Subcultures consist of norms, values, interests—and artifacts associated with them—that are derivative of, but distinct from, a larger referential culture. The term also is sometimes used loosely to distinguish individuals, groups, or other collectivities based on their demographic characteristics (e.g., age, ethnicity, and regional location) or pattern of behavior (e.g., occupation or…
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the prevalent conception of societal change is still encapsulated by the term development (Escobar). Definitions vary, but many emphasize a relatively optimistic view of history (often called modernization) in which development refers to the increased use of technology, increased generation of wealth, and increased attention to democratic procedures an…
The term "deviance" usually refers to some behavior that is inconsistent with standards of acceptable conduct prevailing in a given social group, although the term has also been used to designate personal conditions, ideas, or statuses that are stigmatized or disreputable. Social scientists disagree, about a precise definition of deviance because they use different approaches in tryi…
Legal guilt or culpability for the commission of a crime requires both that the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt all the definitional elements of the crime charged, including the mental state—the mens rea required by the crime's definition—and that an affirmative defense, such as the excuse of legal insanity or duress, is not established. Diminished capacity re…
Each party initially learns the facts of the case through its personal knowledge and investigation. As the trial approaches, a set of procedures, commonly called discovery, permit each side to require disclosure of certain aspects of the opponent's evidence. Whether in civil or criminal cases, the purposes of pretrial discovery are generally the same. Discovery of the opponent's case…
One night in 1974, two young men in Elmira, Ontario, Canada, vandalized the property of twenty-two people: they broke windows, slashed tires, and damaged churches, stores, and cars. They pled guilty to twenty-two charges. The offenders did not pay restitution to the court clerk's office, however. Instead, in an experiment jointly administered by the probation department's volunteer p…
All states made "wife beating" illegal by 1920. However, only since the 1970s has the criminal justice system begun to treat domestic violence as a serious crime, not as a private family matter. Domestic violence is any physical, sexual, or psychological abuse that people use against a former or current intimate partner. It refers to a number of criminal behaviors: assault and batter…
Ancient civilizations relied on the blood feud to provide justice when one person killed another—the relatives of a slain person had a duty to avenge the death. While the blood feud manifested a rough "eye-for-an-eye" retributive justice, it could, in theory, lead to an endless series of killings as each death was avenged. The Greek playwright Aeschylus dramatized a cycle of b…
The automobile age brought with it unprecedented prosperity and freedom of movement, but motor vehicles have also caused the deaths and injuries of millions of people. From the beginning the abuse of alcohol has been universally viewed as one of the major causes of vehicular carnage, with severe punishments being deemed the best way of dealing with the self-indulgent reprobates responsible. Acc…
For more than a century, there have been differences of opinion regarding the relationship between the use of illegal drugs (specifically narcotics and cocaine) and criminal behavior. While representatives of the criminal justice system, the medical profession, and academia have reflected numerous points of view and have espoused widely differing reasons for their interest in the topic, a detailed…
A systematic description of drug regulations must begin by identifying the parameters of the inquiry. What exactly is a drug? Unfortunately, no standard definition exists; different answers are given for different purposes. The most widely cited legal definition, contained in the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. secs. 1–5), basically contains three disjunctive clauses. It identifies …
Ecological variation in crime, delinquency, and fear of crime are examined in this entry. The discussion examines macro-level variations at the regional and city-levels, this considers community level variations. …
There is no widely accepted definition of economic crime, and it is impossible to enumerate briefly the various definitions, theories, and offenses included in this category. We focus on the theoretical work that explores three aspects of economic crime: offender motivations, economic outcomes, and economic processes. The first tradition refers to economic crimes as illegal acts in which offenders…
Corporate executives at the close of the twentieth century committed and concealed a remarkable amount of antitrust crime. The discovery of these crimes underlined a criminal offense that has existed in the United States since 1890 but that nonetheless has remained a peripheral and exotic species within the general criminal law. American antitrust law begins with the Sherman Act of 1890 (15 U.S.C.…
A traditional view holds that criminal tax offenses exist to combat tax evasion. Tax evasion is indeed a widespread, serious, and persistent problem in the United States and elsewhere. In the last part of the twentieth century, however, the United States government broadened its criminal enforcement focus from the suppression of classical tax evasion to a more general attack on crime, including dr…
In modern societies, an individual's life trajectory—including an individual's involvement in criminal activity—has become increasingly determined by his or her educational experiences. Over the past few centuries, schools have in many ways come to challenge families as the primary site for childhood socialization. The expanding role of formal education in the lives of …
