Specific Aspects of Crime in Pakistan

To make a realistic assessment of the present situation of crime in Pakistan, it is necessary to take a brief look at the society and crime conditions before independence and compare the two.

There is a direct relationship between population and crime. As the population increases, the crime rate also rises. Population has its own characteristics, which are reflected in crime. The population of Pakistan has its own distinct features, and the pattern of crime here is also specific. Pakistani society is a dislocated society, and in these fifty years it has not been able to establish its roots in the ground in the same way as it had before independence.

Before independence, crime in society was not as widespread. In old Punjab (excluding urban populations), crime was very low. The reason was that the roots of society were very deep, and both formal and informal controls were fully functioning. For generations, people lived in the same streets and neighborhoods. They had kinship ties among themselves, and even neighborhood relations had the form of extended family ties. Before committing any illegal act, a person would think about what the neighbors or community would say or think. The person committing a wrong act had to continue living there, arrange marriages for his children, and maintain social relations within the same locality. Therefore, a person living in such a society had to consider the long-term and serious consequences before committing any wrongdoing. This acted as a major barrier, and people remained protected from crime. In criminological terms, this is called traditional social control.

In those times, if a stranger passed through a neighborhood, people would become alert—questioning why he had come, whom he wanted to meet, and for what purpose. If his intentions were clear, people would remain quiet; but if he appeared suspicious, the community would question him and sometimes even confront him. When outsiders realized that residents were so vigilant, they avoided coming with bad intentions. This too was a form of social control that acted as a strong barrier against crime.

Living together for generations also meant that people were closely connected through caste and kinship, and were fully aware of each other’s family circumstances. Everyone knew how many children a person had, how many sons and daughters, their ages, and what they were doing—whether studying, working, or engaged in business. With such familiarity, no illegal act could remain hidden. As a result, people lived very cautious lives. Every step of a young man was observed, and every glance of a young woman was noted. This was a form of strict social monitoring, which proved highly effective in preventing law-breaking tendencies.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim gave this kind of arrangement a name: mechanical solidarity, the cohesion of small, undifferentiated communities held together by shared values and beliefs strong enough to function as a collective conscience, pressing individual members toward the same standards of behavior almost automatically. What replaced it after 1947 was closer to what Durkheim called organic solidarity – the looser cohesion of larger, more differentiated societies, where people are bound together less by shared belief and direct surveillance than by mutual dependence on each other’s specialized roles. Partition did not allow Pakistan’s villages and kinship networks to evolve gradually from one form to the other; it broke them apart in a single displacement. Millions of people arrived in unfamiliar towns and cities with no generational history there, no extended family watching from next door, and no neighbors who had known their grandparents. The same informal machinery described above – the watchful street, the closely tracked reputation, the impossibility of hiding wrongdoing from people who had known you your whole life – simply had nothing to attach itself to in these new, mixed, fast-growing urban settlements.

This is close to the pattern the American sociologists Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay documented in Chicago’s own rapidly growing immigrant neighborhoods in the 1920s and 1930s, work that became the foundation of what criminology now calls social disorganization theory. Shaw and McKay found that crime stayed concentrated in the same neighborhoods generation after generation, even as one immigrant community moved out and an entirely different one moved in – which told them the cause was never really about which people lived there, but about three structural conditions in the neighborhoods themselves: persistent poverty, a mix of different ethnic and migrant groups without a shared history, and constant residential turnover that never let stable community ties form. Wherever those three conditions converged, Shaw and McKay found, the ordinary institutions of informal control – family networks, local elders, watchful neighbors – lost their grip, whatever the good intentions of the people living there. Post-independence Pakistan’s major cities absorbed exactly that combination at speed: sudden poverty and dislocation among the newly arrived, populations drawn from many different regions and backgrounds thrown together with no shared local history, and a level of residential instability that gave the old village-style social monitoring no fixed ground to stand on. The specific aspects of crime in Pakistan that later chapters describe are, in large part, the direct inheritance of that one historical rupture: a society whose traditional machinery of informal control was built for the mechanical solidarity of the village it left behind, operating instead inside cities that never gave it the chance to rebuild.