SASCV Wall of Fame

Dr. J. M. Kumarappa (1886–1957)

Director, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (1941–1953) · Member, Rajya Sabha (1952–1954)

Dr. Jagadisan Mohandas Kumarappa laid the institutional foundations on which professional criminology and correctional administration were built in India. As the first Indian Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), he made criminology part of professional education, brought the United Nations and international expertise into Indian corrections, and trained the teachers who carried the discipline forward.

Born on 16 April 1886 in the Madras Presidency, he studied in the United States, taking a bachelor’s degree at Ohio Wesleyan University, a degree in theology at Boston University and a master’s degree at Harvard, before completing his PhD in the social sciences at Columbia University, where Dr. B. R. Ambedkar was among his contemporaries. He joined TISS when it opened in 1936 and served as its Director from 1941 to 1953.

Under his leadership TISS developed its specialisations in social work, including criminology and correctional administration, and joined classroom learning with field practice. Among the scholars he shaped was Professor J. J. Panakal, who went on to head the Institute’s criminology department. His own writing addressed beggary, the rehabilitation of offenders, child labour and social welfare, and as founding editor of the Indian Journal of Social Work he gave Indian social science one of its first professional journals.

In 1949 the Secretary-General of the United Nations selected him as one of a small group of advisers on crime prevention. He worked with the United Nations and the Government of India to bring the American criminologist and UN correctional expert Dr. Walter C. Reckless to India to study the country’s prisons and recommend reforms. Reckless’s report, Prison Administration in India, became a landmark in Indian correctional reform and led to the All India Jail Manual Committee of 1957–59. In the early 1950s the two men organised at TISS the first national training programme in correctional administration for prison and probation officers, work that informed the Probation of Offenders Act, 1958. Their collaboration also led TISS to establish its Department of Criminology and Correctional Administration in 1954, the first department of its kind in India.

Nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1952, he served until 1954 and used Parliament to press for social welfare, education and social science research. He died in October 1957. His partnership with Reckless is honoured in the Kumarappa–Reckless Award, instituted by the Indian Society of Criminology in 1973 as its highest honour, and in the annual Kumarappa–Reckless Lecture at TISS. Every Indian criminologist who has received that award carries his name.

Professor Walter C. Reckless (1899–1988)

United Nations Expert in Criminology and Correctional Administration, India (1951–1952) · Professor, Ohio State University (1940–1969)

Professor Walter C. Reckless, one of the leading American criminologists of the twentieth century, spent less than a year in India, yet few people have left a deeper mark on Indian criminology and corrections. His mission for the United Nations produced the first major study of Indian prisons after Independence, trained the officers who would lead them, and helped bring criminology into Indian universities.

Born on 19 January 1899 and raised in Philadelphia, he earned his PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he worked with the pioneering urban sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess; his dissertation was published as Vice in Chicago. He taught at Vanderbilt University from 1924 to 1940 and then moved to Ohio State University, where he built its programme in criminology and corrections over nearly three decades.

Appointed a consultant to the United Nations Social Defence Section as an expert in criminology and correctional administration, he came to India under the UN Technical Assistance Administration and stayed from October 1951 to August 1952. His task was to study how India’s jails were run and to recommend how correctional training could be improved. Dr. J. M. Kumarappa, then Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), acted as the link between the Government of India and the UN, and TISS became his base.

He travelled through fifteen states, visiting prisons and jails as well as police stations, courts, probation offices, juvenile courts, remand homes, reformatory schools and beggars’ homes. He then ran a training programme at TISS of nearly six months for 47 senior prison officers from 17 states, who came looking for a new philosophy of corrections and returned to put it into practice in their own institutions. His final months went into his report, Prison Administration in India, regarded as the first major report on the Indian prison system after Independence.

His recommendations had lasting effects. The Jail Training School at Lucknow introduced orientation, refresher and pre-promotion courses for correctional staff, a model that other states later followed, and his report led to the All India Jail Manual Committee of 1957–59. In 1954 TISS began India’s first Department of Criminology and Correctional Administration, and other universities soon followed, among them the University of Saugar, which created a Department of Criminology and Forensic Science in 1959. His students included Professor J. J. Panakal, who studied under him at Ohio State before heading the criminology department at TISS.

