Dear Reader,
Pure coincidence, perhaps, that in the same week two conversations in this magazine circled the word “criminal”. In one, the public intellectual and activist G.N. Devy warned that India’s forthcoming caste census risks repeating an old injustice by failing to properly enumerate denotified and nomadic tribes — communities branded as hereditary offenders under colonial rule and never fully released from that suspicion. In another, filmmaker and theatre director Dakxin Chhara described what it means to grow up inside a community officially “denotified” yet socially unpardoned, where the label outlives the law that produced it. Their testimonies suggest something that criminology textbooks rarely acknowledge directly: the history of crime is really the history of who had the power to define harm. And more often than not, the law has been less a neutral referee and more a property manager.
Consider the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, enacted by the British Raj in India after the 1857 rebellion. The Act branded entire communities — an estimated 13 million people across 127 groups by Independence — as “habitually criminal”, addicted to the “systematic commission of non-bailable offences”. No individual act was required for conviction; membership in a designated caste or tribe was sufficient. Surveillance, forced settlement, routine reporting to police stations, restrictions on movement: these measures were justified in the language of public safety. Yet their underlying function was administrative control over mobile populations who did not fit neatly into the colonial economy of land revenue and fixed property. As historian Meena Radhakrishna has documented, many of these “criminal tribes” were simply nomadic communities whose wandering lives made colonial administrators anxious, or groups whose labour was needed for plantations and public works. The law defined mobility as menace. Their “criminality” was invented to solve a logistics problem.
The Act was repealed in 1949, but its logic stays. The Habitual Offenders Act of 1952 effectively re-listed the same communities under a different name. In 2007, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination noted with concern that these “so-called denotified and nomadic tribes” continue to be stigmatised. Today, approximately 60 million people in India live under the shadow of this colonial label. Many remain excluded from Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe status, denied the reservations that might lift them from poverty. The label may have been withdrawn; the stigma was not. In that sense, the census debate is not merely bureaucratic. It is philosophical. It asks whether the state can count people without categorising them into inherited guilt.
This is not an Indian peculiarity. The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution ended slavery “except as a punishment for crime”. That exception became a legal hinge. After the Civil War, Southern states passed Black Codes that criminalised unemployment and homelessness — conditions that inevitably afflicted hundreds of thousands of recently freed people, funnelling them into convict leasing systems. Virginia’s Vagrancy Act of 1866 forced “vagrants” into labour for up to three months; if they fled and were recaptured, they would work wearing ball and chain. In effect, though not in declared intent, the Act criminalised attempts by impoverished freed people to seek out their own families and rebuild their lives.
The pattern is this: power defines crime in ways that protect property and discipline labour. The wanderer is dangerous not because she harms anyone but because she cannot be fixed in place, taxed, employed. The nomad unsettles the bureaucrat’s need for addresses and registers. Consider the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act of 1959, which criminalises begging in India. The law does not ask why a person is on the street; it treats the visibility of poverty as a disturbance to public order. Crime, in this reading, is less about harm inflicted and more about order disturbed — specifically, an order that benefits those with the authority to write laws.
This is where I think of Victor Hugo’s fury in Les Misérables, and its relevance. Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread; the state hounds him for decades. Hugo’s indignation was directed less at the theft than at a system that equated hunger with moral depravity. The question Hugo poses — what is the greater crime, to steal bread or to let children starve? — has never received a satisfactory legal answer. We have built elaborate architectures of punishment for the first and almost none for the second.
Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) shows a man robbed of his means of livelihood, driven by desperation to steal, and immediately caught — while the original injustice against him is unaddressed. Vetrimaaran’s Visaranai (2015) depicts how police in India pick up vulnerable migrant workers for crimes they did not commit simply to close cases. When clearance rates matter more than truth, the expendable become suspects.
The US holds roughly 5 per cent of the world’s population but nearly 20 per cent of its prisoners — approximately 1.9 million people, a disproportionate number of them poor and non-white. Jeffrey H Reiman and Paul Leighton, in The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, argue that the system is designed to fail in precisely this way: it focuses public anxiety on “street crime” while obscuring the far greater damage caused by corporate wrongdoing.
