Traditional Definition Of Crime

This essay argues that the traditional definition of crime has many short comings, and attempts to show, why some criminologist would prefer to use the social harms perspective, over crime, as it holds many advantages. One of the most commonly accepted definition of crime is ‘an act that is capable of being followed by criminal proceedings’, (Williams, 1955, p.107), thus criminal behaviour “is (an) intentional act in violation of the criminal law”. (tappan 1947, pg100). However, there are issues with the concept of crime, firstly it is individual ordinated, meaning it mostly looks at the action and behaviours of individual’s in relation to criminal behaviour, such as murder and rape, but it tends to ignore the criminal behaviours of governments

One of the main benefit of holding a social harms perspective over other that of crime, is that it allows you to move beyond the individualistic aspect of crime that tends to dominate, and look further towards state and cooperation criminal behaviour, that tends to be ignored by a traditional criminologist. This is because “orthodox criminology”, mostly looks at “interpersonal and individualistic forms of wrongdoing as compared to impersonal and organizational forms of social injury”, (David friedrichs 2009:1), “Face-to-face forms of violence such as murder, rape……. receive the bulk of criminological attention” ( Michalowski –Crime, Law and Social Change? 2009 pg 18). This attitude can be seen from the fact that in Britain, the police focus tends to be on ‘street’ level crimes, while ignoring criminal behaviour of states and businesses. One the difficulties with cooperate crime, is that it’s difficult to prosecute them, as a criminal act requires a union of actus reus and mens rea, basically an act and a guilty mind, thus “The accused must be found to have committed 'actus reus' with the willing intention to perpetrate the act“(Dubber, Markus D. (2002) 302. However issues do arise with this, as the act may not have been a deliberate intention to harm another group of people, so cooperation’s in the pursuit of profit can cause environmental disasters. So it’s difficult to prosecute large

(Hilliard 2004:2). So it tends to blame the person who committed the act, however by looking at social harms it allows you reconsider the “allocation of responsibility”( (Dorling :20), some researchers have suggested that poverty can directly play a role in criminal behaviour, the study of harms allows you to question, whether the individual is the sole reason why the crime occurred, if not you can attempt to look at the cause of criminal behaviour, this can therefore lead to can positively impact legislations to tackle the issue. So it will allow you “to reduce the extent of harm that people experience” (Dorling: 34), rather than simply focusing on criminalisation, it also means that social situations that leads to criminal behaviour such as poverty cannot be