1. What is Crime?
1.2 Crime in Canada
Dr. Sean Ashley
Crimes are transgressions that violate the laws a society holds dear. These laws may be formally written down, held by knowledge keepers, or commonly known to all members of the group. To commit a crime is to break the rules a society views as the moral limits of acceptable behaviour. Crimes are an offence against society, not just an individual. In Canada, one can see this in the way crimes are prosecuted; it is the Crown (denoted as R. for rex or regina within legal citations) that charges a person, not the victim of the alleged crime.
Canadian criminal law is mainly codified within the Criminal Code of Canada (CCC) which sets out the various offences a person might commit and the range of punishments that they might receive. Criminal lawyers in Canada define crime largely in relation to these laws, and some criminologists (such as Edwin Sutherland, 1949) have argued that the criminological study of crime should be restricted to violations of state criminal codes like the CCC. This view is known as a legalistic approach to crime because it focuses strictly on violations of the legal code.
Under Canadian criminal law, a person may be charged with two main types of criminal offences: summary and indictable. A summary offence is the less serious of the two and therefore carries a lesser punishment. An example of a summary offence is causing a disturbance or theft under $5,000. In the United States these types of offences are known as misdemeanors. More serious offences in Canada are known as indictable offences. These include crimes such as murder or piracy (on the sea, that is) and can carry stiffer penalties, including life in prison. In the United States these types of offences are known as felonies and are commonly the focus of crime dramas like CSI and Law and Order.
In legal terms, to be found guilty of a criminal offence in Canada, a person must have committed a guilty act (i.e., actus reus) and be of a guilty frame of mind at the time of the offence (i.e., mens rea). It is not enough that a person commits an act that contravenes the CCC; they must also be of a certain state of mind, such as intending to commit the act or behaving with recklessness, negligence, or being willfully blind to the outcome (McElman, 2000).
For many offences, the state of mind and the action naturally occur together. Someone might want an item that belongs to another person (e.g., a car) and takes that object without having the right. The person, therefore, violated the law and intended to do so to satisfy their desire. In some cases, however, the lines are not so clear, such as when someone is sold a stolen car without knowing the car was stolen. Furthermore, some people, such as young children and people suffering from certain forms of mental illness, are thought to not possess the frame of mind necessary for mens rea and therefore may receive treatment rather than punishment for their actions.
Codified laws