherited property by deceit or illegal means.³ In each case the law names the custom by its local names, so that nobody can claim the practice under another label, and then makes it punishable.

This case matters for the theory of crime because it runs the opposite way from Durkheim’s account. For Durkheim the law follows the common conscience, and an act becomes a crime because the community already condemns it.⁸ Here the law runs ahead of the communities where the practice survives, and makes a crime of something that local opinion may still accept. The legal definition can explain this easily, because a crime is whatever the law makes punishable. The social definition struggles, because the community that practises vani does not reprove it. A strong answer uses the case to show the limits of the social definition.

Counting crime across countries: the United Nations classification

The third case is international, and it shows the legal definition doing a job no other definition could do. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime wanted countries to report crime in a form that could be compared. The difficulty was that each country’s laws define offences differently. Its answer, the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes, first published in March 2015, keeps the legal definition of crime but sorts offences by the behaviour of the offender, not by the wording of any one country’s law. Its unit is “the act that constitutes a criminal offence”, described “in terms of the behaviour shown by the perpetrator”.¹⁰ It has eleven top-level categories.¹⁰

1. Acts leading to death or intending to cause death
2. Acts leading to harm or intending to cause harm to the person
3. Injurious acts of a sexual nature
4. Acts against property involving violence or threat against a person
5. Acts against property only
6. Acts involving controlled psychoactive substances or other drugs
7. Acts involving fraud, deception or corruption
8. Acts against public order, authority and provisions of the State
9. Acts against public safety and state security
10. Acts against the natural environment
11. Other criminal acts not elsewhere classified

Set this list beside the Penal Code’s chapters and the difference in purpose becomes clear. The Code puts cheating in its chapter on property, while the United Nations puts fraud, deception and corruption in a category of their own. The Code has chapters on religion and on marriage, and the United Nations list has neither. It places each behaviour where it fits instead, so forced marriage is a row among the acts against the person, and violations of norms on religious beliefs are a row among the acts against public order.¹⁰

Neither list is better than the other, because each serves a different user. The Code’s chapters serve a court that applies one country’s law to one accused. The classification serves a statistician comparing many countries, and the chapter on counting crime explains how such comparisons are made and where they go wrong. Both rest on the same legal definition, which is the point of this case. Without a definition tied to law there would be nothing to count.

13. The case against defining crime by law

The legal definition has serious critics, and their case against it has three parts. Each part has force, and a candidate who can state them fairly and then answer them writes a far stronger answer than one who only repeats a definition.

The first part says the legal definition is arbitrary about who counts as a lawmaker. Sutherland argued that the element of politicality “is arbitrary and is not sharply defined”. If an unofficial council acts like a court, he asked in effect, why should its rules not count as law, and their breach as crime?⁷ The Pakistani jirga raises the same question. A jirga’s decisions bind many people in practice, yet its rules are not law in the sense the codes use.

The second part says that law on paper and law in action differ. Sutherland observed that a statute may go unenforced, or be enforced only now and then, and that the police and the courts decide in practice what is punished.⁷ A definition drawn from the statute book describes what is forbidden, and says nothing about what is actually punished. Two people who commit the same act may meet very different fates, and the legal definition cannot see the difference.

The third part is the strongest. It says the law may leave real harm untouched, or even protect it. The Schwendingers’ point was that a society could pass a law denying a group its basic rights, and a definition bound to law would then call the denial lawful.⁹ Writers on social harm extend the point to pollution, unsafe workplaces and financial practices that ruin thousands but break no statute.

The answer to this case is partial, and it is best given honestly. The first part is a good reason to study how laws are made, and Sutherland drew exactly that conclusion. He made “making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting toward the breaking of laws” the subject of criminology.⁷ The second part is a good reason to study enforcement, which the chapters on the police, the courts and the prisons do. The third part is answered only in part. The wider definitions cannot do their work without the legal one, because to say that the law has missed a harm, one must first know what the law covers. A criticism needs something to criticise.

