So what makes a criminal?
Is a criminal someone who buys a hooker? Someone who smokes pot? Someone who gets a speeding ticket? I haer people talk about “criminals” all the time. I would be surprised to find very many people who haven’t broken a law…
More to the point- is a person who commits a victimless crime a criminal? Is someone who breaks any law a criminal?
I define a criminal as someone that hurts other people, such as stealing, rape, life-destroying drugs (such as meth), etc.
Someone who commits a crime, where a crime is defined as some sort of social deviance that defies some sort of official law of the area (where the area can be anything from a small town to a country). If you jaywalk when you’re not supposed too, you’re a criminal, whether you get caught or not.
And before anyone asks, yes, I do agree that pretty much every person in existence is a criminal by my own definition.
Anyone who sends me SPAM.
And I’m not talking about the delicious meat either.
You are a criminal if society says you are a criminal. Certain acts are not criminal, only in the right social context.
What about alcohol and nicotine? Can’t these be defined as life destroying? This just goes to show that using drugs is not criminal, only using certain drugs in a certain way that have have been defined as criminal by society.
From dictionary.com:
n.
One that has committed or been legally convicted of a crime.
The “everybody” definition kind of takes the usefulness away from the word. Usually when I use it I refer to people who break laws habitually. Someone who is known to be a thief, known to sell drugs, to drive drunk, etc.
If someone has a lot of parking tickets, I don’t consider that a criminal. Though I guess they go higher on the criminal scale if they never plan to do anything about them.
does conning stupid people out of money fall under any of those categories?
send me $20 and i’ll research the answer to your question
You cannot take into consideration the definition of a criminal without the definition of a crime. The only problem is that crime has no objective reality, so trying to define a crime or a criminal objectively is pointless.
Felonies and Misdemenors are criminal. Speeding tickets aren’t either of those.
That’s the easy part. There’s books and books of it, in extreme detail. But it varies from place to place.
Are you a criminal if you fool stupid people out of their money? Depends if you did it legally or not. If somebody voluntarily pays 15 cents to “See the Egress” that’s their problem (Barnum’s American Museum).
Drug use should not be a crime. Criminalizing drug use creates many more problems than it solves.
(there goes any future I may have had in the FBI 
)
Here’s an Op Ed from the LA Times:
Let those dopers be
A former police chief wants to end a losing war by legalizing pot, coke, meth and other drugs
By Norm Stamper
Norm Stamper is the former chief of the Seattle Police Department. He is the author of “Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing” (Nation Books, 2005).
October 16, 2005
SOMETIMES PEOPLE in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I’m a former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they’ll approach me the way they might a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.
Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle’s police department.
But no, I don’t favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.
Decriminalization, as my colleagues in the drug reform movement hasten to inform me, takes the crime out of using drugs but continues to classify possession and use as a public offense, punishable by fines.
I’ve never understood why adults shouldn’t enjoy the same right to use verboten drugs as they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a scotch and water.
Prohibition of alcohol fell flat on its face. The prohibition of other drugs rests on an equally wobbly foundation. Not until we choose to frame responsible drug use — not an oxymoron in my dictionary — as a civil liberty will we be able to recognize the abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it is: a medical, not a criminal, matter.
As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the “war on drugs.” Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush — delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.
It’s not a stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We’re making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?
I’ve witnessed the devastating effects of open-air drug markets in residential neighborhoods: children recruited as runners, mules and lookouts; drug dealers and innocent citizens shot dead in firefights between rival traffickers bent on protecting or expanding their markets; dedicated narcotics officers tortured and killed in the line of duty; prisons filled with nonviolent drug offenders; and drug-related foreign policies that foster political instability, wreak health and environmental disasters, and make life even tougher for indigenous subsistence farmers in places such as Latin America and Afghanistan. All because we like our drugs — and can’t have them without breaking the law.
As an illicit commodity, drugs cost and generate extravagant sums of (laundered, untaxed) money, a powerful magnet for character-challenged police officers.
Although small in numbers of offenders, there isn’t a major police force — the Los Angeles Police Department included — that has escaped the problem: cops, sworn to uphold the law, seizing and converting drugs to their own use, planting dope on suspects, robbing and extorting pushers, taking up dealing themselves, intimidating or murdering witnesses.
In declaring a war on drugs, we’ve declared war on our fellow citizens. War requires “hostiles” — enemies we can demonize, fear and loathe. This unfortunate categorization of millions of our citizens justifies treating them as dope fiends, evil-doers, less than human. That grants political license to ban the exchange or purchase of clean needles or to withhold methadone from heroin addicts motivated to kick the addiction.
President Bush has even said no to medical marijuana. Why would he want to “coddle” the enemy? Even if the enemy is a suffering AIDS or cancer patient for whom marijuana promises palliative, if not therapeutic, powers.
As a nation, we’re long overdue for a soul-searching, coldly analytical look at both the “drug scene” and the drug war. Such candor would reveal the futility of our current policies, exposing the embarrassingly meager return on our massive enforcement investment (about $69 billion a year, according to Jack Cole, founder and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition).
How would “regulated legalization” work? It would: 1) Permit private companies to compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package and peddle drugs.
Create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to libertarians or paleo-conservatives).
Set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency and purity.
Ban advertising.
Impose (with congressional approval) taxes, fees and fines to be used for drug-abuse prevention and treatment and to cover the costs of administering the new regulatory agency.
Police the industry much as alcoholic beverage control agencies keep a watch on bars and liquor stores at the state level. Such reforms would in no way excuse drug users who commit crimes: driving while impaired, providing drugs to minors, stealing an iPod or a Lexus, assaulting one’s spouse, abusing one’s child. The message is simple. Get loaded, commit a crime, do the time.
