We were all taught since the early stages of our education that the beginning of a worthwhile living is the confrontation with ourselves, to evade our inner demons and achieve a serene inner character. We are all inscribed with the belief that all felony or misconduct is the root of why a community is crumbling to pieces. Crime is often depicted in textbooks as sorts of deviant behavior that corrupts social order, and all criminal behaviors should be deservedly punished and stigmatized. Crime and the inability to control crime is a hence seen as a key indicator of the destruction of order within a societal system. That is all true, but in an alter perspective, crime can be the opposite of what it really is. It can be a catalyst of many civil qualities that are vital to a society’s development, and it symbolizes so much more than simply a rotting element within an integrated system.

The legal definition of crime is an act that violates the designated jurisprudence of an area, and hence the doer is or can be subjected to legal punishment. The violation of criminal laws is exactly what crime essentially means. The concept of crime often intervenes itself with the idea that the individual pursuit of private benefits through unconventional ways is deemed harmful, and will potentially disrupt the ongoing social order and harmony of the general public. What constitutes to a criminal act involves a variety of elements, but it mainly branches out into the two big categories of the Mens rea, and the Actus rea, which respectively represents the intention and overall physical gesture of crime. With these two combined together it creates a holistic definition of what criminal deviance is, they are what implies the utilitarian logic in crime. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the major source of criminal data in the US, crime can be generalized into a number of categories. There are crimes against the person, otherwise known as violent crimes, which include murder, rape and aggravated assaults, and crimes against property, or property crimes, which include burglary and larceny-theft etc. There is also a third kind of crime, known as victimless crimes, including prostitution and illegal drug use, which is not typically grouped into the major crime indices. It is unarguable that all these types of crime inflict serious negative consequences for the people involved. The 2015 Federal Crime Report from the FBI shows a clear upward trend in both violent and property crimes in the United States, clearly hinting a new budding criminal culture in the country. But before jumping into conclusions, it is important for us to notice that this reflect only the raw numbers of the situation, they do not capture the entire picture