Crime

CRIME. Many attempts have been made to find an accurate definition of crime, such as "an anti-social act," "a failure or refusal to live up to the standard of conduct deemed binding by the rest of the community," and "some act or omission in respect of which legal punishment may be inflicted on the person who is in default whether by acting or omitting to act." Under all these definitions the man who rides a bicycle without a light, or pulls the communication cord in a railway carriage as a stupid joke, is as much guilty of crime as the man who shoots a night watchman and runs away with the contents of the safe. Yet, if crime is de fined as the commission of a grave offence, manslaughter is a crime and men have been convicted of manslaughter for driving a ve hicle so carelessly as to cause the death of another : the offence was not intentional and in the eye of the ordinary citizen the careless driver is not a criminal.

The Nature of Crime.

That brings us to the motive ; but here we encounter a new difficulty. Who can divine the secrets of the heart? The only material on which our fallible human judgment can work is the act itself. The matter is further compli cated by the question of responsibility, for a certain number of persons who come before the criminal courts—probably not so large a number as is generally supposed—are mentally unstable, even if not certifiably insane. When we know so little of the secret temptations and the hidden faults of our intimate friends, how can we expect the criminal courts, which have not our advantage, to do more than rough justice? As long as human nature remains what it has always been, and what it will continue to be until the race disappears from the globe, that is all that human judges can ever do. Most of us have been guilty at some time of an "anti social act" and all of us, as we have confessed in places of wor ship, deserve punishment. It is more difficult to give an answer to the question "What is crime?" than it is to reply to the question of Pontius Pilate who expected no answer.

Crime is not a fixed quantity. Certain acts such as apostasy, or the practice of witchcraft have been savagely punished in the past and are not now treated as crimes. The treacherous seduction of a wife under circumstances condemned in every moral code may be treated as a crime in one country and not in another. A grave offence in one century may be a trivial offence in another. Every new invention, every new social combination, begets new forms of crime among those who use their wits to prey upon society.

Punishment.

Nevertheless, though we cannot give any sat isfactory definition, all of us know what we mean by "crime" and why we punish it. What is not so generally recognized is that the criminal is for the most part a man of like passions with ourselves, only less restrained, less prudent and far more unlucky. Human society, even when it was in a rudimentary state, tried to protect itself by punishing those who defied its customary law, not pri marily as an act of retribution, but from a sense of compensation —an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—and as civilization ad vanced, so did the theory of punishment as an instrument of deter rence. It is to this principle that the barbarous punishments that persisted in civilized countries up to the end of the eighteenth century were principally due.

It is now generally recognized that for punishment to be effective in reducing crime, three conditions are necessary—all criminals must be caught, their punishment must be justly awarded and there must be no delay in carrying out the sentence. It was only the third of these conditions that primitive and me diaeval society could achieve; it is the condition which is in dan ger of being lost sight of in many civilized communities. The first condition has not yet, and probably never will be, achieved at all. If detection and punishment were as certain as it is that a hand thrust into the fire will be burned, one could count upon the fin gers the number of persons who would adventure upon crime.

During the centuries covered by history, no doubt for long be fore history was written, a state of war has existed between the criminal and the forces of law and order, with fluctuating fortune, and whenever the criminal appeared to be victorious, the penalties exacted from those enemies of society who were unlucky enough to fall into the hands of authority became more savage in the vain hope that the majority—the undetected—might take warning and be deterred. The desecration of tombs in Ancient Egypt, then the most serious of all crimes, went on in spite of the atrocious punishments inflicted.

The torture inflicted on accused persons up to 15o years ago to extort confessions was not, as is commonly supposed, resorted to merely from cruelty, but was part of a judicial system which hesi tated to execute condemned persons before they had confessed.

