How does the state deliver justice to citizens? Are certain groups disadvantaged while seeking help from law enforcement and the courts? This book charts, for the first time, the full trajectory of accessing justice in India’s criminal justice system. It highlights a pattern of “multistage” discrimination, characterized by a more onerous process and unequal outcomes for women at successive steps of seeking restitution. To address discrimination and amplify the voices of victims of violence against women, the book explores the impact of gender representation in law enforcement through all-female “enclaves” or women-only police stations. It shows that certain forms of representation in which segregation is embedded can lead to unintended consequences. Crime and Punishment in India utilizes a range of research designs, from quasi-experiments and experiments to machine learning applied to big data and ethnography. A significant contribution lies in the introduction of a fine-grained dataset based on half a million police reports that are subsequently linked to court files. The book not only sheds light on justice delivery in the world’s largest democracy but also transports readers into the world of crime and punishment in India.
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“How the state delivers justice is a central challenge for all states, not least the world’s most populous democracy. This remarkable book combines a forensic analysis using frontier methods in social science while remaining relevant to the most important policy issues. It sets the standard for future research in this area.”
—Sir Tim Besley, W. Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); author of Principled Agents: The Political Economy of Good Government
“The first step toward addressing an issue is acknowledging it. Crime & Punishment in India sheds light on a long-overlooked issue: gendered access to India’s criminal justice system. Written in a lucid and eye-opening manner, this book is a crucial intervention in justice conversations. One of the book’s most compelling contributions is its introduction of the concept of multi-stage discrimination, a nuanced examination of the layered power imbalances embedded within our unequal society. Machine learning and tools of causal inference have been employed, tracking cases from police reports to judicial outcomes, even integrating personal narratives. Insightful and timely, this book is a necessary intervention in conversations about justice in India.”
—Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
“Though we have long suspected that the path to justice for women in India is paved with inequities, Jassal’s meticulous analyses sweep away any shreds of doubt. By following hundreds of thousands of case reports through the entire justice process, he shows that crimes reported by women are given unequal treatment, and that creating all-women police cadres does not overcome this discrimination. Exacting and compassionate, Jassal’s book is a must read for scholars and policy-makers.”
—Dawn Teele, SNF Agora Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University; author of Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote
“This comprehensive analysis brilliantly shows that understanding discrimination in criminal justice systems requires assessing biases at every stage – from crime registration through investigation, trial, and adjudication – because disadvantages compound. Required reading for anyone interested in developing world policing, this book sets a new standard for how to study bureaucracies by demonstrating that without taking a comprehensive view we will fundamentally misunderstand what drives outcomes.”
—Jake Shapiro, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University; author of Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict