Crime, Theorises of the Definition of

Consensus Approaches

The most familiar consensus approach to crime is one that characterizes it as behavior that is a violation of law. A legal definition of crime refers to acts prohibited, prosecuted, and punished under the auspices of the written criminal legal code as defined by government.

The problem with the purely legal definition, from the perspective of historical and anthropological analysis, is that codes vary by culture, location, jurisdiction, and time. For example, consider laws regarding alcohol consumption. Drinking alcohol is legal in some locations but illegal in others; likewise, the legal age of consumption varies. Each of these elements also changes with time, as the U.S. Prohibition Amendment (1919–1933) and later raising the legal drinking age in the United States illustrate. A behavior considered illegal in the United States, such as marijuana smoking, may be legal in other countries.

Another consensus perspective comes from those who take a moral functionalist perspective toward defining crime. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), for example, argued that crime is behavior that offends the common or collective conscience; the more the common conscience is shocked and indignant, the more criminal the behavior. This approach is problematic in that it leaves the definition of crime up to the changing moral sensibilities of groups.

Conflict Approaches

Conflict approaches see crime as the outcome of a struggle between people with competing interests. Sociologist Thorsten Sellin (1896–1994) presented one version of the conflict view in which he saw crime as an outcome of a clash over differences in primary and secondary cultures. Other scholars, taking a Marxist view, see the conflict over issues of social class and having the power to define some behavior as harm. From yet another perspective, American sociologist Edwin Sutherland (1883–1950) defined crime as behavior that is socially injurious, whether or not the law defines it as such, which was a radical position for his time. By this, he meant to include the harms by businesses that officials saw as administrative irregularities but not criminal behaviors.

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