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crime

Behaviour or action that is punishable by criminal law. A crime is a public, as opposed to a moral, wrong; it is an offence committed against (and hence punishable by) the state or the community at large. Many crimes are immoral, but not all actions considered immoral are illegal.

What constitutes a crime

The laws of each country say which actions or omissions (failures to act) are criminal. These include serious moral wrongs and offences against the person, such as murder and rape; offences against the state, such as treason or tax evasion (which affect state security and social order); wrongs perpetrated against the community, such as littering; and offences against property, such as theft and the handling of stolen goods. Because crime is socially determined, the definition of what constitutes a crime may vary geographically and over time. Thus, an action may be considered a crime in one society but not in another; for example, drinking alcohol is not generally prohibited in the West, but is a criminal offence in many Islamic countries. Certain categories of crime, however, such as violent crime and theft, are recognized almost universally.

Penalties

Crime is dealt with in most societies by the judicial system, comprising the police, the courts, and other institutions. These may impose penalties ranging from a fine to imprisonment to, in some instances, death, depending upon the severity of the offence and the penalty laid down by the country where the offence was committed. Most European countries have now abolished the death penalty, though it is still retained by a number of African and Asian countries as well as some US states. Non-capital and minor offences are also punished in some countries, such as Britain and the USA, by the granting of suspended sentences, where an offender's prison sentence is waived on condition that they do not reoffend during a set period of time. Other common elements in sentencing in Britain and the USA include the provision of probation periods, where offenders are released into the community, but are regularly supervised by probation officers; and community punishment, where offenders are required, in lieu of a prison sentence, to perform a certain amount of unpaid work for the good of the community.

Theories of punishment

There are a number of different theories of punishment, ranging from those which place most emphasis upon the aspect of retribution, where the criminal's punishment is seen as an end in itself (though the punishment's severity may still be linked to that of the crime), to theories which stress the deterrent and reformative aspects of punishment. However, the theory that punishment is intended merely as expiation is not subscribed to by most modern penologists, and in practice the different theories are frequently combined. The most positive theory of penology is aimed at the reform or rehabilitation of the criminal, and stresses the importance of training and educating criminals in preparation for their return to the community as law-abiding citizens. Even the most optimistic criminologists are forced to admit, however, that modern methods have so far failed to influence persistent offenders.

The National Crime Victimization Survey, published by the US Justice Department in June 2001, showed a dramatic drop in violent crime in the USA from 1999 to 2000. The 15% drop was the largest one-year decline since the survey began in 1973. Property crime also fell by 10% during the same period. The data, gathered by interviews with nearly 160,000 people, showed that more violent crime occurred in the West and Midwest than in the South and Northeast.

Organized crime In the 20th century a number of different forms of organized crime have developed. Offences committed by organized crime groups include fraud, kidnapping, and the extraction of ‘protection money’, and may be politically or simply financially motivated. In countries such as the USA, Russia, and China, the main source of income for organized crime groups is the trade in ‘contraband’ products, such as drugs, and prostitution. Chinese triads, in particular, play an important role in drug-smuggling to Europe, and in Colombia and other South American countries organized drug trafficking is a major social problem. Other forms of organized crime include ‘white-collar’ crime, which involves offences committed by business people or politicians either for personal, corporate, or political gain; and international terrorism, which may take the form of hijacking, political kidnapping and assassination, or bombing campaigns directed against civilian or military targets. In the 1990s organized crime has also developed in new directions following the widespread popularity of the Internet: criminals have not only begun to use the Internet for communications purposes, but have also found that it provides new possibilities for organized fraud and the supply of illegal pornography.

Criminology The Italian physician Cesare Lombroso is generally accredited with being the founder of criminology, the scientific study of criminal behaviour. He associated criminality with physical characteristics, but his ideas have since been discredited, and later criminologists have tended to draw more upon sociology and psychology than biology to formulate theories of crime.

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