Where does the field stand, then? Most working criminologists stand where Sutherland did. They begin from the legal definition because courts, police forces and statistics use it, and they treat the wider definitions as reasons to keep asking whether the law draws its lines well. The legalists, led by Tappan, hold the legal line firmly.⁹ The normative school of Durkheim and Sellin, the rights school of the Schwendingers and the harm school of Henry and Milovanovic each push the boundary outward.⁸⁹ An answer that starts from the law, then widens the lens and names the scholars at each step, shows the examiner that the candidate knows the whole debate.

14. Where the law stands now in Pakistan

Pakistan’s criminal law changes almost every year, and three recent changes show how the line between crime and lawful conduct is redrawn. The first is the change to the age of criminal responsibility in 2016. Act X of 2016 amended sections 82 and 83 of the Penal Code. Before it, a child over seven could be charged if mature enough. After it, a child under ten commits no offence, and a child between ten and fourteen commits none unless mature enough to understand the nature and consequences of the conduct.³

The second is the Criminal Laws (Amendment) Act, 2025, Act XXVII of 2025, which received the President’s assent on 29 August 2025. It amends two sections of the Penal Code and one schedule of the Code of Criminal Procedure. In section 354-A, the offence of assaulting a woman and stripping her of her clothes in public view, the words “with death or” are omitted. In section 402-C, which punishes harbouring a hijacker, the words “death or” are omitted.¹⁵ Before the Act both sections named death or life imprisonment, and after it life imprisonment is the penalty named in each.³ The Act also omits “Death or” from the punishment column for section 354-A in the Second Schedule, and gives section 402-C its own row there.¹⁵

The third is the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act, 2026, Act X of 2026, which received the President’s assent on 26 January 2026 and extends to the Islamabad Capital Territory. It made a new offence. The Act defines domestic violence as “all acts of physical, psychological and sexual abuse, other than the offence defined under Pakistan Penal Code or any other law”, committed against a person with whom the offender is or has been in a domestic relationship, and its examples include stalking and harassment. Where the act is not already an offence under the Penal Code, the Act punishes it with simple imprisonment “of a maximum period of three years and not less than six months”. It adds a fine of between twenty thousand and one hundred thousand rupees, paid as compensation to the person harmed.¹⁶

The three changes have one thing in common. None was made by a court or by public opinion alone. Each was an act of the legislature, in writing, and each moved the line between what is punishable and what is not. One narrowed the reach of the law over children, one softened a punishment, and one created an offence where there was none. That is the legal definition at work, and it is why a candidate must learn the definition as a living thing. Section numbers and punishments change with amendments, so learn them from a recent text of the Code and quote the year of any change you cite.

15. What students mix up about crime

The commonest mix-up is to say that the Pakistan Penal Code defines crime. It does not. Both Pakistani codes define offence, and an answer should quote the Code of Criminal Procedure’s sentence, “any act or omission made punishable by any law for the time being in force”.⁴ Use crime and offence as the same thing in an answer, but name the right word when you quote the law.

Students also mix up crime, deviance, sin and vice, as if they were four names for one thing. They overlap and are different. A crime breaks a law of the state. A deviance breaks a social norm, a rule the community expects people to follow, whether or not a law exists. A sin breaks a religious command, and a vice is a habit of wrong conduct, such as gambling or drunkenness. Murder is all four at once, while driving without a licence is a crime and nothing else. The chapters on deviance and on sin, vice and evil teach the other three words in full.

A third mix-up treats a compoundable offence as if it were not really a crime. Murder in Pakistan can be compounded by the heirs, and some candidates conclude that it has become a private matter. It has not. The offence remains an offence, the police still arrest and investigate, and the court keeps its power to punish as ta’zir under section 311.³ Compounding changes how a case may end, not whether the act is a crime.

A fourth mix-up confuses the person who did the act with the person the law calls a criminal. In ordinary speech anyone who steals is a criminal. In Tappan’s strict legal sense only a person a court has convicted is one.⁹ Both uses appear in books, so say which one you mean. The next chapter, on criminality and criminal behaviour, takes this further.