Until quite late in the Christian era, the only conception of punishment for crime was death or the infliction of bodily pain. Under the Roman empire prisons were not places of punishment, but were used only for detaining prisoners until they could be tried or executed. In the list of Roman penalties—death by hang ing, by hurling from the Tarpeian rock, crucifixion, beheading, and drowning in the sack, exile or beating with rods—there is no men tion of the career. According to the reasoning of that day, a man who had declared war upon society had forfeited his right to belong to it and was better out of the way: society was not called upon to pay for maintaining him upon the doubtful chance that his nature might be regenerated. It was in the monastic system of the early Christian church that the idea of imprisonment first took root. The church attached great importance to solitude as a first condition of penitence. Solitude was the inspiration of the mon astic system. "Solitary confinement," as we understand the words, dates from the detrusio in monasterium of the old Canonical Law. When the French had the machinery for keeping people in prison, they used their prisons for secluding persons obnoxious to the court under lettres de cachet. The Declaration of the Rights of Man enunciated in 1789 contained the first suggestion of a meth odical system of imprisonment for lawbreakers, which appeared in the French code of 1791. Beccaria had already published his treatise against arbitrary and savage penalties and had insisted that punishments should be limited to what was necessary for the de fence of the community. Before his day there had been sporadic experiments in Europe. In 1593 the Protestants in Amsterdam had built a prison for women who were to be reformed by regular work and religious influences. Experiments of the same kind were made in Germany and the Hanseatic towns. In 1703 Pope Clem ent XI. had built the famous prison of St. Michel for young pris oners, and later in the century the cellular prison, which evoked the admiration of John Howard, was built at Ghent.

The modern prison system in England

dates from Jeremy Bentham and John Howard. Prison reform was older than the reform of English penal laws of which Sir Samuel Romilly said as late as 1817 "The laws of England are written in blood." The savagery of the French criminal law was swept away by the Revo lution, but more than twenty years later, men and women were being executed in England for thefts of more than forty shillings in value. This conservatism was due in part to a disinclination to copy the methods of our enemies, but there was also the feeling that unless criminals could be terrorized into good behaviour, they would become the masters of society ; as is always the case in com munities with a defective police organization. The criminal, and especially the highwayman, was a popular hero; the class from which he sprang was at war with those who possessed property and was glad to shield offenders from a law so sanguinary and pitiless; the lives of the working class in cities were not such as to attract the adventurous, and though to "cut a dash" on the highway generally brought a man to Tyburn before he was twen ty-five, he took his last ride in the cart under the admiring eye of the only audience whose opinion he valued, and strutted into Eter nity. The policy of terror failed as it has always failed. During the last decade of the 18th century the annual depredations upon property lying in the Thames amounted to the value of more than half a million sterling, and the highways near London were so unsafe for mail coaches that the Government had a force of mounted patrols to escort the coaches to their destination.

Jeremy Bentham did not approach the problem from the hu manitarian standpoint : there was no sentiment about his "Pan opticon," which was a prison so planned as to give the maximum security against escape with the minimum of expenditure of staff. His plan was to educate, to classify and to provide for the dis charged prisoner, but its main purpose was to prevent crime by discovering and removing its causes. He laid, in fact, the founda tion of our modern system. Bentham lived before his time. He found few converts in the England of his day, which Lecky de scribed as standing high in political, industrial and intellectual eminence, but "ranked in the treatment of crime and of prisoners shamefully below the average of the Continent." John Howard was a reformer of a different mould. "He sur veyed all Europe," said Burke, "not to view the sumptuousness of palaces, but to survey the mansions of sorrow and of pain ; to collect the distresses of men in all countries. His plan was orig final and full of genius as of humanity : it was a voyage of dis covery." Howard had himself been captured by a French pri vateer and interned in a dungeon at Brest where his experiences had sunk deep into his mind. His book, The State of Prisons at Home and Abroad, published at his own expense in a provincial town, awakened the public conscience to the scandal and disgrace of our penal system.

The criminal was gaining on the gallows and the population of Great Britain was then under nine millions. It was thus that trans portation came into being. In the reign of Charles II. the moss troopers of the Border had been transported to North America. In the Bloody Assize of i685, Judge Jeffreys sentenced no less than 841 persons to slavery on the plantations. When the United States became independent, Australia and Bermuda provided a new outlet, but by 1852, Great Britain was compelled to "consume her own smoke." Serious crimes may be the result of passion, impulse or pre meditation; they may be committed to escape from threatened ruin, or crime may be deliberately adopted as a profession. Ex perience has shown that the professional criminal is morally far worse than the accidental, and that the murderer from passion is less dangerous to the community than the hardened thief. If all were detected and caught, there would be no professional crim inals and it would not matter what punishments were awarded ; the certainty of punishment would be an effective deterrent. It is indeed uncertain how far severity of punishment affects the statistics of crime. In the early 'sixties there was a sudden rise in the figures and this was ascribed to the leniency of prison treat ment. This was tightened up and the figures fell, but it is far from certain that the one had anything to do with the other. The crime of garroting ten years later was said to have been put down by the award of corporal punishment for highway robbery, but this, too, may be doubted. What is certain at least is that delay in the execution of punishment—either through facilities for criminal appeals, or delays in adjudication—does foster lawlessness, and this mistaken form of humanitarianism is a by-product of civ ilization in some of our modern States.

