Criminalisation
Definition
The formal process by which a legislature converts a previously lawful or merely deviant act into a criminal offence, typically by enacting or amending a statute.
Related terms
- Moral Panic
- A period of intense, media-driven public anxiety about a group or behaviour perceived as an exceptional threat to social order. Coined by...
- Codification
- The consolidation of criminal law into a single systematic statute, or code, drafted in advance, as opposed to letting offences accumulate through...
- Harm Principle
- The idea, associated with John Stuart Mill, that the only legitimate ground for the state to restrict a person's conduct through law...
- Legal Moralism
- The position, associated with Patrick Devlin, that the state may criminalise conduct simply because a society's shared moral code condemns it, even...
- Legalistic Definition of Crime
- Sutherland's definition: crime is behaviour prohibited by the state as injurious to the state, punishable by law. It ties the concept of...
- Mala in Se
- An act treated as inherently wrong in itself, such as murder or rape, independent of whether a statute names it. The wrongness...
- Mala Prohibita
- An act that is wrong only because a statute prohibits it, such as jaywalking or unlicensed fishing. Remove the statute and the...
- Overcriminalisation
- A pattern in which legislatures create so many criminal offences, including minor regulatory ones, that the criminal law's reach outgrows its capacity...
- Social Construction of Crime
- The view that what counts as criminal is not fixed by nature but produced through social, political and historical processes, so the...
- Conflict Criminology
- A family of theories holding that criminal law and its enforcement reflect the interests of powerful social groups rather than universal moral...
- Consensus vs Conflict View of Law
- Two theoretical accounts of who defines crime: consensus sees law as codifying shared values, conflict sees it as reflecting the interests of...
- Critical Criminology
- An umbrella term for approaches that examine crime and criminal justice through the lens of structural power, including class, race, gender, and...
Explained in these topics
- Conflict, Radical and Critical Criminology (UGC-NET Unit IV)Austin Turk's term for the process by which conflict between authorities and subjects results in particular conduct being defined and treated as criminal.
- Crime, Deviance and the Limits of Criminalisation
- Crime vs Deviance: Legal and Social Definitions (Unit I)The process by which an act moves from ordinary deviance, or from no attention at all, into a formal legal prohibition.
- The Legislature, Lawmaking, and the Decision to CriminaliseThe legislative act of declaring a category of conduct a criminal offence, usually by statute, and attaching a penal sanction to it.
- Role of Legislature in Criminal Lawmaking (UGC-NET Unit II)The legislative act of declaring a category of conduct a criminal offence, usually by statute, and attaching a penal sanction to it.