Public-order crime
In criminology, public-order crime is defined by Siegel as "crime which involves acts that interfere with the operations of society and the ability of people to function efficiently", i.e., it is behaviour that has been labelled criminal because it is contrary to shared norms, social values, and customs. Robertson maintains a crime is nothing more than "an act that contravenes a law". Generally speaking, deviancy is criminalized when it is too disruptive and has proved uncontrollable through informal sanctions.
Public-order crime should be distinguished from political crime. In the former, although the identity of the "victim" may be indirect and sometimes diffuse, it is cumulatively the community that suffers, whereas in a political crime, the state perceives itself to be the victim and criminalizes the behaviour it considers threatening. Thus, public-order crime includes consensual crime and victimless crime. It asserts the need to use the law to maintain order both in the legal and moral sense. Public-order crime is now the preferred term by proponents as against the use of the word "victimless" based on the idea that there are secondary victims that can be identified.
For example, in cases where a criminal act subverts or undermines the commercial effectiveness of normative business practices, the negative consequences extend beyond those at whom the specific immediate harm was intended. Similarly, in environmental law, there are offences that do not have a direct, immediate, and tangible victim, so crimes go largely unreported and unprosecuted because of the problem of lack of victim awareness. In short, there are no clear, unequivocal definitions of "consensus", "harm", "injury", "offender", and "victim". Such judgments are always informed by contestable, epistemological, moral, and political assumptions.
A vice squad is a police division whose focus is stopping public-order crimes like gambling, narcotics, prostitution, and illegal sales of alcohol.
England and Wales
Note that under English and Welsh law, a "public-order offence" is a different category of crime related to disorderly conduct and other breaches of the peace. See the following:Crimes without apparent victims
In public-order crimes, there are many instances of criminality where a person is accused because he/she has made a personal choice to engage in an activity of which society disapproves, e.g., private recreational drug use. Thus, there is continuing political debate on criminalization versus decriminalization, focusing on whether it is appropriate to use punishment to enforce the various public policies that regulate the nominated behaviours. After all, society could deal with unpopular behaviour without invoking criminal or other legal processes.Following the work of Schur, the types of crime usually referred to include the sexually based offences of prostitution, paraphilia, underage sex, and pornography; and the offences involving substance abuse which may or may not involve some element of public disorder or danger to the public as in driving while intoxicated. Since 1965, however, societal views have changed greatly, for example, prostitution, often considered a victimless crime, is classified by some countries as a form of exploitation of women—such views are held in Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, where it is illegal to pay for sex, but not to be a prostitute, see Prostitution in Sweden.
When deciding whether harm to innocent individuals should be prohibited, the moral and political beliefs held by those in power interact and inform the decisions to create or repeal crimes without apparent victims. These decisions change over time as moral standards change. For example, Margaret Sanger who founded the first birth-control clinic in New York City was accused of distributing obscene material and violating public morals. Information about birth control is no longer considered obscene. Within the context of a discussion on whether governments should regulate public morals in the interest of the public good, Meier & Geis identify which social problems might be deemed appropriate for legal intervention and the extent to which the criminal law should enforce moral positions which may lack societal consensus.
This reflects a more fundamental problem of legal consistency. People have the right to engage in some self-destructive activities. For all its carcinogenic qualities, tobacco is not a prohibited substance. Similarly, the excessive consumption of alcohol can have severe physical consequences, but it is not a crime to consume it. This is matched in gambling. The state and its institutions often rely on lotteries, raffles, and other legal forms of gambling for operating funds, whether directly or indirectly through the taxation of profits from casinos and other licensed outlets. Qualitatively, there is nothing to distinguish the forms of gambling deemed illegal. A side effect of turning too many people into criminals is that the concept of crime becomes blurred and genuine criminality becomes less unacceptable. If the key distinction between real crime and moral regulation is not made clearly, as more consensual activities become crimes, ordinary citizens are criminalized for tax-evasion, illegal downloading, and other voluntary rule-breaking. A further perceptual problem emerges when laws remain in force but are obviously not enforced, i.e. the police reflect the consensus view that the activity should not be a crime. Alternatively, if the activities prohibited are consensual and committed in private, this offers incentives to the organizers to offer bribes in exchange for diverting enforcement resources or to overlooking discovered activity, thereby encouraging political and police corruption. Thus, any deterrent message that the state might wish to send is distorted or lost.
More generally, political parties find it easier to talk dismissively about crimes if they are classified as victimless because their abolition or amendment looks to have fewer economic and political costs, i.e., the use of the word "victimless" implies that there are no injuries caused by these crimes and, if that is true, then there is no need to create or retain the criminal offences. This may reflect a limited form of reality that, in the so-called "victimless crimes", there are no immediate victims to make police reports and those who engage in the given behaviour regard the law as inappropriate, not themselves. This has two consequences:
- Because these crimes often take place in private, comprehensive law enforcement would consume an enormous amount of resources. It is therefore convenient for the law enforcement agencies to classify a crime as victimless because that is used as a justification for devoting fewer resources as against crimes where there are "real" victims to protect; and
- These crimes usually involve something desirable where large profits can be made, e.g., drugs or sex.
