A crime is an action which breaks a country's criminal law. Some actions, for example, murder, unlawful killing, violence towards a person including rape, theft, damage to property, fraud and forgery have long been regarded as crimes in most countries. Every country makes its own laws and has its own response to crime and punishment. Lesser crimes are usually punished by a fine or by community service (working in the community) while for more serious crimes, the punishment is prison. In a few countries, murder is still punishable by execution.

Property crimes

Property crimes involve stealing or damaging someone else’s money or property. Stealing someone’s property without their permission is called larceny. If violence, or the threat of violence is involved, it becomes known as robbery. Burglary is the act of breaking into a building with plans to steal something or commit another sort of crime. Crimes that damage property are also types of property crime. Vandalism is any crime which damages public or private property, such as the spraying of graffiti or breaking windows. Setting property on fire with intent to damage or destroy is known as arson.

White-collar crimes

White-collar crimes are non-violent crimes which are usually to do with money. They include tax fraud (withholding information about how much tax is due), tax evasion, and identity theft (using someone else’s documents to impersonate them). Smuggling, the transporting of goods between countries without paying tax on them, or the transporting of illegal goods such as narcotics (drugs) or arms, is another example of a white-collar crime.

Organized crime

Crime carried out by a group, or gang, of people working together is known as organized crime. Their organization is run as a illegal businesses. Some groups have members from several countries. People-trafficking—bringing people from one country to work illegally in another—is carried out by organized gangs.
​​​​​​​

The largest and best-known example is the Mafia, a network of "families", that carry out organized crime both in Italy and in the USA where many Italian immigrants had settled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Mafia originated on the island of Sicily in the Middle Ages. Its members are sworn to secrecy. Today it is involved in a range of criminal activity, including obtaining money from people using threats or actual violence, kidnapping, running gambling operations and selling illegal drugs.
​​​​​​​

Groups that distribute illegal drugs are known as drugs cartels. They find ways to import illegal drugs into a country illegally and sell them. The members of some cartels even organize themselves by rank, similar to that used in the military.

The period between the years 1920 and 1933 in the US is called the Prohibition era. This is because the sale of alcohol was prohibited. To cater for those people who wanted to continue consuming alcohol, gangs who made money illegally importing and selling alcohol soon sprang up. They became known as Prohibition gangsters. Huge, powerful networks spread across the country: it was the first modern organized crime. Gangsters such as Al Capone (1899–1947), who dominated organized crime in Chicago in 1925–31, became rich, ruling entire communities by violence, bribery and blackmail.

War crimes

A person commits a war crime when they act outside the agreed conventions of war. Such crimes include deliberately attacking a civilian or stealing from civilians during war. The first laws of war were agreed in 1864 at an international meeting called the Geneva Convention. They were intended to protect hospitals and medical staff from being attacked or captured during war, and made it a rule that war hospitals had to treat injured soldiers from both sides. In 1949, new rules were added which set out the ways that civilians and prisoners of war should be treated during war. Every country in the world has pledged to agree with the Geneva Convention.
​​​​​​​

Terrorism

When groups or individuals carry out violent attacks for a political or religious reason, it is known as terrorism. One of the main aims of a terrorist act is to spread fear through a group of people or society. The 9/11 attacks by the terrorist group Al-Qaeda on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington in 2001 were examples of a terrorist attack.

Crimes against humanity

Crimes committed by governments or rulers against their own people are known as crimes against humanity. These include genocide (the intentional action to destroy an entire people); the persecution of a group of people because of their race; the committing of violent acts, enslavement, torture or unjustified imprisonment; violation of human rights; funding terrorism; forcing children to fight in wars as soldiers. The United Nations is responsible for prosecuting crimes against humanity. In 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in The Hague (Netherlands) to proceed against those accused of both crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The earliest ideas about crime in the Western world came from religious ideas of sin. In countries whose people were mainly Christian, anything that was a sin in the Bible was considered a type of crime, such as blasphemy (insulting a religious figure or using religious symbols in the wrong way). The first system of state law was introduced to Europe by the Romans in the 6th century. This made it easier to identify and prosecute crimes across the Roman Empire. Before the 15th century, few crimes were officially recorded, but by far the commonest were thefts.

In 18th-century Britain, a person could be sentenced to death for relatively trivial crimes, such as illegally cutting down a tree, faking someone’s signature or stealing rabbits. The harshness of these laws earned them the nickname “the Bloody Code”. Even if a convicted criminal escaped death, he or she was likely to be transported to the colonies as punishment. Many laws protected the property and wealth of the country’s richest people, and punished the poor; for example, it was illegal to be a vagrant, a homeless person.
​​​​​​​

At the beginning of the 19th century the British government started to make laws that protected wider sections of society, including the less well-off. Violence was becoming less acceptable and new laws made violent attacks (assaults) serious crimes, sometimes punishable by death. In the 19th century, people who took part in riots and protests were also convicted of crimes. 

As transportation to the colonies declined, the first state prisons appeared in Britain. Courts imposed prison sentences on convicted criminals, although the death penalty remained for murder. Prison conditions were harsh, however: following the 1865 Prisons Act, convicts were made to do hard labour, sleep on hard beds and eat basic food like bread and water.