Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [6]
But blameworthiness itself varies tremendously from society to society, and period to period. It is true that most (perhaps all?) societies have rules about murder and theft. It is hard to imagine a society—certainly no modem society—that would let people roam about killing each other to their heart’s content, with no rules, limits, or controls. Even the Nazis had a concept of murder: anyone who killed a member of the party or an SS officer soon found this out.
On the other hand, no two societies have exactly the same definition of murder. Most modem societies outlaw blood feuds; other societies have allowed, or even fostered, revenge killing. Abortion, in the Republic of Ireland, is a crime, a killing; this used to be true in most American states. At this writing (1993), in the United States early abortion is not a crime at all but a woman’s right, her free and open choice, by virtue of Roe v. Wade.
Crime definitions, then, are specific to specific societies. Social change is constantly at work on the criminal justice system, criminalizing, decriminalizing, recriminalizing. Heretics were burned at the stake in medieval Europe; there is no such crime today. Colonial Massachusetts put witches to death. In antebellum Virginia and Mississippi, two slave states, black runaways, and any whites who helped them, committed crimes. Selling liquor was a crime in the 1920s, during Prohibition. It was a crime during the Second World War to sell meat above the fixed, official price; or to rent an apartment at excessive rent. These are now extinct or obsolete crimes.
Every state, and the federal government, has a penal code: a list of crimes to be punished. In every state, too, and in the federal government, criminal provisions are scattered elsewhere among the statute books. This is particularly true of regulatory crimes. The modem criminal code, even after pruning, is still much bulkier than older codes. There were no such crimes as price-fixing, monopoly, insider trading, or false advertising in the Middle Ages. Many new crimes—wiretapping, for example—are specific to high-tech society. We live in a welfare and regulatory state. Such a state produces thousands of newfangled offenses : dumping toxic wastes, securities fraud, killing endangered species, making false Medicare claims, inserting a virus into computer programs, and so on.
Clearly, there are crimes and crimes. It is conventional to draw a line between property crimes, crimes against the person, morals offenses, offenses against public order, and regulatory crimes. Social reactions depend on the type of crime. Typologies are not very systematic; but they can be illuminating. For example, there are what we might call predatory crimes—committed for money and gain; usually, the victims are strangers. These are the robberies and muggings that plague the cities and inspire so much dread. There are also lesser and greater crimes of gain: shoplifting, minor embezzlements, confidence games, cheats, frauds, stock manipulations in infinite form. There are also what we might call corollary crimes, crimes that support or abet other crime—conspiracies, aiding and abetting, harboring criminals; also perjury, jail break, and the like. Much rarer are political crimes—treason, most notably ; also, sedition, and, in a larger sense, all illegal acts motivated by hatred of the system, and which strike out against the constituted order. Then there are crimes of desperation—men or women who steal bread to keep from starving, addicts who steal or turn a trick to support their habit. Some crimes are thrill crimes—joyriding, shoplifting at times,