Anomalies.

The history of the movement of crime discloses anomalies that are impossible to explain; the lines of particular offences do not follow gentle curves upward or downward, but are subject to sudden leaps with corresponding falls as the years go by. Probably the imitative instinct in criminals has much to do with these fluctuations; one sensational crime widely reported in the newspapers produces others of the same kind. How far the so-called "crook" films affect the problem is a matter of dispute : it is certain that since their exhibition in the Far East, young native criminals equipped with masks, safe-breaking implements and automatic pistols have come into being. But some of the fluc tuations seem to defy explanation. During the last five years there has been a dramatic rise in homicides all over the Malay Penin sula, generally unconnected with dacoity or robbery, but rather as the result of sudden passion. After the Napoleonic wars there was a striking increase of crime in England and during the World War this was quoted to prepare the world for a similar phenom enon after the Peace ; but there was no increase in crimes of vio lence ; rather the contrary.

Many writers on crime have been betrayed into taking the prison statistics as a basis for their arguments, but these figures depend solely upon the efficiency of the police and the criminal courts. The only real material for comparison is the number of crimes reported to the police and figures of these are not accessible for comparison in all countries.

In Britain the apparent decrease of crime that followed the World War was due to causes independent of the moral well-being of the community. The Borstal system for the treatment of young offenders and the Probation Act had come into force a few years before the outbreak of war, and both have undoubtedly had some influence in reducing the volume of professional crime, though it is not to be supposed that the reduction in the daily average of per sons undergoing imprisonment signifies that crime is progressively waning. The total daily average of the prison population in Eng land and Wales has fallen by nearly half what it was in the last years before the World War, and 25 prisons have been closed. Since petty offences are often the product of want, the unemploy ment dole has no doubt had some influence on the figures. Never theless, a scrutiny of the criminal statistics of the last fifty years will show that there is a tide in crime, and that it is unwise to found arguments upon the level at low water. The tide is apt to turn as it did when it reached the high water mark of the first decade of the 2oth century.