Last, students borrow foreign categories that do not fit Pakistani law. Felony and misdemeanour belong to English and American law, and the Pakistani sorts are cognizable, bailable and compoundable.⁴ Strict liability is also misread as a crime with no law behind it. It is the opposite. A strict liability offence needs a law like any other offence, and lacks only the guilty mind.¹⁴

16. What the examiners have asked

Two questions have asked directly about this chapter’s subject.¹

• CE-2016, Q.3. “Define the term Crime and Criminals. Explain the types of Criminals in detail.”
• CE-2022, Q.2. “What is the difference between crime, deviance, sin and vice? Do you believe that crime is one of the major social problems of Pakistani society? Discuss.”

Two more parts of questions have touched it.¹

• CE-2016, Q.9(c). A short note on “Criminal law”, one of three from which a candidate chose two.
• CE-2023, Q.2. “Discuss scope of Criminology as science dealing with study of criminal law, forensics and criminal investigation.”

The CE-2016 question has two tasks. The first is to define crime and criminal, for which this chapter and the next give the material. The second is to explain the types of criminals, which the chapters on classifying criminals and on occasional, habitual and professional criminals teach. A candidate who writes only the first half has answered half the question. The CE-2022 question asks the candidate to tell four things apart and then to judge whether crime is a major social problem in Pakistan. This chapter teaches the first of the four words, and the chapters on deviance, on sin, vice and evil and on crime as a social problem teach the rest.

Many other questions need the legal definition in their introductions. A question on money-laundering, cyber crime or juvenile delinquency reads better when the answer says early on what the law makes an offence, and under which law.

17. Facts to take into the examination hall

• 6 October 1860. The date the Penal Code was enacted.³
• Definition of offence. The Penal Code: “a thing made punishable by this Code”. The Code of Criminal Procedure: “any act or omission made punishable by any law for the time being in force”.³⁴
• Sections 378 and 379. Theft is defined in the first and punished in the second with up to three years, or a fine, or both.³
• The Code’s defined words. Dishonestly, fraudulently, reason to believe, voluntarily and good faith, defined in the Code’s sections numbered 24, 25, 26, 39 and 52.³
• Sections 82 and 83. A child under ten commits no offence. A child of ten to fourteen commits none unless mature enough to understand the nature and consequences of the conduct. The ages were set by Act X of 2016, replacing seven and twelve.³
• Section 84. Unsoundness of mind excuses a person incapable of knowing the nature of the act, or that it is wrong or contrary to law.³
• Section 96. Nothing is an offence which is done in the exercise of the right of private defence.³
• Definition of person. A person includes a company or association or body of persons, whether incorporated or not.³
• Article 12. No punishment for an act not punishable when done, or by a heavier penalty than the law then prescribed.⁵
• Articles 13 and 14. No double punishment, no compelled self-incrimination, and no torture to extract evidence.⁵
• Sutherland, 1947. The four marks of criminal law: politicality, specificity, uniformity and penal sanction.⁷
• Blackstone, 1769. A crime is an act committed or omitted in violation of a public law.⁶
• Durkheim, 1893. An act is a crime because we reprove it, not the other way round.⁸
• Tappan, 1947. The legalistic definition. Only those convicted by a court are criminals.⁹
• Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1970. The human rights definition. Whatever denies basic rights is criminal.⁹
• Henry and Milovanovic, 1996. The constitutive definition, with crimes of reduction and crimes of repression.⁹
• March 2015. The United Nations International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes, with eleven top-level categories.¹⁰
• 2025 and 2026. The Criminal Laws (Amendment) Act, 2025 (Act XXVII of 2025) and the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act, 2026 (Act X of 2026).¹⁵¹⁶

18. What loses marks on this subject

1. Saying the Penal Code defines crime. It defines offence.
2. Defining crime as “a wrong act” with no mention of the law, the mind or the punishment.
3. Leaving out the guilty mind, or the law made beforehand, when teaching the elements.
4. Using the Latin terms without explaining them, or without a Pakistani example.
5. Quoting only foreign definitions, such as Tappan’s, with no Pakistani section or article.
6. Treating crime, deviance, sin and vice as the same thing.
7. Treating all offences as alike, with no sorting by wrong, by procedure or by wrong in itself.
8. Calling Pakistani offences felonies and misdemeanours.
9. Giving section numbers from memory that turn out wrong. Learn the few above well.
10. Writing as if the list of crimes were fixed. Give a recent change with its year.

