What constitutes a crime is something that changes with the law over time. One definition is given by:
Crime is the breaking of a law for which the criminal justice or some other governing authority prescribes punishment. (page 13, Rennison and Dodge, 2018)
One type of classification of crimes is by federal or state. Federal crimes are those that violate laws passed by the Congress; these are tried in federal courts. State crimes are those that violate laws passed by state legislatures, and as such are tried in local courts.
A second type of classification of crimes is by felony, wobbler, misdemeanor, and infraction/violation. Each jurisdiction determines its own subclassifications for felonies and misdemeanors. For example, felonies could be categorized as being of Class A through Class J, from the more to less serious. Misdemeanors could be categorized as being of Class 1 through Class 4, with Class 1 being the most serious and Class 4 being the least serious.
A felony is the most serious type of crime. Conviction of this type of crime will result in a sentence of more than a year in a state or federal prison.
A wobbler is a crime in which the defendant could be found guilty of either a felony or a misdemeanor, depending upon the facts of the case and the elements of the offense. For example, a battery that is impolite, rude, or insulting is a lower-level misdemeanor, but if it causes bodily injury it can become a higher-level misdemeanor; if it causes serious bodily injury it becomes a felony (personal communication with Steven M. Fleece, state of Indiana trial court judge, retired, August 24, 2020).
A misdemeanor is of course less serious than a felony, and conviction on this type of crime will result in a sentence of a year or less in a local jail, suspended on terms of probation. If the terms of the probation are violated, the judge can impose some or all of the suspended sentence.
Finally, an infraction/violation is something like a traffic ticket. It does not result in a jail sentence and is not considered a criminal offense. It can however result in a fine.
The cost to federal, state, and local governments in 2012 for the various functions of criminal justice has been estimated at $280 billion, adjusted to 2016 dollars (GAO Report, 2017). These functions can basically be divided among policing, courts, and jail/prison, including probation services.
These government costs are just a relatively small part of the overall costs of crime. For example, the GAO report referenced above reported that there were four different primary methods for estimating the cost of crime, and that these methods provided the widely varying estimates of $690 billion, $1.57 trillion, and $3.41 trillion as the cost of crime in 2012, again adjusted to 2016 dollars (GAO Report, 2017).
One of the primary reasons for the wide variance in the estimates has to do with how intangible (or nonmonetary) costs are considered. Examples of intangible costs are victim pain, suffering, and lost quality of life; increasing fear in the community; the public’s change in behavior as a result of the fear of crime; lost wages from incarceration; and the psychological cost to the family of the incarcerated. DeVuono-powell et al (2015) discuss the cost of incarceration on families.
Regardless of which estimate is closest to the true value, the cost of crime in the United States is massive. Hence, even small improvements in the design and operation of criminal justice systems can result in sizable savings and improvements in quality.