Crimes and Punishments; G. Aschaffen burg, Crime and Its Repression (1913) • C. Lombroso, Crime—Its Causes and Remedies (191 I) ; R. Garofalo, Criminology (1914) ; E. Ferri, Criminal Sociology (1917) ; Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (5th ed.) ; J. Devon, The Criminal and the Community; C. Goring, The English Convict (1913) ; B. Thompson, The Criminal (1925) ; M. Parmelee, Criminology (1918) ; W. Healy, The Individual Delinquent (1915) ; E. H. Sutherland, Criminology (1924) ; W. Blackstone, Com mentaries on the Laws of England (vol. iv.) ; J. F. Stephen, A History of the Criminal Law of England (1883) ; C. S. Kenny, Outlines of Criminal Law (1926) . (B. T.) CRIMEA (anc. TAURIS or TAURIC CHERSONESE), called by the Russians by the Tatar name Krym or Crim, an A.S.S.R. in the Russian republic, created by decree in Oct. 192I, forming a peninsula on the north side of the Black sea, with the mainland of which it is connected by the Isthmus of Perekop (3-4m. across). It extends for 2oom. between 23' and 46° io' N., and II om. between 32° 30' and 36° 40' E. Its area is 25,775 sq. kilometres. Pop. (1926) 700,027; urban, 291,64o and rural, 408,387, mainly Russians and Crimean Tatars, the latter much modified by racial intermixture with Greek, Turkish and other elements. The popu lation has declined by about ioo,000 in the last 3o years. Its coasts are washed by the Black sea, except on the north-east, where is the Sivash or Putrid sea, a shallow lagoon separated from the Sea of Azov by the Arabat spit of sand. The shores are broken on the west side of the Isthmus of Perekop by the Bay of Kar kinit; on the south-west by the open Bay of Kalamita, on the shores of which the allies landed in 1854, with the ports of Eupa toria, Sevastopol and Balaklava ; by the Bay of Arabat on the north side of the Isthmus of Yenikale or Kerch ; and by the Bay of Kaffa or Feodosiya (Theodosia), with the port of that name, on the south side of the same. The south-east coast is flanked at a distance of 5 to 8m. from the sea by a parallel range of mountains, the Yaila-dagh or Alpine Meadow mountains, and these are backed, inland, by secondary parallel ranges; but 75% of the re maining area consists of high arid prairie lands, a southward con tinuation of the Pontic steppes, which slope gently north-west wards from the foot of the Yaila-dagh. The main range of these mountains shoots up abruptly from the deep floor of the Black sea to an altitude of 2,000 to 2,5ooft., beginning at the south-west extremity of the peninsula, Cape Fiolente (anc. Parthenium), supposed to have been crowned by the temple of Artemis in which Iphigeneia officiated as priestess. On the higher parts of this range are numerous flat mountain pastures (Turk. yailas), which, except for their scantier vegetation, are analogous to the almen of the Swiss Alps, and are crossed by various passes (bogaz), of whicn only six are available as carriage roads. In this range are the peaks of Demir-kapu or Kemal-egherek (5,o4of t. ), Roman-kosh (5,060 ft.), Chatyr-dagh (5,000ft.), and Karabi-yaila (3,975ft.). The sec ond parallel range, 1,5oo to I,9ooft., forms steep crags to the south-east and a gentle slope towards the north-west. In the former slope are thousands of small caverns, probably inhabited in prehistoric times; and several rivers pierce the range in pic turesque gorges. A valley, Io to I2m. wide, separates this range from the main range, while another valley 2 to 3m. across separates it from the third parallel range, 5oo to 85o feet. Evidences of a fourth and still lower ridge can be traced towards the south-west. Short streams, none of them anywhere navigable, form mountain cascades in spring, e.g., the Chernaya, Belbek, Kacha and Alma, to the Black sea, and the Salghir, with its affluent, the Kara-su, to the Sivash lagoon.

Climate and Flora.

In climate and vegetation there exist marked differences between the open steppes and the south eastern littoral, sheltered by the Yaila-dagh. The former, although grasses and Liliaceae grow on them in great variety and luxuriance in the early spring, become completely parched by July and August, when the air is filled with clouds of dust. High winds pre vail, and snowstorms, hailstorms and frost. Parts of the steppes are impregnated with salt, or studded with saline lakes. Water is scarce, and mainly obtained by sinking artesian wells. Kurgans or burial-mounds of the ancient Scythians remain on the steppe. Behind the Yaila-dagh the narrow strip of coast and the slopes of the mountains are smothered with greenery. This Russian Riviera stretches all along the south-east coast from Cape Sarych (ex treme south) to Feodosiya (Theodosia), and is studded with sum mer sea-bathing resorts—Alupka, Yalta, Gursuv, Alushta, Sudak, Theodosia. Numerous Tatar villages, mosques, monasteries, for mer palaces of the Russian imperial family and Russian nobles, now used as sanatoria and rest homes for workers from all parts of the U.S.S.R., and picturesque ruins of ancient Greek and mediaeval fortresses nestle amongst underwoods of hazel and other nuts, groves of bays, cypresses, mulberries, figs, olives and pomegranates, vineyards, tobacco plantations, and gardens gay with all sorts of flowers. The higher slopes of the n'iountains are thickly clothed with forests of oak, beech, elm, pines, firs and other Coniferae. In the south-east there have become acclimatized such plants as magnolias, oleanders, tulip trees, bignonias, myrtles, camellias, mimosas and many tender fruit-trees. The vineyards produce wine of a good quality and fruits grow in abundance, especially cherries, apples and pears. In some winters the moun tains are covered with snow, but snow seldom falls to the south of them. The heat of summer is moderated by breezes off the sea, and the nights are cool and serene ; the winters are mild and healthy. Fever and ague prevail in the lower-lying districts for a few weeks in autumn. Dense fogs occur sometimes in March, April and May, but seldom penetrate inland. The rainfall is every where scanty ; it varies greatly, however, from year to year ; e.g., at Simferopol from 7.5 to 26.4in. per annum. Of the whole area, 35% is under cultivation, and 2% of this is garden, vineyard and tobacco cultivation. Winter wheat 49.1%, barley 31.9% and oats 13.6% are the chief crops. Of summer crops maize occupies the chief place, together with melons, cucumbers, flax and millet. The Yaila mountain area affords pasture for sheep and cattle.