He died on 20 September 1988 in Dublin, Ohio. India remembers his mission in the Kumarappa–Reckless Award, instituted by the Indian Society of Criminology in 1973 for significant contributions to teaching, research or administration in criminology and criminal justice, and in the Kumarappa–Reckless Lecture at TISS. His name stands beside Kumarappa’s because the work was shared: an Indian institution builder and an international expert, together laying the foundations of Indian corrections.

Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer (1915–2014)

First Honorary President, Indian Society of Criminology · Judge, Supreme Court of India (1973–1980)

Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, one of India’s most celebrated judges, brought to criminology both the authority of the bench and the conscience of a reformer. When the Indian Society of Criminology was established in 1970, he was invited to be its Honorary President, delivering the presidential address at its annual conferences and lending the young society his stature at a decisive moment in its growth. Few people did more to turn the findings of criminology into the law of the land.

Born in Palakkad on 15 November 1915, he began practising law in 1938 in the chambers of his father at Thalassery. Elected to Kerala’s first Legislative Assembly in 1957, he served as a minister in the state’s first government, where his portfolios included home, law and prisons, and he began reforming the state’s prisons. He later served as a member of the Law Commission of India and, from 1973 to 1980, as a Judge of the Supreme Court of India.

On the Supreme Court he transformed Indian prison jurisprudence. In Sunil Batra v. Delhi Administration (1978 and 1980) and Charles Sobhraj v. Superintendent, Central Jail, Tihar (1978), the Court rejected the “hands-off” doctrine and held that prisoners do not lose their fundamental rights at the prison gate; in his words, prisons are built with the stones of law. In Prem Shankar Shukla v. Delhi Administration (1980) the Court held handcuffing to be prima facie inhuman, and he warned that a prison term must never become a postgraduate course in crime.

He was equally concerned with those who were in prison without having been convicted. His judgment in Gudikanti Narasimhulu v. Public Prosecutor (1978), which opens with the question “Bail or jail?”, gave Indian law the principle that bail is the rule and jail the exception. In M. H. Hoskot v. State of Maharashtra (1978) he held that free legal aid for the poor is a duty of the State, and he is regarded as the pioneer of the legal aid movement in India, having chaired the Government’s Expert Committee on Legal Aid in 1973. His readiness to treat letters from prisoners and citizens as petitions helped to create public interest litigation, which opened the courts to those who could not reach them.

His judgments on sentencing, including Mohammad Giasuddin v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1977), argued for reformation rather than retribution, and he wrote of meditation and yoga as therapeutic tools of criminology. After retirement he chaired the National Expert Committee on Women Prisoners (1986–87), the first national inquiry into the conditions of women in Indian prisons, whose report shaped later prison manuals, including provisions for the children of women prisoners.

He was also a founding figure of Indian victimology. On 14 August 1992 he inaugurated the Indian Society of Victimology at the University of Madras, and he returned to deliver the valedictory address at its first biennial conference. In 1996 he chaired the one-day workshop of senior judges, police officers, prosecutors and academics that reviewed, amended and finalised the Society’s draft Victims (Criminal Injuries) Right to Assistance Bill, and he then wrote to the Union Home Minister urging Parliament to enact it for all the States. For him, a justice system that cared for prisoners but forgot their victims was only half just.

The Indian Society of Criminology elected him a Fellow and conferred on him the Kumarappa–Reckless Award in 1988. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 1999. He died in Kochi on 4 December 2014, at the age of 99, still writing on justice and the rights of the poor. For Indian criminology, he showed that the measure of a justice system is how it treats those who are inside its prisons.

Professor (Dr.) S. M. Diaz, IPS (Retd.) (1919–2000)

Director, National Police Academy (1974–1977) · Former Inspector General of Prisons, Tamil Nadu

Professor S. M. Diaz was a mathematician, soldier-teacher, police leader and scholar, and one of the practitioners who brought criminology into the Indian university. He is remembered, with Professor T. E. Shanmugam, as a founder of the Department of Criminology at the University of Madras and as the “Philosopher-Policeman” of Indian criminology.

Born in Manapad, Tamil Nadu, in 1919, he studied mathematics at St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchirappalli, and stayed on to teach there; it used to be said that he taught precise mathematics in elaborate English. As a student he was a cadet, and later an officer, in the University Officers Training Corps. From 1940 to 1949 he taught at the Military Academy in Dehra Dun.

