In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority.

[1] The term "crime" does

not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,[2] though statutory definitions have
been provided for certain purposes.[3] The most popular view is that crime is a category created by law; in other
words, something is a crime if declared as such by the relevant and applicable law.[2] One proposed definition is that
a crime or offence (or criminal offence) is an act harmful not only to some individual but also to a community,
society or the state ("a public wrong"). Such acts are forbidden and punishable by law.[1][4]
The notion that acts such as murder, rape and theft are to be prohibited exists worldwide.[5] What precisely is a
criminal offence is defined by criminal law of each country. While many have a catalogue of crimes called
the criminal code, in some common lawcountries no such comprehensive statute exists.
The state (government) has the power to severely restrict one's liberty for committing a crime. In modern societies,
there are procedures to which investigations and trials must adhere. If found guilty, an offender may be sentenced to
a form of reparation such as a community sentence, or, depending on the nature of their offence, to
undergo imprisonment, life imprisonment or, in some jurisdictions, execution.
Usually, to be classified as a crime, the "act of doing something criminal" (actus reus) must – with certain
exceptions – be accompanied by the "intention to do something criminal" (mens rea).[4]
While every crime violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime. Breaches of private
law (torts and breaches of contract) are not automatically punished by the state, but can be enforced through civil
procedure.

Contents

 1Overview
 2Etymology
 3Definition
o 3.1England and Wales
o 3.2Scotland
o 3.3Sociology
o 3.4Other definitions
 4Criminalization
 5Labelling theory
 6Natural-law theory
 7History
 8Classification and categorisation
o 8.1Categorisation by type
o 8.2Categorisation by penalty
o 8.3Common law
o 8.4Classification by mode of trial
o 8.5Classification by origin
o 8.6Other classifications
o 8.7U.S. classification
 9Reports, studies and organizations
 10Offence in common law jurisdictions
 11Causes and correlates of crime
 12Crimes in international law
 13Religion and crime
 14Military jurisdictions and states of emergency
 15Employee crime
 16See also
 17Notes
 18References
 19External links

Overview
When informal relationships and sanctions prove insufficient to establish and maintain a desired social order, a
government or a state may impose more formalized or stricter systems of social control. With institutional and legal
machinery at their disposal, agents of the State can compel populations to conform to codes and can opt to punish
or attempt to reform those who do not conform.
Authorities employ various mechanisms to regulate (encouraging or discouraging) certain behaviors in general.
Governing or administering agencies may for example codify rules into laws, police citizens and visitors to ensure
that they comply with those laws, and implement other policies and practices that legislators or administrators have
prescribed with the aim of discouraging or preventing crime. In addition, authorities provide remedies and sanctions,
and collectively these constitute a criminal justice system. Legal sanctions vary widely in their severity; they may
include (for example) incarceration of temporary character aimed at reforming the convict. Some jurisdictions have
penal codes written to inflict permanent harsh punishments: legal mutilation, capital punishmentor life without parole.
Usually, a natural person perpetrates a crime, but legal persons may also commit crimes. Conversely, at least under
U.S. law, nonpersons such as animals cannot commit crimes.[6]
The sociologist Richard Quinney has written about the relationship between society and crime. When Quinney
states "crime is a social phenomenon" he envisages both how individuals conceive crime and how populations
perceive it, based on societal norms.[7]

Etymology
The word crime is derived from the Latin root cernō, meaning "I decide, I give judgment". Originally the Latin
word crīmen meant "charge" or "cry of distress."[8] The Ancient Greek word krima (κρίμα), from which the Latin
cognate derives, typically referred to an intellectual mistake or an offense against the community, rather than a
private or moral wrong.[9]
In 13th century English crime meant "sinfulness", according to etymonline.com. It was probably brought to England
as Old French crimne (12th century form of Modern Frenchcrime), from Latin crimen (in the genitive case: criminis).
In Latin, crimen could have signified any one of the following: "charge, indictment, accusation; crime, fault, offense".
The word may derive from the Latin cernere – "to decide, to sift" (see crisis, mapped on Kairos and Chronos).
But Ernest Klein (citing Karl Brugmann) rejects this and suggests *cri-men, which originally would have meant "cry
of distress". Thomas G. Tucker suggests a root in "cry" words and refers to English plaint, plaintiff, and so on. The
meaning "offense punishable by law" dates from the late 14th century. The Latin word is glossed in Old English
by facen, also "deceit, fraud, treachery", [cf. fake]. Crime wave is first attested in 1893 in American English.