19. A worked answer plan

The question is CE-2016, Q.3: “Define the term Crime and Criminals. Explain the types of Criminals in detail.”¹

It has three tasks: define crime, define criminal, and explain the types of criminals in detail. This chapter supplies the first. The next chapter, on criminality and criminal behaviour, supplies the second, and the chapters on classifying criminals and on the occasional, habitual and professional criminal supply the third. Give each task space in proportion to the marks it carries, which means the types of criminals deserve at least half the answer. The headings on the rough page might be these.

• Introduction, with the legal definition and the answer in brief
• The legal definition of crime, from the codes and the Constitution
• The three elements of a crime, with theft as the example, and a sketch of Figure 1
• The wider definitions, from Durkheim to the Schwendingers, and their limits
• Who is a criminal in law, and whom the law excuses
• The types of criminals, as the later chapters teach them
• A recent Pakistani change showing how the law moves
• Conclusion

A model introduction might run like this. A crime is conduct that the law of a country makes punishable by the state. The Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898, defines the related term offence as “any act or omission made punishable by any law for the time being in force”. To convict, a court must find a prohibited act, a culpable state of mind and a law in force when the act was done, the last guaranteed by Article 12 of the Constitution. Criminologists have proposed wider definitions grounded in social norms, human rights and social harm, yet each presupposes the legal definition it seeks to extend. A criminal, in the strict legal sense, is a person whom a court has convicted of an offence, and criminals may be classified by the frequency, skill and organisation of their offending.

What to remember from this chapter

• A crime is conduct that the law makes punishable. The Pakistani codes define offence, not crime.
• The Penal Code was enacted on 6 October 1860. The Code of Criminal Procedure defines an offence as any act or omission made punishable by any law in force.
• A crime needs a forbidden act or omission, a guilty mind and a law made beforehand. Article 12 of the Constitution guarantees the third.
• The Code defines dishonestly, fraudulently, reason to believe, voluntarily and good faith, and its illustrations show the guilty mind at work.
• A child under ten commits no offence, and a child of ten to fourteen commits none unless mature enough. Act X of 2016 set these ages.
• Unsoundness of mind, intoxication against one’s will and private defence are general exceptions. A company is a person under the Code.
• Offences are sorted by the wrong they attack, by what the police and courts may do, and by whether they are wrong in themselves.
• Murder in Pakistan is compoundable by the heirs, and the state keeps its power to punish as ta’zir.
• Four definitions of crime exist: legal, social, human rights and social harm. The legal one is the base, and the others test it.
• The list of crimes changes. In 2025 and 2026 Parliament changed penalties and made domestic violence an offence in Islamabad.

Check yourself

Answer each from memory, in your own words, before you open the answer.

1. Which word do the Pakistani codes define, crime or offence, and what does the Code of Criminal Procedure say it means?

2. Name the three things a court must find before it convicts, and say which article of the Constitution guarantees the third.

3. A takes a book from a friend’s library, meaning to read it and return it. Why is that not theft under the Penal Code?

4. What did Blackstone say marks a crime off from a private or civil injury?

5. Give Durkheim’s reversal of the usual order of thought about crime, and say what it makes of the law.

6. At what ages does the Penal Code now excuse a child, and what were they before 2016?

7. In the Second Schedule, what does the row for theft under section 379 say about arrest, bail, compounding and the trial court?

8. Why is qatl-i-amd in Pakistan both a public wrong and a private claim?

9. Why does the law against vani and swara fit the legal definition of crime better than Durkheim’s social one?

10. Name three places where Pakistani law crosses the line between a crime and a civil wrong.

11. State the strongest part of the case against defining crime by law, and the answer to it.

12. A question from the chapter on how to sit the paper. CE-2016 asked “Define the term Crime and Criminals. Explain the types of Criminals in detail.” How many tasks does it set, and which takes the most room?