After Independence, when the departure of British officers left India short of senior police officers, the Government made a special recruitment to the Indian Police Service. Diaz was selected and allotted to the Madras cadre, and in 1949 he topped the first batch at the police training college at Mount Abu, the institution that later became the National Police Academy. He returned to the Academy as its Director from 1974 to 1977 and steered its move in 1975 from Mount Abu to its permanent campus in Hyderabad, today the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy. He was awarded the President’s Police Medal for Meritorious Service and the President’s Police Medal for Distinguished Service, and retired as Inspector General of Prisons, Tamil Nadu.

In 1977, together with Professor T. E. Shanmugam, he developed the idea of a Department of Criminology to be carved out of the Department of Psychology at the University of Madras. The department was established in 1983, and the two of them are regarded as its founders. He served it as Visiting Professor until his death and, remarkably, in his seventies completed a PhD in criminology in the very department he had helped to found and seen grow into a doctoral centre. He wrote widely for journals and lectured at universities across the world on prison reform, social equality, women’s empowerment and victimology; his writings include New Dimensions to the Police Role and Functions in India (National Police Academy, 1976).

A lifelong reader of the Thirukkural, he published Aphorisms of Valluvar: Commentary and Comparative Study (1982) and, in 2000, a complete English translation of all 1,330 couplets, Thirukkural: English Translation and Explanation, in two volumes. This work, together with his writing on justice and society, earned him the title of “Philosopher-Policeman”.

He also left his mark on international victim justice. In 1985 he led the Indian delegation, deputed by the Ministry of Home Affairs, to the Seventh United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders at Milan, the first UN Congress to place victims on its agenda. When the delegations of the United States and the Soviet Union resisted the provisions on victims of abuse of power, Diaz, as Chairman of the Indian delegation, brought the dissenters to the table over lunches and evening meetings and, after several rounds of discussion and amendment, persuaded them to let the Declaration pass unanimously. The UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power on 29 November 1985.

The Indian Society of Criminology honoured him with its highest award, the Walter C. Reckless–Kumarappa Award, for his eminent contributions to the growth of Indian criminology. The Department of Criminology, University of Madras, named “Diaz Hall” in his memory, and the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, featured him as an “Eminent Criminologist” in its newsletter Crime and Justice Perspective (February 2004).

He died on 20 February 2000 in Hyderabad, where he had gone to address police officers at the very Academy he once headed. He began life as a teacher and ended it as a scholar.

Professor T. E. Shanmugam (1921–1997)

Founder Chairman, Indian Society of Criminology (1970–1981) · Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Madras

Professor T. E. Shanmugam was one of the founding pillars of criminology in India. A psychologist by training, he brought a scientific, personality-based approach to the study of crime and delinquency when the discipline was still taking root in the country.

In April 1967 he became President of the Criminology and Forensic Science Study Circle at the University of Madras, and in 1970 he convened the meeting that resolved to turn the Study Circle into a national body, the Indian Society of Criminology (ISC). He was elected its Founder Chairman and led it for eleven years, from 1970 to 1981. Working closely with Mr. N. Pitchandi and other academics and criminal justice professionals, he guided the Society through its formative years and laid the foundation on which it stands today. The ISC elected him a Fellow in 1975 and conferred on him the Kumarappa–Reckless Award in 1985. He served on the Editorial Board of the Indian Journal of Criminology from its inception until his last day, and was known for his uncompromising insistence on quality.

As Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Madras, he brought criminology to the University from the Madras Medical College at a time when the course might otherwise have been discontinued. In 1977, together with Professor S. M. Diaz, he developed the idea of a separate Department of Criminology, to be carved out of the Department of Psychology; the new department was established in 1983 under the headship of Dr. K. Chockalingam. On retirement he was named Professor Emeritus in Psychology, a position he held until his death on 5 August 1997.

After post-doctoral research with Professor H. J. Eysenck at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, he returned to India to test Eysenck’s theory of criminality among Indian offenders, and guided many doctoral studies on personality and crime, including a study of the psychological and social aspects of murder. His book Psychosocial Factors Underlying Juvenile Delinquency (University of Madras, 1980) compared 150 institutionalised delinquents with 150 non-delinquents and identified extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism and criminal propensity among the psychological factors in delinquency. His Effects of Transcendental Meditation on Prisoners: A Psychological Study, a 65-page monograph in the Indian Journal of Criminology (1992), compared inmates practising meditation with matched groups receiving relaxation therapy or no treatment, and was an early example of experimental research in Indian corrections. He also edited Researches in Personality and Social Problems (University of Madras, 1973).