Definition
England and Wales
Whether a given act or omission constitutes a crime does not depend on the nature of that act or omission. It
depends on the nature of the legal consequences that may follow it.[10]An act or omission is a crime if it is capable of
being followed by what are called criminal proceedings.[11][12]
History
The following definition of "crime" was provided by the Prevention of Crimes Act 1871, and applied[13] for the
purposes of section 10 of the Prevention of Crime Act 1908:
The expression "crime" means, in England and Ireland, any felony or the offence of uttering false or counterfeit coin,
or of possessing counterfeit gold or silver coin, or the offence of obtaining goods or money by false pretences, or the
offence of conspiracy to defraud, or any misdemeanour under the fifty-eighth section of the Larceny Act, 1861.

Scotland
For the purpose of section 243 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, a crime means
an offence punishable on indictment, or an offence punishable on summary conviction, and for the commission of
which the offender is liable under the statute making the offence punishable to be imprisoned either absolutely or at
the discretion of the court as an alternative for some other punishment.[14]

Sociology
A normative definition views crime as deviant behavior that violates prevailing norms – cultural standards
prescribing how humans ought to behave normally. This approach considers the complex realities surrounding the
concept of crime and seeks to understand how changing social, political, psychological, and economic conditions
may affect changing definitions of crime and the form of the legal, law-enforcement, and penal responses made by
society.
These structural realities remain fluid and often contentious. For example: as cultures change and the political
environment shifts, societies may criminalise or decriminalise certain behaviours, which directly affects
the statistical crime rates, influence the allocation of resources for the enforcement of laws, and (re-)influence the
general public opinion.
Similarly, changes in the collection and/or calculation of data on crime may affect the public perceptions of the
extent of any given "crime problem". All such adjustments to crime statistics, allied with the experience of people in
their everyday lives, shape attitudes on the extent to which the State should use law or social engineering to enforce
or encourage any particular social norm. Behaviour can be controlled and influenced by a society in many ways
without having to resort to the criminal justice system.
Indeed, in those cases where no clear consensus exists on a given norm, the drafting of criminal law by the group
in power to prohibit the behaviour of another group may seem to some observers an improper limitation of the
second group's freedom, and the ordinary members of society have less respect for the law or laws in general –
whether the authorities actually enforce the disputed law or not.

Other definitions
Legislatures can pass laws (called mala prohibita) that define crimes against social norms. These laws vary from
time to time and from place to place: note variations in gamblinglaws, for example, and the prohibition or
encouragement of duelling in history. Other crimes, called mala in se, count as outlawed in almost all societies,
(murder, theft and rape, for example).
English criminal law and the related criminal law of Commonwealth countries can define offences that the courts
alone have developed over the years, without any actual legislation: common law offences. The courts used the
concept of malum in se to develop various common law offences.[15]

Criminalization
Main article: Criminalization
The spiked heads of executed criminals once adorned the gatehouse of the medieval London Bridge.

One can view criminalization as a procedure deployed by society as a preemptive harm-reduction device, using the
threat of punishment as a deterrent to anyone proposing to engage in the behavior causing harm. The State
becomes involved because governing entities can become convinced that the costs of not criminalizing (through
allowing the harms to continue unabated) outweigh the costs of criminalizing it (restricting individual liberty, for
example, to minimize harm to others).
States control the process of criminalization because:

 Even if victims recognize their own role as victims, they may not have the resources to investigate and seek
legal redress for the injuries suffered: the enforcers formally appointed by the State often have better access to
expertise and resources.
 The victims may only want compensation for the injuries suffered, while remaining indifferent to a possible
desire for deterrence.[16]
 Fear of retaliation may deter victims or witnesses of crimes from taking any action. Even in policed societies,
fear may inhibit from reporting incidents or from co-operating in a trial.
 Victims, on their own, may lack the economies of scale that could allow them to administer a penal system, let
alone to collect any fines levied by a court.[17] Garoupa & Klerman (2002) warn that a rent-seeking government
has as its primary motivation to maximize revenue and so, if offenders have sufficient wealth, a rent-seeking
government will act more aggressively than a social-welfare-maximizing government in enforcing laws against
minor crimes (usually with a fixed penalty such as parking and routine traffic violations), but more laxly in
enforcing laws against major crimes.
 As a result of the crime, victims may die or become incapacitated.