Loïc Wacquant, in Punishing the Poor, describes how the “invisible hand” of the free market has been joined by the “iron fist” of the penal state. The prison, in this analysis, is not a solution to crime but a warehouse for populations rendered surplus by deindustrialisation and welfare retrenchment. It is also, increasingly, an economy unto itself — a $4 billion annual industry in private prisons alone in the US, not counting the far larger ecosystem of construction contracts, food services, and prison labour.
In India, prison occupancy rates often exceed 100 per cent capacity, and a significant proportion of inmates are undertrials — legally innocent until proven guilty. Lengthy pre-trial detention effectively punishes poverty, since those who cannot afford bail remain inside.
This brings us to the uncomfortable question that societies have largely avoided: what is crime, actually? If harm is the criterion, then wage theft — which costs American workers an estimated $50 billion annually — should be prosecuted more vigorously than shoplifting. If public safety is the standard, then corporate negligence that kills workers or poisons communities should attract harsher penalties than street violence.
Instead, individual prosecutions accompany only 27 per cent of corporate leniency agreements. The executives of Boeing, Wells Fargo, and Purdue Pharma faced no individual criminal accountability for schemes that devastated thousands.
Yet contemporary societies have not fully absorbed this insight. We glamorise certain crimes — the rogue trader, the charismatic don, the “disruptor” who bends rules — while trivialising systemic harm. Technology has amplified these disparities rather than correcting them. Algorithmic policing concentrates surveillance in poor neighbourhoods, generating more arrests not because more crimes occur there but because that is where the algorithms look. Meanwhile, the harms enabled by technology — data theft affecting millions, algorithmic discrimination, environmental devastation — remain largely outside criminal frameworks. The powerful commit their harms at scale and call it innovation; the poor commit theirs in desperation and call it crime.
The selective enforcement extends to new terrains. Cancel culture, for all its excesses, is a popular attempt to create accountability where legal systems have failed — to name as harmful what the law protects or ignores. Its flaws are obvious: it frequently ignores due process and collapses distinctions between offences. The underlying tension is familiar: we distrust institutions yet crave justice; we fear impunity but are impatient with process. In the rush to condemn, allegation and proof blur. The mob is indeed an ugly alternative to justice, but it mostly appears where justice has absented itself.
Authoritarian regimes exploit these ambiguities differently. By broadening definitions of sedition or public disorder, they reclassify dissent as a crime. What was once political speech becomes unlawful assembly; what was once investigative reporting becomes defamation. The criminal code stretches to accommodate power. In societies where land and lineage still determine status, local elites may influence policing and prosecution, reframing disputes over property or honour as criminal accusations against those lower in hierarchy.
What might a more honest approach look like? First, it would require acknowledging that criminal law has always been a political instrument, shaped by power rather than neutral principle. This does not mean abandoning the law but subjecting it to continuous democratic scrutiny. Second, it would demand proportionality — matching punishment to actual harm. Environmental destruction that poisons water supplies would carry penalties commensurate with its impact; non-violent offences rooted in poverty would be addressed through social policy rather than incarceration. Third, it would recognise that incarceration is among the least effective responses to most social problems. Evidence from multiple countries suggests that education and vocational training in prisons reduce recidivism. Yet such programmes rarely generate political applause.
Criminal justice reform has gained rhetorical support across political spectrums in recent years, but the reforms enacted have been modest, often cosmetic. Genuine reform would require confronting uncomfortable truths about class, caste, and power. It is easier to debate sentence lengths than to ask why some harms are criminalised and others are not.
The communities that G.N. Devy and Dakxin Chharra spoke about know something the rest of us prefer to forget: that the label “criminal” can be applied to anyone the powerful find inconvenient. Their ancestors committed no crimes; they were simply poor, mobile, and outside the colonial administrative imagination. The label stuck for 150 years. It continues to shape police behaviour, marriage prospects, access to housing and employment. It demonstrates that crime is not only an act but an identity that can be assigned, and that once assigned, proves almost impossible to shed.
Until we face and address this history — until we ask why we put people in cells for being homeless or hungry or born into the wrong community — we will continue to call punishment justice and wonder why the prisons stay full while the crimes that matter most go unnamed. The word “criminal” will not disappear. But it need not function as an inherited curse. It can become what it was meant to be: a precise description of conduct that demonstrably injures others, not a shorthand for class, caste, or inconvenience.
Do watch the interviews of Devy and Chharra and as always write back with your comments.
Wishing you a meaningful week ahead,
Jinoy Jose P.
Digital Editor, Frontline
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