Generous with his time, he welcomed anyone who sought his guidance. He enjoyed the company of young scholars, listened closely to their research, and rarely missed a weekly seminar, clinical conference or doctoral viva voce. With a humanistic outlook and scientific rigour, he left an indelible mark on Indian criminology.

Professor J. J. Panakal (1922–1995)

First Head, Department of Criminology and Correctional Administration, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (from 1954) · Former President, Indian Society of Criminology

Professor J. J. Panakal was one of the first Indian criminologists and, for three decades, the leading teacher of the discipline in the country. As the first Head of the Department of Criminology and Correctional Administration at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, he built the programme that trained a generation of criminologists and correctional professionals, and he remained a vigorous advocate of reform in the administration of justice in India.

A student of Dr. J. M. Kumarappa, he graduated from TISS in 1946 and won a scholarship to the Ohio State University, where he studied criminology under Professor Walter C. Reckless, the American criminologist whose work as a United Nations correctional expert shaped India’s early correctional policy. On his return, he led the specialisation in criminology and correctional administration that TISS began under his stewardship, which became its Department of Criminology and Correctional Administration in 1954, and headed the department for some thirty years.

His teaching rested on a distinctive idea. He brought serving officers of the criminal justice system into the same classroom as fresh university graduates, believing that young students who learned alongside trained and experienced officers would, over time, professionalise the police, prisons and correctional services. Many of the officers and teachers he trained went on to lead those services and to teach criminology across India. His writings include Crime and Corrections in India (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, 1989).

He played a key role in establishing the Indian Society of Criminology and later served as its President. His article “An Agenda for Criminology” opened the first issue of the Indian Journal of Criminology in 1973. The Society elected him a Fellow and conferred on him the Kumarappa–Reckless Award in 1975.

His standing extended well beyond India. He was the first Indian academic to be appointed a United Nations correspondent in the field of the prevention of crime and the treatment of offenders, served with the International Society of Criminology, the International Society of Social Defence and the International Penal and Penitentiary Foundation, and was nominated a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology.

Unassuming, approachable and friendly, he remained the pre-eminent Indian criminologist until his death on 18 December 1995. He gave Indian criminology its first professional school, and its first generation of professionals.

Professor N. R. Madhava Menon (1935–2019)

Chairman, Committee on Draft National Policy on Criminal Justice (2006–2007) · Founder Director, National Law School of India University and National Judicial Academy

Professor N. R. Madhava Menon is remembered as the father of modern legal education in India. For criminology and victimology, his lasting contribution was to draft, for the first time, a national policy for India’s criminal justice system that placed the victim of crime at its centre, and to build the institutions that trained the lawyers and judges who administer it.

Born in Thiruvananthapuram on 4 May 1935, he studied law in Kerala and took his LL.M. and PhD at Aligarh Muslim University. He taught law at Aligarh and later headed the Faculty of Law at Delhi University, where he built on its legal aid clinics and championed what he called “socially relevant legal education”: training lawyers not only in the rules of law but in their responsibility to society, and especially to those who cannot afford justice. His handbook Clinical Legal Education (1998) carried this approach to law schools across India. In 1986 he founded the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, which he led for twelve years. He went on to found the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata (1998–2003) and, at the request of the Supreme Court, the National Judicial Academy in Bhopal, which he directed until 2006. Through the Academy, judges across India received systematic training in the administration of criminal justice for the first time.

His concern for victims began well before the policy. Soon after the Indian Society of Victimology was founded in 1992, he and his students at the National Law School helped the Society prepare a draft bill on assistance to victims of crime. The Society’s second biennial conference (1994) debated the draft clause by clause, and a workshop chaired by Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer finalised it in 1996 as the Victims (Criminal Injuries) Right to Assistance Bill, which was sent to the Government of India as a model for national legislation. He remained one of the strongest voices for a law that would make compensation to victims mandatory.