Labelling theory
Further information: Labeling theory § The "criminal"
The label of "crime" and the accompanying social stigma normally confine their scope to those activities seen as
injurious to the general population or to the State, including some that cause serious loss or damage to individuals.
Those who apply the labels of "crime" or "criminal" intend to assert the hegemony of a dominant population, or to
reflect a consensus of condemnation for the identified behavior and to justify any punishments prescribed by the
State (in the event that standard processing tries and convicts an accused person of a crime).

Natural-law theory
Justifying the State's use of force to coerce compliance with its laws has proven a consistent theoretical problem.
One of the earliest justifications involved the theory of natural law. This posits that the nature of the world or of
human beings underlies the standards of morality or constructs them. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the 13th century:
"the rule and measure of human acts is the reason, which is the first principle of human acts" (Aquinas, ST I-II,
Q.90, A.I). He regarded people as by nature rational beings, concluding that it becomes morally appropriate that
they should behave in a way that conforms to their rational nature. Thus, to be valid, any law must conform to
natural law and coercing people to conform to that law is morally acceptable. In the 1760s William Blackstone (1979:
41) described the thesis:
"This law of nature, being co-eval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in
obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of
any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority,
mediately or immediately, from this original."
But John Austin (1790–1859), an early positivist, applied utilitarianism in accepting the calculating nature of
human beings and the existence of an objective morality. He denied that the legal validity of a norm depends on
whether its content conforms to morality. Thus in Austinian terms a moral code can objectively determine what
people ought to do, the law can embody whatever norms the legislature decrees to achieve social utility, but
every individual remains free to choose what to do. Similarly, Hart (1961) saw the law as an aspect
of sovereignty, with lawmakers able to adopt any law as a means to a moral end.
Thus the necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of a proposition of law simply involved
internal logic and consistency, and that the state's agents used state power with responsibility. Ronald
Dworkin (2005) rejects Hart's theory and proposes that all individuals should expect the equal respect and
concern of those who govern them as a fundamental political right. He offers a theory of compliance overlaid by
a theory of deference (the citizen's duty to obey the law) and a theory of enforcement, which identifies the
legitimate goals of enforcement and punishment. Legislation must conform to a theory of legitimacy, which
describes the circumstances under which a particular person or group is entitled to make law, and a theory of
legislative justice, which describes the law they are entitled or obliged to make.
Indeed, despite everything, the majority[citation needed] of natural-law theorists have accepted the idea of enforcing the
prevailing morality as a primary function of the law. This view entails the problem that it makes any moral
criticism of the law impossible: if conformity with natural law forms a necessary condition for legal validity, all
valid law must, by definition, count as morally just. Thus, on this line of reasoning, the legal validity of a norm
necessarily entails its moral justice.[clarification needed]
One can solve this problem by granting some degree of moral relativism and accepting that norms may evolve
over time and, therefore, one can criticize the continued enforcement of old laws in the light of the current
norms. People may find such law acceptable, but the use of State power to coerce citizens to comply with that
law lacks moral justification. More recent conceptions of the theory characterise crime as the violation
of individual rights.
Since society considers so many rights as natural (hence the term "right") rather than man-made, what
constitutes a crime also counts as natural, in contrast to laws (seen as man-made). Adam Smith illustrates this
view, saying that a smuggler would be an excellent citizen, "...had not the laws of his country made that a crime
which nature never meant to be so."
Natural-law theory therefore distinguishes between "criminality" (which derives from human nature) and
"illegality" (which originates with the interests of those in power). Lawyers sometimes express the two concepts
with the phrases malum in se and malum prohibitum respectively. They regard a "crime malum in se" as
inherently criminal; whereas a "crime malum prohibitum" (the argument goes) counts as criminal only because
the law has decreed it so.
It follows from this view that one can perform an illegal act without committing a crime, while a criminal act could
be perfectly legal. Many Enlightenment thinkers (such as Adam Smith and the American Founding Fathers)
subscribed to this view to some extent, and it remains influential among so-called classical liberals[citation
needed]
and libertarians.[citation needed]