Jain Sahitya Samaroha Guchha 1

Author(s): Ramanlal C Shah, Kantilal D Kora, Pannalal R Shah, Gulab Dedhiya
Publisher: Mahavir Jain Vidyalay

Page 405

386
Jain Sahitya Samaroh
With its inter-discipiinary aspects, its changing value-concepts and its transitional phase, penology, in its confrontation with the immutable Jaina Scriptures, is defined as STRATEGY IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CRIME and the Jain Penology is defined as Strategy in the fight against Karman.
Penology so defined can safely avoid the conflict and controversy with the sociological thearists who visualize crime not as 'an inherent property of an act' but as mere deviance not conforming to the social norms. If social re-arrangement can immunize individual against crime, the technique of individual re-arrangement, known technically as the process of 'samvara' (impeding of Karma) can equally and more efficaciously immunize the society from crime.
All the penal codes, ranging their penalties from mild admonition to the cruel death sentence are but as many social acknowledgments of the proclaimed failure to cure the individual human mind of its criminal tendency. Combat at.psyphic and psychological levels to treat deviance so as to make the human conduct conform to the social norms is still at an experimental and investigational stage. Before the outcome of this treatment method is known, the sociological theorists, denouncing all the efforts at correctionalism, insist upon social re-arrangement with the fundamental social changes where there would be neither opportunity nor inclination to commit crime !