In May 2006 the Ministry of Home Affairs appointed him Chairman of the Committee to Draft a National Policy on Criminal Justice, following a recommendation of the Malimath Committee that the Government state a coherent policy on all major issues of criminal justice. The Committee’s report, presented in 2007, recommended reclassifying crimes so as to empower victims, speedy and effective delivery of justice, sentencing guidelines for purposive punishment, protection of women, children and other weaker sections, the use of science and technology in criminal justice, and compensation for victims of crime. It called for facilities for victims and witnesses in criminal courts and for their courteous treatment, and for a bureau of criminal justice statistics and a research division within the Ministry of Home Affairs. The Government never formally adopted the draft as national policy, but it was circulated to the States, and those recommendations that could be carried out by administrative action were issued to them as advisories.

He carried the same message to the criminological community, presenting the draft policy at an All India Criminology Conference in Bhopal that called for a victim justice system in India. Although the policy remained a draft, it helped shift Indian thinking on criminal justice from the offender and the State towards the needs and rights of victims.

Among many honours, he received the International Bar Association’s Living Legend of Law Award in 1994 and the Padma Shri in 2003, and was awarded the Padma Bhushan posthumously in 2020. He died in Thiruvananthapuram on 8 May 2019. He gave Indian criminal justice not only better-trained lawyers and judges but a vision of justice in which the victim is no longer a forgotten party.

Professor Nandasena Ratnapala (1935–2007)

Founding father of criminology in Sri Lanka · Former Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Sri Jayewardenepura

Professor Nandasena Ratnapala is regarded as the founding father of criminology in Sri Lanka. He brought criminology into the Sri Lankan university curriculum, built the degree programmes through which the country trained its first criminologists, and showed by his own fieldwork how far a scholar must go to understand the people at the margins of society.

Born on 19 May 1935, he joined Vidyodaya University, today the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, as a lecturer in Sinhala in 1959 and moved in 1972 to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, where he became Professor. In the mid-1980s he introduced criminology into the curriculum, first as a final-year special subject taught together with social problems, and then, from the 1985/86 academic year, as a four-year special degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice, the first of its kind in Sri Lanka. Postgraduate diplomas and the M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. programmes in criminology followed under his direction. The programme he started grew, in 2016, into the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, still the only department of its kind in the country.

His research took him to the people that criminology studies. To write his study of beggars in Sri Lanka, first published in 1976 and revised in 1999, he lived for months on the streets of Colombo as a beggar, sleeping among them at Fort Railway Station. He argued that understanding and sympathy, rather than punishment alone, were the way to deal with the problem, and that supporting the destitute prevented crime. He wrote further on sex workers, on drug addiction and on behaviour change in the context of HIV/AIDS, and his books include The Police of Sri Lanka (1988) and Crime and Punishment in the Buddhist Tradition.

His concern for those at risk of crime was practical as well as scholarly. Troubled by the abuse that street children suffered after dark, he began the research project that led to the Sanhinda Children’s Home at Meegoda, so that these children might grow up as good citizens rather than as victims or offenders.

He died on 7 August 2007. The University of Sri Jayewardenepura honours him with the Professor Nandasena Ratnapala Prize and Gold Medal, awarded each year to the best graduates in Criminology and Criminal Justice. Every criminologist trained in Sri Lanka today studies in a discipline he brought into being.

Professor K. V. Kaliappan (1942–2015)

Former Chairman, Indian Society of Criminology · Professor and Head, Department of Psychology, University of Madras (until 2000)

Professor K. V. Kaliappan, known to generations of students as K.V.K., is regarded as the father of applied psychology in India. For criminology, his great contribution was to take psychology out of the classroom and into the work of preventing crime and rehabilitating offenders, delinquent children and people struggling with addiction.

Born on 20 August 1942 in Dharapuram, Tamil Nadu, into an agricultural family, he studied psychology at Presidency College, Chennai, earned a postgraduate diploma in medical and social psychology at NIMHANS, Bangalore, and took his doctorate in clinical psychology at the Department of Psychology, University of Madras, where Professor T. E. Shanmugam called him “my academic son”. He began his career at the Institute of Mental Health, Chennai, before joining the University of Madras, where he retired in 2000 as Professor and Head of the Department of Psychology.

An expert in projective testing, including the Rorschach Inkblot Test, behaviour modification, counselling and community psychology, he brought these clinical tools to bear on offenders and those at risk of offending. As President of the Juvenile Guidance Bureau, Chennai, an extension centre of the Department of Psychology, he led the adoption of psychological approaches to the prevention of juvenile delinquency and the rehabilitation of delinquent children.

