body, for the criminal law does not penalize an individual for status or condition. The legality requirement meas that there must be a law that makes an act a crime for it to be a crime. The harm requirement holds that every crime has been created to prevent a given harm, and the detrimental consequence that we are trying to avoid by passing a law is called harm. The crime cannot be complete if the defendant's act has not created the specified harm. The causation requirement means that a crime is not complete unless the criminal's conduct necessarily caused the harm without interference by someone else. The requirement of mens rea means that the individual must have a "guilty mind," which means that the person committed a crime by knowing that their act was a crime. There are certain exceptions to this requirement, notably reckless action which leads to an unintended consequence, but basically the rule applies. The concurrence requirement means that the criminal act must take place with an equally criminal mind so that act and intent both occur. Finally, the punishment requirement means that an illegal act coupled with criminal intent is still not a crime unless the law subjects the behavior to punishment. All crimes are subject to some degree of punishment.
There is no single cause of crime, and while we as a society may realize this, we tend to think of crime in the aggregate as having some basic cause, whether in the character of the criminal or in some external social force. The explanations that have been offered for criminal behavior focus on biological, psychological, social, and economic factors. Biological and psychological theories assume that there are underlying physical or mental conditions that cause criminal behavior, but as Adler, Mueller, and Laufer (1991) note, these theories provide insight into individual cases but do not explain why crime rates differ from place to place and situation to situation. (I...