Noun

Singular crime

Plural countable and uncountable; plural crimes

crime (countable and uncountable; plural crimes)

1. (countable) A specific act committed in violation of the law.
2. (uncountable) The practice or habit of committing crimes.

   Crime doesn’t pay.

Derived terms

• crime against humanity
• crime against nature
• crimebuster
• crime index
• crime mapping
• crime rate

• criminal
• criminal law
• criminal record
• criminology
• decriminalization
• international crime

• organised crime / organized crime
• sexual crime
• war crime
• white collar crime

Societies define crime as the breach of one or more rules or laws for which some governing authority or force may ultimately prescribe a punishment. Its distinctions are in the nature of being a public wrong.

When society deems informal relationships and sanctions, insufficient to establish and maintain a desired social order, there may result more formalized 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 behavioral codes, and can punish those who do not conform.

Authorities employ various mechanisms to regulate behaviour, including rules codified into laws, policing people to ensure they comply with those laws, and other policies and practices designed to prevent crime. In addition, authorities provide remedies and sanctions, and collectively these constitute a criminal justice system. Not all breaches of the law, however, count as crimes — for example: breaches of contract and other civil law offences. In counterpoint to the above these are construed as private wrongs.

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. The labellers intend to assert the hegemony of a dominant population, or to reflect a consensus of condemnation for the identified behavior and to justify a punishment imposed by the State (in the event that standard processing tries and convicts an accused person of a crime). Usually, the perpetrator of the crime is a natural person, but some jurisdictions and some moral environments also regard legal persons as capable of committing 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.

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Sun Jul 5 23:29:51 2009