Under the Economic Lecture Series, a guest talk on ‘Economic Analysis of Criminal Behavior’ was held at IIM Indore on December 30, 2016. Mr. Abhishek Upadhyaya, Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate of Raebareli was the speaker for the talk with a special reference to the Indian scenario.
Mr. Upadhyaya began his speech talking about the definition of crime and how it is a function of the probability of getting convicted and the probability of getting punished, among various other economic factors. With various economics-based derivations, he demonstrated the importance of a criminal to prefer risk for him to commit a crime, and therefore, get deterred by an increase in the probability of getting convicted. This, he added, would increase charge-sheeting rate and reduce social loss. Mr. Upadhyaya also mentioned that criminals act based on the principle of bounded rationality, and like everyone else, are not completely rational.
Mr. Upadhyaya then moved on to his analysis of crime data gathered by the NCRB between the year 1953-2015 and provided important insights about the change in rate of crime, indicating that charge-sheeting rate has shown an almost inversely proportional relation with conviction rate for most crimes. Sharing an example of a case he recently worked on, Mr. Upadhyaya threw light upon pendency in Indian courts and the various conspicuous, institutional, and structural factors causing the same.
The talk concluded with a Q&A session.