These reforms would yield major reductions in a host of predatory street crimes, a disproportionate number of which are committed by users who resort to stealing in order to support their habit or addiction.
Regulated legalization would soon dry up most stockpiles of currently illicit drugs — substances of uneven, often questionable quality (including “bunk,” i.e., fakes such as oregano, gypsum, baking powder or even poisons passed off as the genuine article). It would extract from today’s drug dealing the obscene profits that attract the needy and the greedy and fuel armed violence. And it would put most of those certifiably frightening crystal meth labs out of business once and for all.
Combined with treatment, education and other public health programs for drug abusers, regulated legalization would make your city or town an infinitely healthier place to live and raise a family.
It would make being a cop a much safer occupation, and it would lead to greater police accountability and improved morale and job satisfaction.
But wouldn’t regulated legalization lead to more users and, more to the point, drug abusers? Probably, though no one knows for sure — our leaders are too timid even to broach the subject in polite circles, much less to experiment with new policy models. My own prediction? We’d see modest increases in use, negligible increases in abuse.
The demand for illicit drugs is as strong as the nation’s thirst for bootleg booze during Prohibition. It’s a demand that simply will not dwindle or dry up. Whether to find God, heighten sexual arousal, relieve physical pain, drown one’s sorrows or simply feel good, people throughout the millenniums have turned to mood- and mind-altering substances.
They’re not about to stop, no matter what their government says or does. It’s time to accept drug use as a right of adult Americans, treat drug abuse as a public health problem and end the madness of an unwinnable war.
john-
that made the most sense of nearly any pro legalization article i’ve ever read. thanks for posting.
The “victimless” is what makes the question interesting. A few musings:
Drug use may seem victimless, but often the victim suffers earlier, in the crimes that some drug users commit in order to gain money for the drug. If no such crime was committed then I would view drugtaking as just being stupid rather than criminal. Of course defining victim is difficult: when that user dies from his overdose, is his family a victim? They will certainly , I hope, suffer from his demise.
Speeding is another interesting one. If no-one gets hurt there is no victim. But the crime is of a nature: “driving in such a way as to statistically increase the chance that someone will get hurt, to above a predefined level”. No vivtim, just an increased chance there might have been one. Of course one you are stopped, then if it was just for speeding, then there was no victim.
I do take issue with car tax, and its evasion. Currently the onus (UK) is on the car owner to declare he is not using a car. If I leave my car off road and do not use it then that is certainly victimless, yet I can be punished for the crime of not telling anyone I don’t intend to use the car this year. The treasury complaining that I have not paid them money I do not owe, certainly leads to a victimless crime. One generated purely to simplify the collection of car taxes.
I could go on I suppose but…
Nao
In that post I wrote
“They will certainly , I hope, suffer from his demise.”
That does not really express my meaning and might be misinterpreted. I now realise that is would have been better worded as
“They will certainly , I would guess, suffer from his demise.”
Apologies
To answer DK’s original question…
No, a criminal is none of your listed definitions. The fact that whether or not something is defined as a crime “varies from place to place” as john stated, shows that the definition of a criminal is subjective.
You should look towards a sociological definition of crime/criminal. It is interesting to read different sociological theories on deviance and crime, so check out a sociological theory or ciminology book if you are interested.
I’m with John_Childs. Legalise drug use. That article presented some very good arguments, although drug abuse is a social, a psychological and a personality issue, not just a medical one.
Cathy
Your probably not a criminal until you get caught and convicted.
Sid Vicious said: No one is innocent.
Bob Dylan said: To live outside the law you must be honest.
I said: If unicycling is outlawed, only outlaws will ride unicycles.
Billy
My opinions about the drug laws and gun control are both on the Libertarian side and both tie in with each other. You have to solve both problems at the same time.
Legalize drugs and at the same time get tough on people who abuse guns. Legalizing drugs would free up some space in jails and prisons. Use that space to get very tough on people who abuse guns. Gun abusers are people who use a gun, or even have a gun in their possession, while committing a property crime or violent crime. At the same time also get tough, but not as tough, on property crime like auto theft and burglary as space in jails and prisons allows. People who commit a crime while carrying a gun will get much much higher sentences than people who commit the same crime without a gun. We need to make it so that criminals will choose not to carry a gun because they don’t want to risk the time. It needs to be very clear only and idiot would carry a gun and commit a crime. It will be clear to everyone that it is dumb to carry a gun and break the law.
Legalizing drugs is key because it will change the scope of law enforcement and also free the space in the jails and prisons. In the end I believe we will be safer and the costs to society will be less than what we have under the current drug war style system. It may seem that legalizing drugs would be a big social experiment that is too risky to even try. I say that the war on drugs was a big social experiment that has failed and will continue to fail.
With control and oversight legal drugs do not have to be a disaster. Heroin addicts can function quite normally in society as long as they can get clean and reliable drugs. Other drugs are similar. You don’t have to end up a junkie on a street corner. You can still be a productive member of society and a heroin addict.
The three strikes laws that catch non-violent drug offenders are immoral. You don’t need to lock up people for life for non-violent crime. Save the three strikes for the violent crimes and serious property crimes. I know there are some states that have three strike laws that snare non-violent drug crimes and some states that have three strikes laws that do not. I just did a quick internet search to try to find some info on how many states are in each group but didn’t find anything. I hope my state is not in the immoral group.
This plan would not address all gun crimes. For example the people who commit a murder suicide really wouldn’t care about increased punishment due to the gun abuse. A plan can’t be perfect. There is still personal responsibility. The government cannot and should not protect you from everything.