Crime is the breach of one or more rules or laws for which some governing authority, via mechanisms such as police power, may ultimately prescribe a conviction. While every crime violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime; for example: breaches of contract and of other civil law may rank as "offences" or as "infractions".

When informal relationships and sanctions are insufficient to establish and maintain a desired social order, there may be more formalized or stricter systems of social control imposed by a government, or by a sovereign state. 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 to 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 people to ensure they comply with those laws, and implement other policies and practices designed to prevent 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 punishment or life without parole.

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).

Often a natural person perpetrates a crime, but legal persons may also commit crimes.

Crime in the field of sociology is the breach of a rule or law for which some governing authority or force may ultimately prescribe a punishment. The word crime originates from the Latin crimen (genitive criminis), from the Latin root cernō and Greek κρινω = "I judge". Originally it meant "charge (in law), guilt, accusation".

Sourced

• It is written ' Thou shalt not kill,' so because he has killed, are we to kill him ? No, that's impossible.
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot: A Novel in Four Parts (1916), p. 19.

• Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.
  • H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905), Chapter 5; reprinted in The Works of H.G. Wells. Vol. 9 (1925).

• Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only in crease, but never do away with, crime.
  • Emma Goldman, "Anarchism, What it Really Stands For", Anarchism and Other Essays (1917).

Attributed

• If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she doesn't deserve to have any.
  • Oscar Wilde, reported in Evan Esar, 20,000 quips & quotes (Barnes & Noble Publishing, April 1995), p. 193. ISBN 1566195292.

• Poverty is the mother of crime.
  • Marcus Aurelius, reported in Robert D. Ramsey, Well Said, Well Spoken (Corwin Press, 2001), p. 30. ISBN 0761977708.

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Wed Nov 11 11:24:45 2009