What It Means to Be Criminal in Today's Society

nick peterson

Sociology

Professor Schwartz

December 8th, 2010

Why I am (not) a criminal

If you asked an ordinary, everyday person, with a job and a family if they were a criminal, in all likelihood, they would say no. You could ask that very same question to most students, and they would probably say no. Most of them, if thoroughly interviewed I believe would be reassessing the answer to the original question. I do not mean that most of them would admit to being tried and convicted but rather, they would be thinking about the question from a more analytical standpoint based on trying to decide what a “criminal”, really is.

To define the word criminal you must frist define it’s root which is “crime”. The dictionary definiton of crime is “an act or the commission of an act that is forbidden or the omission of a duty that is commanded by a public law and that makes the offender liable to punishment by that law.” This means that anyone is susceptible to be prosecuted for breaking a law, but it also entails the idea that the breaking of a public law is in fact a crime. If you are or have broken a law does that make you a criminal? Again, according to Webster’s dictionary definition of criminal, “relating to, involving, or being a crime “, that would encompass a vast majority of people who think that they aren’t criminals, because let’s fact it, people break the law and are unpunished for it everyday. I believe that out of these definitions comes a very large discrepancy, how can you be a criminal that commits crime if you have never been convicted, how can it be proven? To answer that you could only rely on one source, and that source still does not recover all crime not reported. The NCVS has been working since 1974 to try and document unreported crimes among the citizens of the United States. This agency has surveyed 100,000 persons in various locations around the United States, but there is still no way to get everyone, such as everyday people committing...