The hidden crime factor
Decriminalization of public-order crimes
Maguire and Radosh accept that the public-order crimes that cause the most controversy are directly related to the current perceptions of morality. The most fundamental question remains whether the government has the right to enforce laws prohibiting private behaviour.Arguments in favor of decriminalization
Those who favor decriminalization or legalization contend that government should be concerned with matters affecting the common good, and not seek to regulate morality at an individual level. Indeed, the fact that the majority ignore many of the laws, say on drug-taking, in countries founded on democratic principles should encourage the governments elected by those majorities to repeal the laws. Failure to do so simply undermines respect for all laws, including those laws that should, and, indeed, must be followed. Indeed, when considering the range of activities prohibited, the practical policing of all these crimes would require the creation of a police state intruding into every aspect of the peoples' lives, no matter how private. It is unlikely that this application of power would be accepted even if history showed such high-profile enforcement to be effective. Prohibition arguably did not prevent the consumption of alcohol, and the present war on drugs is expensive and ineffective. Those who favor decriminalization also point to experience in those countries which permit activities such as recreational drug use. There is clear evidence of lower levels of substance abuse and disruptive behavior.- The presence of public-order crimes encourages a climate of general disrespect for the law. Many individuals choose to violate public-order laws, because they are easily violable, and there is no victim to complain. This encourages disrespect for the law, including disrespect for laws involving crimes with victims.
- To criminalize behavior that harms no other or society violates individual freedom and the human/natural rights of the individual. The right of the individual to do what they will, so long as they harm no other, or society as a whole, is a generally accepted principle within free and democratic societies; criminalization of acts that others feel are immoral, but are not clearly proven to be harmful, is generally violative of that principle; although exceptions may—and do—apply. There are questions of the victimlessness of such supposed "exception" crimes as well as criticisms of the validity of assuming "bad tendencies" though. One example of criticism of the idea of criminalizing cruelty to animals out of a bad tendency in the people who do it instead of animal suffering is that research on the ability of animals to suffer by studies of animal brains is often used to determine what animals should be covered by laws against cruelty to animals, as shown in controversies about extending such laws to fish and invertebrates in which animal brain studies are the main cited arguments both for and against criminalization. It is also pointed out that computer games with "cruelty" to virtual mammals are legal in most Western countries while cruelty to real mammals is not, again showing that it is inner animal suffering and not outer body language that is relevant regardless of whether or not animals are formally classified as victims in courts. The notion of cruelty to animals as a predictor of violence to other humans is also criticized for lacking consistency with the evolutionary notion of empathy being gradually extended from close relatives to more distant relatives according to which cruelty to other humans should predict cruelty to animals but not the other way, explaining the appearance of cruelty to animals being a risk factor for violence to humans as a result of criminal investigation spending more resources investigating people known to abuse animals for human violence while people with no history of animal abuse or animal neglect more easily get away with violence to other humans due to being less investigated. In the case of child pornography depicting real children, victimlessness is questioned as circulation of pornographic images of people taken when they were too young to consent to it may injure their personal integrity. In the case of cartoons, it is pointed out that the same psychiatrists who argued for criminalization have used the same arguments to acquit or strongly reduce sentences for statutory rape in cases where they deemed the victim to "look older", which critics cite as an example of it being counterproductive to protecting children, arguing that a societal transition from visual age guessing to ID checking would reduce statutory rape. There are other arguments than depravity to ban pornographic cartoons depicting minors however, including curtailment of profit from such cartoons which explains why such laws in some European countries have exceptions for cases when the creator and the possessor are the same person in which no transaction is involved. It is also argued that passive marijuana smoking de facto constitutes victimization in some cases of drug use. More generally it is argued that civilized punishment should be based on deterrence, while basing punishment on assumptions of depravity leads to inhumane and uncivilized punishment as the assumption that some people are inherently bad leads to an appearance of persecution being "necessary". It is also argued that since higher priorities of criminal investigation of people considered depraved can find statistical correlations by higher percentages of criminals in profiled groups being caught compared to non-profiled groups no matter if there is a link or not as a self-fulfilling prophecy, preventing it from being self-correcting and making it possible for depravity arguments to lead to anyone being classified as depraved and, as a result, a general loss of freedom. It is therefore argued that depravity arguments should be categorically avoided, as any "exception" would be a mobile goal post.
- The cost of enforcing public-order crimes is too high to individual and societal freedom, and will inevitably result in coercion, force, brutality, usurpation of the democratic process, the development of a carceral state, and finally, tyranny. Due to public-order crimes not having a victim, someone aside from a victim has to be used to report public-order crimes, and someone other than the sovereign people itself has to be delegated to enforce the public-order laws. This results in the development of an apparatus of coercion, a class of "law enforcers" within society, but separate from society, in that they are tasked with enforcing laws upon the people, rather than the people enforcing their own law. This inevitably results in violations of individual freedom, as this class of "law enforcers" seeks more and more power, and turns to more and more coercive means.
- Public-order crimes often pertain to behavior engaged in especially by discernible classes of individuals within society, and result in the criminalization or stigmatization of those classes, as well as resentment from those classes against the laws, against the government, or against society.
- Public-order crimes will end up being selectively prosecuted, since it is not possible to prosecute them all. This creates or reinforces class, gender, or race based criminalization or stigmatization. It also is a very powerful tool for political persecution and suppression of dissent. It produces a situation in which otherwise upstanding citizens are committing "crimes" but in the absence of mens rea and without even being aware of the fact that their behavior is or was illegal until it becomes convenient to the state to prosecute them for it.
- The natural variation in internal moral compass, which often turns out to be beneficial to society, or to stem from variations of understanding which will always be with us to some degree, leads to individuals committing "crimes" in the absence of mens rea. Individuals of all political stripes and background who do not have an encyclopedic knowledge of the law are vulnerable to accidentally committing crimes and suffering punishment when they were not aware that the behavior was even considered problematic. For instance individuals who violate building or zoning codes on their own property may be stuck with large expenses, life disruptions, or fines unexpectedly.
- Public enforcement of morality will inevitably lead to individuals with underdeveloped moral compasses of their own, instead resulting in external restraint substituting for internal restraint, and, thus, greater immorality, deviance, and societal decadence. Or, they may give up on their internal compass and turn to a more Machiavellian approach if they are punished for following it.