Are You A Criminal?

Have you ever considered yourself to be a "criminal?" According to some dictionary entries you may be; Miriam-Webster's Dictions of Law, a criminal is defined as "one that has committed or been legally convicted of an act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it" ("Criminal"). This includes all laws, no matter what. Has anyone ever performed oral sex for you? Have you ever administered oral sex on anyone else? Well, with the reasoning of this definition in mind, you are a criminal. In most states, according to law, sodomy is illegal. Sodomy laws prohibit oral sex. In Maryland, for example, cunnilingus, oral stimulation on a female, and fellatio, oral stimulation on a male, is illegal (Geppi 2003). So now you must consider: is the average husband and wife pair of co-conspirators in organized crime? The more important question to ask is, if a criminal is a person who violates a law, or is a criminal a person who violates more serious social values of what proper behavior is?

To find the answer to this question, the first place to start would be the word itself. "Criminal" derives from the Latin word "crimin" meaning "accused of" (criminal). The latter of the word means "having the qualities of" ("Criminal"). So when analyzing the etymology of the word, the term encompasses even those who have only been accused of committing a crime. However, a lot about the word has changed over time since then.

The actual definition of a criminal has changed a lot over the centuries as well. In the Middle Ages, a criminal was someone who was believed to be a witch or possessed by demons (Siegel 4). The punishment back then was burning at the stake, a fate of which an estimated 100,000 people were victim (Siegel 4). Even within the past two centuries, you could be found to be a criminal depending on the shape of your cranium, a pseudoscience known as Phrenology (Siegel 6). During the Eugenics Movement, women who were believed to exhibit these traits were sterilized, so as to not produce "criminal" offspring ("Eugenics"). The movement was accepted in 27 states and it is estimated that up to 70,000 women were sterilized due to this belief ("Eugenics"). Luckily, institutions are more scientifically educated today, and people are not subjected to these "precautions."

Now most people tend to classify a criminal by the fact that they are a convict or felon. Although it is true that a convict or felon is a criminal, the term criminal is not a synonym to those terms. A convict or felon is a convicted criminal; however, a criminal is someone who committed a crime, but has not necessarily been convicted of that crime.

Society does have some exemptions to this ideology, if the crime in questions is of a serious moral conviction. To see where the border of what they consider to be an offense worthy as being termed "criminal" we can look at the way the government classifies crimes. Crimes are classified as either "mala in se" or "mala prohibitum" (Siegel 596). "Mala in se crimes are acts that are outlawed because they violate basic moral values, such as rape, murder, assault, and robbery" (Siegel 596). Those probably constitute the bulk of what society considers as being criminal. "Mala prohibitum crimes are acts that are outlawed because they clash with current norms and public opinion, such as tax, traffic, and drug laws" (Siegel 596). Society probably tends to overlook these crimes in their classification of a criminal since they are not committing any direct harm upon another person.

So how do these "non-criminal" crimes come into existence in the first place? Well, in the U.S., most of our framework for our criminal codes is derived from English Common Law, which was created centuries ago (Siegel 32). This is where most of the mala in se crimes come from. Mala prohibitum crimes are made up from a concept known as "Criminal Attempt Law." Criminal Attempt Law is a process which makes an act, innocent in itself, an inchoate crime (Siegel 591). This makes previously legal acts, such as marijuana possession, become a criminal act. Marijuana and many narcotics were completely legal up until the 20th century ("Eugenics"). Then as society's views of drugs changed, so did the laws. Criminal Attempt Laws reclassified many drugs as illegal to possess, thereby creating