What is a crime?

Crime is categorized as a part of public law — the law regulating the relations between citizens and the state. Crimes can be thought of as acts which the state considers to be wrong and which can be punished by the state. Criminal law is one of two main branches of what is known in Western society as positive law (the body of law imposed by the state); the other is civil law.

In different times and places what has been considered a crime has varied widely. But in the modern world there are certain acts such as treason, murder, robbery, assault, and rape that are almost universally regarded as crimes. Treason, or disloyalty to one’s group, especially in time of war is perhaps one of the most universal and among the earliest acts to have been recognized as a public wrong.

In all modern civilized societies, murder is regarded as a crime. In ancient cultures and in some primitive societies that still exist, however, killing a human being was and is a relatively private matter to be dealt with by families or larger kinship groups. Deliberate killing such as infanticide, cannibalism, head hunting, or the killing of the very old is classified as murder in modern societies, but such practices were viewed as customary and acceptable by ancient cultures and even by some 20^th-century tribes in remote parts of the world.

New laws or new interpretations of existing laws may make activities criminal that were once legal or, on the other hand, they may legalize acts that were once criminal. For example, the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on Jan. 29, 1919, prohibited the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages and the importing of them into the country. From 1920 until the amendment was repealed in 1933, something that had been legal in most parts of the United States had become a crime.

There are some acts which are crimes in one country but not in another. For example, it is a crime to drink alcohol in Saudi Arabia, but not in Egypt. It is a crime to smoke marijuana in England, but not (in prescribed places) in the Netherlands. It is a crime to have more than one wife at the same time in France, but not in Indonesia. In general, however, there are quite a lot of agreements among states as to which acts are criminal. A visitor to a foreign country can be sure that stealing, physically attacking someone or damaging their property will be unlawful. But the way of dealing with people suspected of crime may be different from his own country.

It is societies acting through their governments that make the rules declaring what acts are illegal. Hence, war is not a crime. Although it is the most violent of human activities, it has not been declared illegal by governments or their agencies. But petty theft the stealing of a loaf of bread is a crime because the laws of most states and nations have said so.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14