LEGALISTIC DEFINITION OF CRIME AND AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW
LEGALISTIC DEFINITION OF CRIME AND AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW

Summary/Abstract: In the first part of the paper, the author addresses one of the most famous definititons of crime given almost half a century ago by American criminologist Tapan, and criticizes it for being restrictive and overtly formalistic. Tapan equals crime with criminal offence, understood as a legal category. In the seventies, Schwedingers defined crime as a breach of basic human rights and had laid a foundation stone for many alternative definitions of the crime. One of the most influential ones at present is the “constitutive definition” given by Stewart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic According to this definition, there are two types of crime, depending on whether the injured person loses certain qualities important for its present status (reduction crimes) or is prevented from achieving desired position in the society (repression crimes). This definition of the crime enables to broaden the scope of criminology to all actions which injure somebody else, where 'injury' is understood in the broadest sense.

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