The term employee theft refers to the unauthorized taking, transfer, or use of property of a work organization by an employee during the course of work activity. Straightforward as it seems, the application of the definition to employees' activity is complicated by two essential problems. The first centers on the issue of what is meant by unauthorized taking. If the activity is prohibited b…
Virtually every society, type of economy, enterprise, and occupation has a variant of employee theft. In security-intensive work systems such as banking, pharmaceutical, and electronic microchip plants, employee theft is limited to relatively few items. In security-loose systems, the gray areas of pilferability are more inclusive, covering a wide range of goods and services. There are some work sy…
The entrapment defense has received wide public attention in many prosecutions ranging from drug sales, to public corruption, to financial crimes. The defense is very significant, for the criminal defendant successfully raising entrapment will have all charges dismissed if a showing is made that the government was improperly involved in the creation of the criminal activity. Entrapment has been co…
Euthanasia is translated from Greek as "good death" or "easy death." As originally used, the term referred to painless and peaceful natural deaths in old age that occurred in comfortable and familiar surroundings. That usage is now archaic. As the word is currently understood, euthanasia occurs when one person ends the life of another person for the purpose of ending th…
The exclusionary rule permits a criminal defendant to prevent the prosecution from introducing at trial otherwise admissible evidence that was obtained in violation of the Constitution. In a sense the term "exclusionary rule" is misleading, because there are many exclusionary rules. Some, such as the rule against hearsay, exclude evidence because it is not very reliable. Others, such…
To approach the theory of excuse, one needs first to understand how excuses relate to other components of punishable, criminal conduct. Excuses become relevant only after proof that the actor has committed an unjustified act in violation of a criminal statute. Acts that fall outside the scope of the criminal law require no excuse; nor do nominal but justified violations of the law. If the actor ha…
The defense of duress is typically invoked when someone has been pressured into committing a crime by another person's threat. According to the Model Penal Code, an actor is excused in committing a crime if "he was coerced to do so by the use, or the threat to use unlawful force against his person or the person of another, that a person of reasonable firmness in his situation would h…
The infancy defense, which dates back to the common law and is still recognized in some form or another in the vast majority of jurisdictions, bars the prosecution of children below a specified age (age seven at common law) and presumptively precludes prosecution of older minors (ages seven to fourteen at common law) in the adult criminal justice system (although, under modern statutes, children i…
If a person pleads "not guilty by reason of insanity" (NGRI), that plea means that the person committed the underlying act (that would have been criminal had she had the requisite mens rea, or guilty mind), but, because of mental illness, is not to be held responsible for that act. A series of perplexing and difficult questions remains: What should the test be to determine if a defen…
The importance of intoxication as a criminal defense can be easily exaggerated. In many cases the defense is legally barred, where available it is often rejected on factual grounds by the decision maker, and even when successful it normally serves to reduce the level of conviction rather than excuse entirely. Yet intoxication remains of great interest to the student of criminal law, for intoxicati…
The classic eyewitness identification takes place in court, with the witness pointing to the defendant and stating "That's the perpetrator." Such identifications are usually preceded by outof-court identifications, using one of three procedures: (1) lineups, in which a witness is asked to pick a suspect out of a line of people; (2) showups, in which a witness is shown just one…
Eyewitness identification refers to a type of evidence in which an eyewitness to a crime claims to recognize a suspect as the one who committed the crime. In cases where the eyewitness knew the suspect before the crime, issues of the reliability of memory are usually not contested. In cases where the perpetrator of the crime was a stranger to the eyewitness, however, the reliability of the identif…
Since the early 1970s, violence in the family has been transformed from a private concern to a criminal justice problem. Violence in intimate relationships is extensive and is not limited to one socioeconomic group, one society, or one period in time. Every type and form of family and intimate relationship has the potential of being violent. In 1998, a National Academy of Sciences panel assessing …
"The most important part of education," said the Athenian in Plato's Laws, "is right training in the nursery" (li. 643). Through acceptance of Freudian theory, this ancient belief gained new credibility during the first half of the twentieth century. According to Freudian theory, successful socialization begins with an early attachment to the mother, an attachmen…
Criminal events provoke many emotions from the general public—outrage, sadness, anger, disgust, shock. One of those emotions, public fear of crime, has drawn concerted attention from social scientists since the late 1960s. One reason for that attention is a simple but sobering fact: The number of people who experience fear of crime during any particular period is enormously greater than the…
The agency now known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) has an interesting history. While today the agency enjoys extraordinary prestige and status, and is quite encompassing in its authority and jurisdiction, the agency has a rather humble, and at times scandalous and controversial, past. The purpose of this entry is to trace the evolution of the Federal Bureau of Investigation fr…
