CRIM Assignment 1

What is Crime and What are the Challenges in Defining Crime?

Crime, as a universal highly frequent social phenomenon, is difficult to define

briefly because crime covers various academic areas such as biology, psychology, and

sociology. In this short essay, I will explain crime from three aspects: legal definition,

human rights definition, and social and political process. Meanwhile, illustrates

challenges in defining crime, especially since crime can change over time from place

to place.

Firstly, the legal definition of crime. According to Tappan, ‘Crime is an

international act or omission in violation of criminal law (statutory or case law),

committed without defence or jurisdiction, and sanctioned by the state.’ (Tappan,

1947). The legal definition of crime can identify certain behaviours against

individuals and properties, for instance, rape, homicide, theft, and sexual assault,

generating complex relationships between offenders, victims, and formal justice

agency (Warren, 2021). Those behaviours violate morality as well as the social order,

thereby the state’s power will take action to punish the offenders by imprisonment and

the death penalty for a safe society. Mentioning the limitations, particularly the

enforcement biases may exist. For example, white-collar crime is less popular than

homicide because justice agencies put attention to crimes with higher exposure. That

may lead to data deviation when calculating the statistics of crime that happened in a

country.
 Moreover, the human rights definition provides another perspective on crime,

which is the fundamental standard to take protection for citizens by providing

authoritative rules from the government (Warren, 2021). Safety for the person,

individual freedom, fairness, and peaceful enjoyment of property and privacy are four

significant ways to maximize human rights. Besides, the governments encourage

complying with basic standards in the treatment and regulation of human behaviours

(Warren, 2021), so that they can prevent harmful acts in the community, hence,

creating a harmonious society with a normal social order.

The third type is a social and political process. Crime is a social and political

construction, which means the collective judgment emphasizes the norms of society.

So, crime refers to the behaviours that violate the norms of social order, therefore,

leading to an irreversible consequence whether against human rights or state rights

(Haugaard, 2022). In addition, the social and political processes reflect the

distribution of cultural forces towards vulnerable minorities like Indigenous, so the

society may force less on social, political, and corporative responsibility. Furthermore,

over-criminalization and net widening will stem from politicians' over-control, which

may result in misjudgment as to what extent the crime is the most serious one that the

state should punish.

Finally, the challenge in defining crime depends on the nature of the crime,

which means crime changes over time, so the reform of laws legislated by the courts

also experienced an evolution. For example, the manifestation of decriminalization of

sodomy in a comparison between Brower v Hardwick (1986) and Lawrence v Texas

(2003), with similar facts that the two men, who are in an intimate relationship, were

having various sex when policemen found them. Justice Kennedy said, ‘to control a

personal relationship that, whether or not entitled to formal recognition in the law, is

within the liberty of persons to choose without being punished as criminals’

(Weinmeyer, 2014). Based on the contrast, it is obvious to reveal the

decriminalization of sodomy over almost 20 years represents the changing and

evolution process of crime, meanwhile, how the law defines the crime behaviours

from an obsolete society to modern society.

Overall, although crime is hard to define, legal, human rights, and social and

political perspectives all can provide an illustration. The most challenging to

accurately define crime is due to the changing and evolution from period to period

across different places and countries.

References
Haugaard, M. (2022). Power and crime: A theoretical sketch. Journal of Political

Power, 15(1), 14–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379x.2022.2031112

Tappan, P. W. (1947). Who is the criminal? American Sociological Review, 12(1),

96–102. https://doi.org/10.2307/2086496

Warren, I. (2021). Chapter 1: What is crime and who is the criminal? In Crime and

justice: A guide to criminology (6th ed., pp. 3–17). essay, Lawbook Co.

Weinmeyer, R. (2014). The decriminalization of sodomy in the United States. AMA

Journal of Ethics, 16(11), 916–922.

https://doi.org/10.1001/virtualmentor.2014.16.11.hlaw1-1411