Brief notes on the definition of crime

Oct 25, 2016 Letters

Dear Editor,
Many Guyanese have developed a rather distorted and one-sided conception of crime. They see crime as something that is intrinsically evil, as something that threatens individual rights, civil liberties and perhaps the very foundations of society. They seek to protect themselves by locking their doors and windows, insuring their possessions and avoiding dangerous places and situations. They think of crime as something alien, something that exists outside of organised society.
In actuality crime goes well beyond the street crime, violence, and theft portrayed in the popular media. Moreover, the volume and rates differ considerably from what conventional wisdom suggests. Although violence and theft may appear to be the most typical forms of law breaking; crime includes thousands of different types of offences and the majority rarely come to our attention. White collar crime for example is associated with the illegal activities of business people that take place alongside the legitimate day to day activities of their business or profession.
It involves billions of dollars annually in price fixing, embezzlement, restraint of trade, stock manipulation, misrepresentation, bribery, false advertising and consumer fraud. The economic toll from white collar crime exceeds the dollar losses from all known robberies, burglaries and other thefts, yet it is rarely considered. Also significant is the fact that many activities are considered crimes in some jurisdictions but not in others, and in some nations but not in others.
There are activities that once were viewed as crimes but are no longer considered as such and some types of behaviour that many people consider normal and common are nevertheless defined as criminal under the law. What then is crime?
Crime has been subject to a variety of definitions and interpretations. For the scholar, crime can be drama, a conflict between good and evil like those portrayed in the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. To the moralist and reformer, crime is a manifestation of spiritual depravity. It is a pestering disease of the soul that must be eradicated by the powers of restraint and virtue. Crime has also been equated with sin, with violations of natural law, the Ten Commandments or the proscriptions embodied in the Bible, the Quran, and the Talmud.
For others, crime has different meanings. To the reporter it is news; to the detective, it means work; to the thief it is business and to the victim, it suggests fear and loss. But to most individuals, crime is no more than the violation of a generally accepted set of rules that are backed by the power and authority of the state. While these and many other conceptions of crime may be important for particular purposes, they are of little help at arriving at an explicit definition of crime. Nevertheless the notion of crime as sin suggests a standing point for the evolution of criminal definitions, linked to historical images of right and wrong and the precepts of natural law.
Allan. R. Gates

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