What Exactly is a Crime, Anyway?
Why hockey players get 5 minutes in the penalty box while street thugs get 15 years in prison
You are a professional hockey player out on the ice. You charge a player on the opposing team by knocking him against the boards, causing permanent brain damage and ending his career. You are disqualified from the game. Two weeks later, after a league tribunal, you are told to resume playing for the team. You are never charged in a criminal court. You continue earning millions of dollars a year, and opponents from other teams fear you.
You are on the street and see someone from an opposing gang, wearing a red handkerchief in his back pocket. You signal to your friends, sneak up behind him, ram him against the alley wall, and knock him unconscious. He wakes up three months later from a coma, now a paraplegic. You are arrested, convicted with assault, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Both of these assaults harmed the victim seriously. However, one is a state crime that involves intervention by the court system, and the other is left to the players to resolve.
What makes one a crime and the other not?
You could cite the rules of hockey. In the National Hockey League at least, violence is condoned and promoted. Penalties are implemented to establish competitive boundaries. While it is unfortunate how some people are injured and maimed, they agree to play the game knowing these risks. One could argue that there is nothing wrong with the assault in itself. It’s not a real crime. It’s just part of the game.
But you can say the exact same thing about the street scenario. Gang warfare is a game with its own proprietary rules, systems of penalizing and enforcement. When you join a gang, you do so with full understanding of the risks involved. Violence is central to the game.
Crime is not, and never has been, a wrong against another human being. A crime — by its nature and treatment — is deemed a wrong against the state, which is a fictional entity. It’s a state crime.
A state crime is never defined by the action itself or by a group of people calling it a crime. As Hester and Eglin point out in A sociology of crime (1992), history has yet to provide any convincing examples of criminal law as a product of consensus. A crime is created by a law, which is created by the authorities.
A law is not a mandate. There is no law that says gangs shall not maim and kill each other. Instead, laws are written in “if-then” structure. If you do this, here are the penalties. It’s the same as hockey rules: if you elbow an opponent, you get two minutes in the penalty box.
If the government intervened in the hockey rules and established its jurisdiction on the ice, the benefits would be questionable for the state and may even threaten its brisk business with the NHL. Fights on the ice attract fans and ticket revenues. They also help jack up the players’ salaries. They are a tax collector’s wet dream.
The National Hockey League generates huge tax revenues for the federal and regional governments across Canada and the US through corporate taxes and income tax. Players donate up to 49% of their salary to the IRS and CRA. The salaries of all thirty teams total about $2 billion, and $600 million to $1 billion of that goes right into the tax collectors’ pockets every year. That’s in addition to the corporate taxes levied on the teams themselves. In other words, the government is already very happy with their NHL business, and would derive minuscule benefits of barging into the tribunal’s meetings.
The same cannot be said of street gangs. There are no corporate taxes, no income taxes, no regulations with annual membership fees, no licensing program, and no fines for violating the industry rules.
Designating a street fight as a crime, and arresting offenders, helps the state collect taxes another way. Police departments can petition the city council for bigger budgets to hire more officers and more resources. The District Attorney’s office can apply for bigger budgets to charge and convict the suspects. The Department of Corrections can apply to build more prisons and hire more guards. The feds can launch a whole program called The War Against Street Violence. Then the taxes can be collected to finance everything.
Now there is motivation for the state to intervene.
In other words, arresting suspects in street fights helps generate tax revenues over the long term through expanding structures. Allowing hockey fights to continue helps generate annual cash flows through hockey taxes. One is a crime, the other is not. The house wins both ways.
What constitutes a crime?
We commonly assume the following about crime:
· Activities legally categorized as crimes are more harmful to people than activities not categorized as crimes.
· Once an activity is identified by law as a crime, and once the penalties are enforced, the frequency of the activity declines. In other words, designating an activity as a crime acts as a “deterrent” to that activity.
· Crime-fighting enhances social order, public safety, and public health.
· Criteria for criminalizing acts and substances are based largely on common sense and follow a degree of consistency.
None of these assumptions holds weight. A real crime — harm to a living human being through assault, theft or fraud — is not the same as a state crime. Many real crimes are not state crimes, and many state crimes do not involve any harms whatsoever to other human beings.
How crime actually works
Here is how crime actually works in the state system:
An activity or substance is not called a crime by the state until it is written down as a law.
State crimes are considered offenses against the state, and the state intervenes. Infractions and disputes not written into law as a crime are left to individuals to resolve, and the state does not intervene.
States decide to write a crime into law if it offers specific benefits to the state.
State crimes apply largely to individuals and civilians, rather than to corporate entities or governments. Throughout history, state crimes usually apply to harms on a much smaller scale than real crimes that are not considered state crimes.
Countless harmless activities and substances can switch instantly between non-crime and state crime depending on proof of permission from the state. Today, that proof is usually called a license.
Both felonies and minor offenses act as a form of taxation. While felonies usually involve prison terms, and minor offenses usually involve fines, both serve to strengthen the state.
A state crime is not actually a prohibited act or substance. It is simply an act or substance that carries penalties of prison time or fines. It serves the same function as a violation of industry regulations, where fines are applied to corporations.
The lawmakers and court system have a clear motive to identify and manufacture as many crimes as it can. If no law exists to identify the activity as a crime, the courts put pressure on the lawmakers to make a new law.
By criminalizing activities or substances that are harmless to other people, the state actually manufactures real, serious and violent crimes that would not occur if the activity or substance remained legal. Examples such as crystal meth and cannabis abound.
In other stories I examine the difference between state crime and real crime, why certain things became crimes, and how the act of crime-making is a form of taxation. Subjects include crystal meth, alcohol, cannabis, counterfeiting, bank robbery, insurance fraud and tax evasion.
