Seegras Logbook

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Thesis
3. Survey
   1. College Freshmen Report on homosexuality, abortion and marijuana
4. Conclusion

• Bibliography

1. Introduction

Victimless Crimes as defined by Edwin Schur [1] are
crimes which do not have any evident victim. They consist of actions which
are outlawed because they violate moral standards. Reason number two, the
protection of the subject from itself can be traced back to the violation
of moral standards, since obviously the same actions are not outlawed in
other cultures. Most of these victimless crimes differ wildly among cultures,
examples might be the consumption of hashish and alcohol in the western
society compared to the Islamic society, or prostitution now and by the times
of the ancient in greek. These victimless crimes must therefore be a product of culture, and
not a measure to insure health or protection of the subject from itself. What
gives even more proof to this, is the fact, that criminal prosecution costs
more than the (if required) medical treatment of the offenders. Nobody will
spend much money just for someone to be protected from self. But money
will be spent to ensure the own moral standards. Of course, this will not
be admitted in most cases.
Speaking of damage, we should define damage as the subjective feeling
of being hurt. (See also Jeffrey H. Reiman, [6]). We
cannot speak of damage, if it is wanted, e.g. by masochists,
or if it is inevitable for getting the desired effect (e.g. dentists, drugs,
or extreme-sports). For victimless crimes, there is no damage done to:

• physical and psychical integrity of the people
• property of the involved people and society

This type of crime is defined by the willingness of all involved parties
to commit such an action, and no harm is done to other people, except of
the violation of law and moral standards. This for instance is true for
the use of illegal drugs, for suicide or for prostitution, but not for
bribery or black-market trade, since there is damage done to society or
the state or to property of them. So we come to some actions which might
be considered victimless crimes, which either are outlawed or not. Of
course, nearly everything can be outlawed (such as not wearing a veil
as a woman). This is only a small list of actual or historical outlawed
actions in western society that can [*] be
considered victimless crimes.

• Use of drugs (alcohol, tobacco, coffee, marijuana, opiates, etc)
• Prostitution
• Homosexuality
• Suicide
• Abortion
• