“Welcome to India, where everything is against the law.” That is a line from a recent article in The Economist. India is said to have 7,305 crimes at the national level, with three-quarters of them punishable by imprisonment. According to The Economist, under section 40 of the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949, a person must hold a permit to drink liquor. A first violation of the law could attract a fine of 10,000 rupees (about $110) and up to six months in prison.

The penchant for rulemaking is said to be equally prevalent at the state level in India. In the state of Uttarakhand, two people in a romantic relationship who decide to live together must register and pay a fee within 30 days of cohabitation. Failure to do so carries a fine and up to three months in jail. If the relationship later sours and the couple decides to go their separate ways, they are required to pay another fee to de-register. The Economist says that because everything seems forbidden in India, Indians have become less law-abiding, not more. If there are so many rules, why even bother trying to obey any of them.

I have had a longstanding fascination with criminal codes because of how culture, religion, political ideology, stage of development and a host of other factors determine what behaviors different societies consider to be wrongful and deserving of punishment. I grew up in West Africa. In much of that region, polygamy is not a crime. It is widely practiced there. In the Western world, it is illegal to have more than one spouse. Adultery is deemed immoral and frowned upon here in the West but it is not criminalized. However, in some highly religious societies, an adulterous affair is an egregious crime for which the participants can be stoned to death.

Patriarchy is a global phenomenon. In many societies, men set the rules and quite often, they carefully limit the extent to which they themselves can be ensnared by the laws. In West Africa, men can have multiple wives but no woman would dare to acquire more than one husband because it is socially and culturally unacceptable. In conservative religious societies, women who participate in adulterous affairs are often punished more severely than the men involved, even though those males are co-conspirators in the “crime” and equally guilty, if not more.

The stage of a society’s development can greatly influence people’s thinking about criminality. In the late 17th century, a number of individuals in Massachusetts were accused of witchcraft. In what became known as the Salem witch trials, 19 men and women were found guilty and executed by hanging. According to some historical accounts, some of the accusers had been suffering from the effects of ergot poisoning that caused them to experience hallucinations. With enlightenment, such persecution will not occur in today’s Massachusetts, or anywhere else in America.

Unfortunately, that is not the case in some parts of rural West Africa. Because of widespread superstitious beliefs in the region, people frequently make baseless accusations of witchcraft. Unlike in 17th century Massachusetts, there are no trials. The accused, who are almost always frail, old women, are simply ostracized. Even their closest family members shun them, at a time when those elderly women need help and company the most. The only piece of good news for them is that suspected witches are not hanged to death in West Africa.

The people who set the rules in India take pains to list the thousands of behaviors that are deemed unlawful. In autocratic societies, authorities save themselves the hassle by making criminal codes so vague that pretty much anything can be considered a transgression under a single law. Article 293 of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Criminal Code says that “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” is a crime. The law is deliberately ambiguous, allowing bureaucrats to use it to arrest and charge anyone who does something that is unacceptable in their eyes. It is said to be a widely hated law in China because most Chinese think that their leaders use it to quash dissent and limit freedom of expression. According to China Media Project, an independent research project that studies the Chinese media landscape, “this charge could be brought against almost anyone living in China today.”

Here in America, book banning has been in the news quite a bit lately. I have previous familiarity with the practice. When I left Ghana for the Soviet Union in 1985, I took a small New Testament Bible with me. Behind the Iron Curtain in those days, religion was officially suppressed so people could not freely practice their faiths. I happened to have my Bible in my suitcase one time when I was traveling on a train from London back to Moscow. A customs officer at the border between Poland and Belarus found it during his inspection of my luggage and asked me what it was. After I described it to him, he took it to a back room and spent several minutes there. I had no idea what he did or who he talked to, but he just handed it back to me when he returned. He didn’t say a word.

In autocratic societies, authorities are extremely sensitive about what their people read. Reading the “wrong” material can land someone in prison. I recalled that Bible incident recently after reading this article in The Economist. Some Chinese officials are said to have been caught secretly reading “gossipy political works” prohibited by the Communist Party. According to the newspaper, this year, the authorities have identified at least nine people who are alleged to have ‘engaged in “private reading” of printed or online literature containing “serious political problems.”’ China’s criminal code can be quite hilarious at times. One of the “inquisitive” officials has reportedly been expelled from the party. He is no longer wanted in the party because as The Economist puts it, “anyone who reads dodgy stuff is assumed to lack faith in the party’s directives.”

Given the multitude of cultures and religions across the world, there are bound to be wide variations in how people in different places think about propriety. The problem though is that too many criminal codes are riddled with absurdities and hypocrisies. Women, unfortunately, are disproportionately harmed by them. Societies must rectify that.