Economics of Criminal Behaviour: An overview of Convicted Property Offenders in Tamil Nadu

Effective response towards crime is one of the essential priorities for all society. In order to provide an effective response, it is significant to understand the relationship between crime and various factors. Economics has always been a social science which focuses on resource availability as its demand. The imbalance created has paved way for economic distortions and impact on wellbeing of mankind. In the pursuit to improve financial wellbeing, criminals have always been guided by economic factors and thereby providing a wide scope to analyze inter-dependence between economics and crime. Therefore, an attempt has been made to find out the socio-economic status and various factors for committing property crime among 654 convicted property crime offenders housed in the eleven prisons of the state of Tamil Nadu. Findings reveal that almost all of the respondents are belong to poor socio economic status and they have cited various factors such as personal factors, situational factors resulted in committing property crime. The derived finding will be more useful in preventing individuals from committing property crime by understanding and rectifying the causative factors.