ABSTRACT
Agreeing that offences of violence, theft and burglary are crimes is not problematic. Getting agreement that various fi nancial and environmental activities are crimes may take more elucidation. And whilst crimes committed by the state may elicit an agreement that technically they may be crimes, this can be accompanied by a desire to justify them by making reference to the particular political context in which they occur. Nor do regulatory offences and offences of strict liability come readily to mind when defi ning what is meant by crime; drug taking may be recognised as an offence, but not considered wrong; and the advent of a criminal penalty for the breach of a civil order, as happens with the anti-social behaviour order (ASBO), begins to confound people’s notions of what committing a crime entails. For where the mere presence of a named individual in a particular street, a street that is otherwise open to all others without penalty, attracts the possibility of a fi ve year prison sentence for that individual, as is the case with ASBOs, then the common boundaries of ‘what is crime’ are challenged. The fact that the criminal law itself is not a static thing is evident; it has been argued that over 3,000 new criminal offences were introduced during the fi rst nine years of the Blair government (Cooper, 2008; Solomon et al, 2007). It is hard to work out how robust this fi gure is – whether it is an underestimate or an overestimate will depend upon what is counted as a discrete criminal offence – but what is clear is that any shared understanding of what crime might be is susceptible to political revision. And whilst the boundaries of what constitute crime are frequently subject to extension, rarely are ‘crimes’ abolished.1 It is, moreover, a common problem when considering the relationship between mental disorder and crime to slip into thinking only about crimes of interpersonal violence, even though these are exceptional rather than routine. Crime is simply diverse in its nature (see Amos et al, 2010 for a discussion of ‘normal’ offending by those with mental diosrder).
