Crime

An act or omission that is forbidden by the law and punished by the state or law enforcement
agency.

Or

Crime is an act committed or omitted in violation of public law forbidden or commanding it.

Or

Crime is a violation of societal rules of behavior as interpreted and expressed by the criminal law,
which reflects public opinion, traditional values, and the viewpoint of people currently holding social
and political power. Individuals who violate these rules are subject to sanctions by state authority,
social stigma, and loss of status.

Or

An act deemed socially harmful or dangerous that is specifically defined prohibited and punished
under the criminal law.

Criminology

The scientific study of crime, criminals, punishment, and victims is called criminology.

Deviance

Behavior that departs from the social norms but is not necessarily criminal.

Or

Violation of societal norms, values, standards, rules, and regulations is deviance.

Law

Law is commonly understood as a system of rules that are created by legislator and enforced
through social or governmental institutions.

Or

Rules that are made by the parliament and then enforced by the law enforcement and courts are
known as laws.

Criminal Law

The written code that defines crimes and their punishments.

Or

Criminal law is a body of norms formally spread through specified governmental organs, violation of
which warrants the imposition of punishment through special proceedings maintained in the name
of the people or the state.

Sin

Violation of divine laws is called sin.

Or
Sin is an action or type of behavior which is believed to break the laws of God and religion.

Vice

An immoral or illegal activity which violates the human morality.

Crime and criminals

1- Introduction to crime :
The information about the crime reaches to the public may be through the newspapers , television
programs, films, and novels .
Some of us have accumulated experience with crime by having ourselves been victims or knowing
others who have been victims, some by being offenders (or at least defendants), or knowing such
individuals, and others by being occupationally concerned with prevention of crime or supervision of
people found guilty of violating the law .There's many difficulties to offer a wholly satisfactory
definition of the crime, a word frequently used and a phenomenon often encountered .
Crime is a by-product of civilization. Most civilized members of society obey authority and conform
to the norms prevailing in their culture.
Their obedience and compliance may vary in degree, but law- abiding citizens remain within the
limits of tolerance.
Crime then is a socio-political event subject to the definitions of the society in which it occurs.
The social response to crime in terms of treatment of offenders is dependent upon the advance of
the civilization and the affluence of the society.
Public policy is always a blend of economics and humanitarian values.
Social scientists seek to know the conditions under which crime increases; the characteristics of
offenders and victims; why some acts are illegal and others are not .
For these and other important purposes, we must again ask: what's the wholly satisfactory definition
of the crime ?

Legal Definition of the Crime :

The most simple definition of crime offered by Thorsten Sellin, in his point of view to the crime is :
"any form of conduct which is forbidden by the law under pain of some punishment ".
Paul Tappan 1960 (along similar lines) ,defined the crime: " intentional act or omission in violation of
criminal law".
Tappan would distinguish between lesser violations, such as
vagrancy, and criminal acts, :
"thereby avoiding the unnecessary attribution of criminal status to individuals who offer little or no
real threat to the safety of the community".
But it may well be that Tappan is really making a distinction between the behaviour which after all is
commonly deemed criminal if it is against the law and the status of individuals who are not seen and
treated as criminals when their violations are of a minor nature.
Marxism and the Definition of Crime :
Marxism was once among the dominant perspectives in the criminological field. Following
something of a decline in its influence, recently there have been signs that it is on the cusp of a
revival.
Any such revival should be built upon sound theoretical foundations if it is to be fruitful and
enduring.
This necessitates the development of a robust Marxist definition of crime.
In a recent work, Cowling has proposed a definition of crime that is based upon legally enshrined
consensus.
This runs counter to Sumner’s idea of crime and deviance as ideological ‘censure’.
In what follows the two positions will be outlined, a number of weaknesses in the definition
proposed by Cowling will be suggested, and it will be argued that the notion of censure should serve
as the basis for a renewed Marxist focus on crime and deviance.
In our point of view the crime is:
" any form of conduct forbidden by law and for which authorized government personnel can inflict
punishment, when those violations carry relatively severe penalties and provoke moral outrage
against the offenders ".
Before an act can be legally defined as a crime, at least theoretically, five conditions must be met :
(1) An act must take place that involves harm inflicted on someone by the actor;
(2) The act must be legally prohibited at the time it is committed;
(3) The perpetrator must have criminal intent (mens-rea) when he engages in the act;
(4) There must be a causal relationship between the voluntary misconduct and the harm
that results from it; and :
(5) There must be some legally prescribed punishment for anyone convicted of the act .

