Victimology & Vitimless-Crime

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1. What specific criminal act described within the context of victimless-crime do you feel comes closest to fitting the definition of being truly victimless? Why?

Victimless or consensual crimes have unique characteristics that make them an indirect threat to the privacy of innocent people.

The laws against victimless crimes are not direct threats to privacy themselves. In criminalizing certain acts, society makes a judgment that there can be no privacy interest in those acts.

But victimless crime laws do threaten the privacy of innocents because of the monitoring and investigation they require for enforcement. None of the participants in a victimless crime will report it to authorities. To enforce this kind of crime law, officials must engage in extensive monitoring, wiretapping, and surveillance of suspects and the public.

The existence of victimless crimes tends to erode Fourth Amendment protections that are there to protect the privacy of innocents. The cost to privacy of victimless crime laws had not been well-considered in the past. (http://www.privacilla.org/government/victimlesscrimes.html)

Victimless crime has the following applications:

· In common usage, victimless crime refers to behavior that is illegal but does not violate or threaten the rights of anyone and may be associated with the implication that the behavior should therefore not be illegal. This is definition we will use.
· In criminology, victimless crime is now termed public order crime.
· In the law, case law has developed to discuss what used to be termed "victimless" crime: see Public order crime case law in the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victimless_crime).

A victimless crime is therefore behavior of an individual which is forbidden by law, ...