Industries.

Iron is mined in the Kerch peninsula and ex ported to the Ukrainian factories and salt is exported especially from Lake Sakch near Eupatoria. Porphyry and limestone are also exported. Fish abound all around the coast, such as red and grey mullet, herring, mackerel, turbot, soles, plaice, whiting, bream, haddock, pilchard, a species of pike, whitebait, eels, salmon and sturgeon. Industries include shipbuilding, flour-mills, ironworks, jam and pickle factories, soap-works and tanneries. The Crimean Tatars are peasants noted for their leather, wool and metal work. A railway, coming from Kharkov, crosses the peninsula from north to south, terminating at Sevastopol and sending off branch lines to Theodosia, Kerch and Eupatoria. The chief towns (q.v.) are Sim feropol, the capital, the important naval station and trading port of Sevastopol, the ports of Eupatoria, Theodosia, k erch and Yalta, a health resort on the south-east coast.

History.

The earliest inhabitants of whom we have any authentic records were the Celtic Cimmerians, who were expelled by the Scythians during the 7th century B.C. A remnant, who took refuge in the mountains, became known subsequently as the Tauri. In that same century Greek colonists began to settle on the coasts, e.g., Dorians from Heraclea at Chersonesus, and Ionians from Miletus at Theodosia and Panticapaeum (also called Bos porus). Two centuries later (438 B.C.) the archon or ruler of the last-named assumed the title of king of Bosporus, a State which maintained close relations with Athens, supplying that city with wheat and other commodities. The last of these kings, Paerisades V., being hard pressed by the Scythians, put himself under the protection of Mithridates VI., king of Pontus, in 114 B.C. After the death of this latter sovereign his son Pharnaces, as a reward for assistance rendered to the Romans in their war against his father, was (63 B.C.) invested by Pompey with the kingdom of Bosporus. In 15 B.C. it was once more restored to the king of Pontus, but henceforward ranked as a tributary State of Rome. During the succeeding centuries the Crimea was overrun or occu pied successively by the Goths (A.D. 250), the Huns (376), the Khazars (8th century), the Byzantine Greeks (ioi6), the Kip chaks (IoSo), and the Mongols (1237). In the 13th century the Genoese destroyed or seized the settlements which their rivals the Venetians had made on the Crimean coasts, and established them selves at Eupatoria, Cembalo (Balaklava), Soldaia (Sudak) and Kaffa (Theodosia), flourishing trading towns, which existed down to the conquest of the peninsula by the Ottoman Turks in Meanwhile the Tatars had got a firm footing in the northern and central parts of the peninsula as early as the i3th century, and after the destruction of the Golden Horde by Tamerlane they founded an independent khanate under a descendant of Jenghiz Khan, who is known as Hadji Ghirai. He and his successors reigned first at Solkhat (Eski-krym), and from the beginning of the 15th century at Bakhchi-sarai. But from 1478 they ruled as tributary princes of the Ottoman empire down to 1777, when, having been defeated by Suvorov, they became dependent upon Russia, and finally in 1783 the whole of the Crimea was annexed to the Russian empire. The Crimean War of 1854-56 is treated of under a separate article. At various times, e.g., after the acquisi tion by Russia, after the Crimean War of 1854-56, and in the first years of the .loth century, Crimean Tatars emigrated in large numbers to the Ottoman empire. (See also BOSPORUS CIMME Rlvs, and RUSSIA : Bibliography.) See Sir Evelyn Wood, The Crimea in 1854 and 1894 (1895) ; E. H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks (1913) ; M. Rortovtzeff, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (1922) .