Since the founding of the United States, the authority to define and punish crimes has been divided between the states and the federal government. Before the Civil War the United States exercised jurisdiction over only a narrow class of cases in which the federal interest was clearly dominant if not exclusive. Since the Civil War, federal criminal jurisdiction has been gradually expanding to subje…
Cases investigated and prosecuted by the federal criminal enforcement authorities often capture national attention. Terrorist bombings, official corruption, insider securities trading, organized crime enterprises, international drug conspiracies—all have been targeted by the "Feds," as have bank robberies, environmental crimes, illegal immigration, and foreign espionage, t…
Feminist perspectives in criminology developed in reaction to silences and gaps in mainstream criminology. According to the critique that feminists began to mount in the late 1960s and early 1970s, mainstream or traditional criminology was inadequate in five key respects: (1) it focused almost exclusively on male offenders; (2) it was androcentric in its understandings and interpretations of crime…
Even according to its critics, feminism has been one of the most important influences on the substantive criminal law in the past fifty years. Feminism has changed legal understandings of rape and battering as well as the law of homicide and self-defense. Indeed, there is a growing awareness and body of scholarship showing that feminist concerns are not simply limited to "women's�…
Forfeiture is the loss or confiscation of one's property in consequence of a crime, offense, or breach of obligation. It is an ancient practice sustained by differing rationales through the centuries. In biblical times, religious ideas supported the view that property causing death was "guilty" and had to be destroyed as a form of expiation. In medieval England, offending prop…
The law against forgery is designed to protect society from the deceitful creation or alteration of writings on whose authenticity people depend in their important affairs. A person who, with the purpose of deceiving or injuring, makes or alters a writing in such a way as to convey a false impression concerning its authenticity is guilty of forgery in its contemporary sense. …
Gambling can be defined broadly as participation in any risk-taking activity. In law gambling is defined as a bet or wager (consideration), on a probability game or a sporting event (chance), with the hope of winning a payoff or prize (FCC v. American Broadcasting Co., 347 U.S. 284 (1954)). From a public health perspective, activities such as day trading in stocks, commodities, and futures markets…
Gender is the single best predictor of criminal behavior: men commit more crime, and women commit less. This distinction holds throughout history, for all societies, for all groups, and for nearly every crime category. The universality of this fact is really quite remarkable, even though many tend to take it for granted. Most efforts to understand crime have focused on male crime, since men have g…
A guilty plea consists of a defendant admitting having committed one or more of the crimes charged and a court agreeing to accept that admission and to sentence the defendant. Ordinarily, a guilty plea occurs after defense counsel has bargained with the prosecution and obtained some concession—for example, a reduction of the charges, an agreement not to file other charges, or a stipulation …
"There is no glory in plea bargaining," writes Professor George Fisher. "In place of a noble clash for truth, plea bargaining gives us a skulking truce . . . . Plea bargaining may be . . . the invading barbarian. But it has won all the same" (p. 859). In the late 1990s, 94 percent of the convictions of state-court felony defendants in the seventy-five largest U.S. count…
There are approximately as many guns in civilian hands in the United States as there are people, more than 250 million (Kleck, pp. 96–97). Most are rifles and shotguns used primarily for recreation, but a growing proportion, perhaps one-third, are handguns, which are usually purchased for personal or home defense. Between the late 1960s and late 1970s, violent crime rates in the United Stat…
Habeas corpus is shorthand for a variety of writs or legal pleadings seeking to bring a person within a court's power. Of the many habeas corpus writs, the most celebrated and significant is the writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, the "Great Writ," which requires an official or person who holds another in custody to produce the person so that a court can inquire into the le…
A hate crime is a crime committed as an act of prejudice against the person or property of a victim as a result of that victim's real or perceived membership in a particular group. Many of the most notorious hate crimes have been murders, such as the racially motivated murder of James Byrd, Jr., in Texas in 1998 or the homophobicmotivated murder of Matthew Shepard in North Dakota later that…
Homicide is the killing of one human being by another. As a legal category, it can be criminal or noncriminal. Criminal homicides are generally considered first-degree murder, when one person causes the death of another with premeditation and intent, or second-degree murder, when the death is with malice and intent but is not premeditated. Voluntary manslaughter usually involves intent to inflict …
A glance through anthropological and historical records reveals immense cross-cultural variation in the acceptance and repression of homosexual relations between men and between women. So great is this variation that some societies in some eras have imposed capital punishment on men engaging in homosexual acts, while others have held sexual friendships between men to be a social ideal of the most …
Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is usually spread unintentionally, but in the course of sexual or drug-using conduct that is intentional. Since the beginning of the HIV epidemic, criminal law has been proposed, and sporadically deployed, as a means of addressing conduct that exposes others to, or actually infects them with, HIV. This entry surveys the practical, legal, and social issues that ar…