Anti-social Behaviour
The term ‘antisocial behaviour’ is a very recent addition to the stock of criminological concepts. It
was hardly used at all before the 1990s .
Here it refers to behaviour that causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to persons
not of the same household as the perpetrator. As can be seen by the ‘is likely to’ clause, the notion
of antisocial behaviour covers a very wide spectrum of behaviours.
Examples of such behaviours include graffiti writing, abusive language or verbal intimidation,
vandalism, littering, begging, assault, drunken behaviour in public and much, much more.
Indeed, the Home Office – England - definition includes the catch-all term ‘yobbish behaviour’ as
well as ‘misuse of fireworks’ and ‘dumping rubbish and abandoning cars’.
In fact, it might be said that the notion of antisocial behaviour refers to behaviour that someone
does not like or considers to be unpleasant, and signals a sense of social breakdown caused, most
particularly, by rowdy or uncontrolled young people.
A wide range of instruments is available to try and tackle antisocial behaviour, including warning
letters, penalty notices, parenting orders, Individual Support Orders, injunctions and proceedings
against tenants.
Criminological interest in antisocial behaviour has focused largely on neurodevelopmental causes,
social pressures and gender differences or on developmental risk-factors.

Crime and Deviance

The terms crime and deviance are often used in tandem, or even interchangeably, in criminological
discussion.
However, they ought to be viewed as distinct, albeit interrelated, categories. Crime, in its most
straightforward sense, denotes those behaviours that are formally prohibited and punishable under
criminal law.
Such offences provide the subject matter of mainstream criminological investigation.
However, criminologists may study activities that are not criminal as such (i.e. do not breach criminal
law), but are instead subject to administrative law (regulations drawn up by government’s
administrative agencies).
Criminologists deem such activities as relevant because they may cause serious harms to society and
its members.
Moreover, the fact that they are not recriminalize is considered noteworthy in itself, as it invites us
to examine why it is that some harmful behaviours are deemed crimes and not others.
It is important to bear in mind that crime is a social construct, insofar as what counts as crime will
depend upon the legal standing of an act at a particular time and place.
The term deviance in contrast denotes behaviours that breach informal social norms and rules, and
hence are considered undesirable or objectionable.
An act may be seen as deviant while being entirely legal (an example would be consensual
sadomasochistic sex).
Conversely, an act may be a crime, but not considered as deviant by the social majority (a good
example would be speeding).
Crime and deviance intersect in that societal perceptions about deviance may drive a process of
criminalized.
On the other hand, behaviours may be eventually criminalized as a result of a change in wider
cultural understandings and sensibilities.
In this way formal(legal)and informal(cultural) understandings of what is appropriate or
inappropriate, normal or abnormal, desirable or undesirable are clearly interconnected.

The Legal Making of a Criminal

There is a simple legal answer to the question “What is a criminal?”
A criminal is someone who has committed a crime and has been judged guilty of having done so.
Whatever factors criminologists might decide lead to criminal behavior, a person is not “officially” a
criminal until he or she has been defined as such by the law.
Before the law can properly call a person a criminal, it must go through a series of actions governed
at all junctures by well- defined legal rules collectively called criminal procedure.
These procedural rules vary greatly from culture to culture, but almost all modern cultures have a
set of rational (i.e., logical and predictable) rules guiding the serious business of officially labeling a
person a criminal.

Understanding crime
Crime is a sociopolitical event rather than a clinical condition. Crime is defined in the law as behavior
sufficiently deviant to damage society and to merit, therefore, legal action and the intervention of
society into the lives of citizens who so deviate.
It is not a clinical or medical condition that can be diagnosed and specifically treated. Consequently,
there have been many approaches to the problem of crime from many different viewpoints with
varying degrees of compatibility and agreement.
Certainly, criminal behavior cannot be understood by simply viewing the easily observable variables.
Deviant behavior may or may not be pathological from the clinical viewpoint. It may or may not be
ethically wrong.
The understanding of criminal behavior has been attempted by conjecture and use of trial and error
methods, much of it emotionally involved.