Crime is a societal issue that has an impact on victims in various ways. It can cause physical and emotional harm, affect a person’s ability to earn a living and can lead to a breakdown of trust within a community. It can have economic costs that include criminal justice system expenditure and reduced productivity. Crime can also have a social cost – it may cause a person to lose their job or reputation or to be labelled a criminal.
How a crime is defined can make all the difference when it comes to analysing, reporting and understanding crime trends. A person may commit a crime if their conduct violates public law (acts that have been declared as crimes by statute) and they intend to cause harm. They must also be aware that their conduct could result in injury or death to another person and that they will be punished if found guilty of the crime.
Each state and the federal government decides what sort of conduct to criminalise by creating their own criminal laws. For example, New York’s penal code contains nine major felonies and numerous misdemeanors. These laws are often based on common law and the U.S. Constitution, and they have a wide variety of punishments.
Criminologists have a variety of theories about why people might engage in criminal behaviour. Some are psychological – Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, for example, suggested that crime was the result of unhealthy attachments to parents – while others focus on social context, such as poverty, education access and unemployment rates.
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