Incapacitation is one of the mechanisms through which prisons contribute to crime prevention. While incarcerated an offender is restrained from committing crimes, at least outside the prison walls, and thus it is said that prisons incapacitate offenders from "additional mischief," as William Blackstone once put it. For at least two hundred years incapacitation has been recognized as …
Prosecuting authorities in the American criminal justice system have broad discretion in deciding how to handle a criminal matter. A prosecutor may file formal charges against an individual suspect and pursue a guilty verdict by means of a plea bargain or trial. The vast majority of cases that are processed to a verdict within the criminal justice system result in the conviction and punishment of …
The study of intelligence in criminological research has ebbed and flowed considerably during the past century. In the first quarter of the 1900s, hundreds of studies categorized criminal offenders as "feebleminded" and "mentally deficient." Fifty studies conducted from 1910 to 1914 identified an average of 51 percent of institutionalized delinquents as feebleminded (Su…
A major step to close one of the important gaps in the enforcement system of international criminal law was taken on 17 July 1998 with the adoption of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Statute) at a diplomatic conference in Rome. The vote was 120 in favor to 7 against (including the United States, China, Iraq, and Israel), with twenty-one abstentions. The Statute provides for t…
International criminal justice standards, including principally the right to a fair trial, have been defined and guaranteed by no less than twenty global and regional human rights treaties and other instruments. The most important are (1) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; (2) the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; (3) the International Convention on the Elimination of A…
The bulk of criminal law is established and enforced under the national law of individual states, but an increasingly important body of international criminal law has also emerged. It began with a few international procedures developed by states to coordinate the enforcement of their national criminal law and has grown as international law itself has come to proscribe certain acts as crimes. Since…
Jails are locally administered, short-term confinement facilities, usually run by the county sheriff or city police, which typically hold persons awaiting trial or other proceedings, as well as convicted offenders serving sentences of one year or less. The transiency and diversity of jail inmate populations cause significant problems for jail administrators, and many believe that local control com…
The U.S. federal, state, and even local governments have adapted the territorial reach of their criminal laws to permit punishment of "new and complex crimes" when elements of extraterritoriality exist. The proactive extension of its extraterritorial jurisdiction has resulted in transformation of the law of jurisdiction and has led to occasional tension with other governments. While …
Public praise and criticism for the jury have a long history, and high profile jury trials are a staple of modern press coverage. However, it is only in the past forty years that researchers have published systematic empirical studies of jury behavior. Study of the jury is a particularly thorny project because the jury speaks publicly only through its verdict. At the end of the trial the jury reti…
In 1791, the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteed every criminal defendant the right to trial "by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed." This provision was essentially redundant. Article III, section 2 of the Constitution had already provided, "The trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by…
The law recognizes a privilege for an actor to employ force to prevent crime, to effect a lawful arrest, to prevent an escape from custody, under circumstances where, without the justification of such a privilege, the actor might be charged with assault or even homicide. This category of justifications, like others, arises in cases where the law accepts that a harm is done, or may be done, by the …
Self-defense and defense of others are defenses to a charge of criminal conduct in which the defendant concedes the transgression of a norm or statute against violence, for example, assault or homicide, but maintains that under the circumstances the use of force was either not wrongful ( justification) or is wrongful, but it would be unfair to impose punishment (excuse). Either as a justification …
Estimates of the magnitude of youth gang problems in the United States steadily increased over the last decades of the twentieth century. An unprecedented public and government response to gang problems at federal, state, and local levels began in 1989. As the century drew to a close, evidence of a leveling off of the scope of gang problems began to emerge. For two consecutive years, in 1997 and 1…
Ideological changes in the cultural conception of children and in strategies of social control during the nineteenth century led to the creation of the first juvenile court in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899. Culminating a century-long process of differentiating youths from adult offenders, Progressive reformers applied new theories of social control to new ideas about childhood and created the juv…
Juvenile courts and the rest of the juvenile justice system are responsible for dealing with: (1) juvenile delinquents, who have committed an act, such as an assault or burglary, that would be a crime if committed by an adult; and (2) status offenders, whose behavior, such as school truancy, running away from home, or incorrigibility, is illegal for a child but would not be a crime if committed b…
The Maine Youth Center, which opened in 1854 and is one of the oldest reform schools in the United States, is home for over two hundred adolescent boys and girls from Maine who have broken the law. The campus sits high on an open hill overlooking the Fore River and looks out on the South Portland Airport. The original building, which formerly housed all of Maine's delinquent youths, is now …