He served the Indian Society of Criminology for many years as its Chairman. During his tenure the Society created and ran three Pudhu Vaazhvu (“New Life”) centres for the prevention and treatment of drug abuse and alcoholism at Salem, Vellore and Cuddalore, which treated more than 6,000 people in rural Tamil Nadu. It was a rare example of a criminological society running treatment services itself, and it showed how the prevention of substance-related crime could begin in the community rather than in the prison.

He guided some 40 doctoral and more than 150 M.Phil. researchers, many of them on crime, delinquency and addiction, and his students went on to become professors, directors of national institutes and practising counsellors. He also founded the International Society for Effective Living to bring psychological services to all sections of society, and as Coordinator of the National Service Scheme at the University of Madras he ran camps on drug abuse prevention that were adopted as models across India.

He died on 15 March 2015. He showed Indian criminology that the psychologist belongs not only in the clinic but also in the village, the juvenile home and the de-addiction centre.

More about Professor Kaliappan: kvkaliappan.org

Professor A. Sivamurthy (1944–2017)

Pioneer of crime geography in India · Former Professor and Head, Department of Criminology, University of Madras · First Secretary, Criminology and Forensic Science Study Circle (1967)

Professor A. Sivamurthy brought geography into Indian criminology. A geographer by training, he was among the first in India to ask not only why crime happens but where, and his studies of Madras (now Chennai) laid the foundations of crime geography and spatial criminology in the country.

He was present at the very beginning of organised criminology in Tamil Nadu. When the Criminology and Forensic Science Study Circle was established at the University of Madras in April 1967, he served as its first Secretary, alongside Professor T. E. Shanmugam as President. In 1970 the Study Circle became the Indian Society of Criminology, which he served for decades.

He held degrees in both of his disciplines: a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in geography, and the master’s degree in criminology and forensic science of the University of Madras. From 1968 to 1985 he taught geography, first at Periyar E.V.R. College, Tiruchirappalli, and then at Presidency College, Madras, writing the textbooks Geography of Settlements and Geomorphology for the Tamil Nadu Text Book Society. Alongside his teaching he published in the Indian Journal of Criminology year after year, taught criminology in the master’s programme, and between 1983 and 1985 jointly edited three volumes for the Indian Society of Criminology, among them Crimes in Banks and Frauds in Banks.

He completed his PhD at the University of Madras in 1981 with the thesis Spatial Pattern of Crimes and Criminal Behaviour in Madras City: A Crimino-Geographical Study. Mapping every reported crime and every offender’s residence by census division, he showed that the places where crimes occur and where offenders live vary across the city in step with its physical, social, demographic and occupational character. His study of the journeys offenders make found that many property offenders travel five to ten kilometres to commit crimes, and that commercial centres and transport terminals draw offenders from distant parts of the city. Tracing theft across Madras in 1965, 1970 and 1975, he showed how crime followed the movement of wealth from one neighbourhood to another, and urged the police to deploy their resources according to these changing patterns. Further studies tested classical models of urban structure against theft and house burglary, and mapped how the fear of crime varied across the city.

He joined the Department of Criminology of the University of Madras as Reader in 1985 and rose to become Professor of Criminology. While holding that chair, he served the University in senior administrative roles in the 1990s, as Controller of Examinations and, more than once, as Registrar in charge. He then returned to his department as Professor and Head, and led it until his retirement, after which he continued his research as a UGC Emeritus Fellow in the department. His work on the commuting of property offenders continued into the era of GIS, and his maps of Chennai’s police jurisdictions remain a baseline for researchers today.

The University of Madras honours his memory with the annual Professor A. Sivamurthy Endowment Lecture. Long before crime mapping software reached India, he mapped crime by hand, census division by census division. Indian crime mapping and spatial criminology are built on the ground he surveyed.

Professor K. Chockalingam (born 1945)

Founding President, Indian Society of Victimology (1992) · Founder Secretary, Indian Society of Criminology (1970) · Founding Head, Department of Criminology, University of Madras (1983)

Professor K. Chockalingam is widely regarded as the father of victimology in India. Over more than five decades he helped to found the country’s first criminological society, built one of its leading criminology departments, created its society of victimology, and carried the cause of crime victims from Indian classrooms to the United Nations and back into Indian law and policy.

He was a student in the second batch of the master’s programme in criminology and forensic science that began in Tamil Nadu in 1965, and in September 1967 he succeeded Dr. A. Sivamurthy as Secretary of the Criminology and Forensic Science Study Circle. When the Study Circle became the Indian Society of Criminology in 1970, he was its Founder Secretary, alongside Professor T. E. Shanmugam as Chairman. When criminology left the Department of Psychology to become an independent Department of Criminology at the University of Madras in April 1983, he became its founding Head.

At a time when victims were not a subject of study in any Indian university, his department organised the first seminar on victimology in India, devoted to access to justice, restitution, compensation and assistance for victims of crime; its papers were published as Readings in Victimology (1985). That year he attended the Seventh United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders at Milan as an individual expert, and witnessed the adoption of the Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, the “Magna Carta” for victims. In 1991 the World Society of Victimology co-opted him to its Executive Committee, and he later served as its Vice President.

Returning from the World Society’s symposium at Rio de Janeiro, he brought together academics, lawyers, police and correctional officers to found the Indian Society of Victimology in 1992, with himself as Founder President; the Society was inaugurated by Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer on 14 August 1992. Under his leadership the Society, with Professor N. R. Madhava Menon and his students, drafted a model Victims (Criminal Injuries) Right to Assistance Bill, finalised in 1996 at a workshop chaired by Justice Krishna Iyer and sent to the Government of India. The UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice commended the draft as a model, and the Malimath Committee on Reforms of the Criminal Justice System later endorsed the Society’s call for victim compensation. The Society’s efforts also led the Government of Tamil Nadu to create a Victims Assistance Fund in 1995, one of the first State schemes of its kind in India.

His research led to practical change. His studies of crime victimisation in the cities of Tamil Nadu and of the sexual harassment of women in public transport informed the State’s introduction of women-only buses, and his work brought victimology into police training. As Vice-Chancellor of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, from 2001, he oversaw the creation of its Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice in 2003. He has also served as Chairperson of the Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development and as Professor of Victimology at the Tokiwa International Victimology Institute in Japan, and he continues to teach and mentor as Professor Emeritus of Victimology at RV University, Bengaluru.

In 2024 the World Society of Victimology conferred on him its highest honour, the Hans von Hentig Award, making him the first Asian and the first Indian to receive it. The Indian Institute of Public Administration has honoured him with the Paul H. Appleby Award and, in 2026, the Dr. Rajendra Prasad Award. He gave Indian victimology its institutions, its first generation of scholars and its place in the world.

Mr. K. Senthilathiban (1959–2020)

Former Secretary, Indian Society of Criminology · Former Associate Editor, Indian Journal of Criminology

Mr. K. Senthilathiban belonged to the generation that kept Indian criminology’s institutions running after its founders. As Secretary of the Indian Society of Criminology and as an editor of the Indian Journal of Criminology, he gave years of quiet, practical service to the Society and its journal, and he helped carry criminology beyond the university into treatment, training and community work.

He joined the postgraduate course in criminology at the Department of Psychology, University of Madras, in 1979, and studied criminal psychology under Professor K. V. Kaliappan, who became his lifelong mentor. His first published research paper, on anxiety among juvenile delinquents, was written with Professor Kaliappan, and he remained associated with the department for more than two decades as a student, researcher and organiser.

He served on the Executive Council of the Indian Society of Criminology and became its Secretary when Professor Kaliappan was Chairman. He also served as Associate Editor of the Indian Journal of Criminology while Professor Kaliappan was its Editor, helping to sustain the country’s oldest criminology journal. With Professor Kaliappan he ran the Society’s three Pudhu Vaazhvu (“New Life”) centres for the prevention and treatment of alcoholism and drug abuse at Salem, Vellore and Cuddalore, one of the Society’s most significant contributions to the community.

From the early 1990s he turned increasingly to training and organisational development. An accredited trainer in entrepreneurship motivation, he founded the Sparks Development Group in 2001 and later SPACE and Sparks, taught as guest faculty at IIT Madras and the Loyola Institute of Business Administration, and carried the habits of a criminologist and psychologist, careful assessment and a concern for people, into his work with government, corporate and community organisations. He published fourteen research papers.

Those who knew him remember a warm voice, a ready argument and complete honesty. He was never a “yes man”, even to the teacher he revered. He died in 2020. His life shows that a discipline needs not only founders and theorists but also those who organise its conferences, edit its journals and keep its institutions alive.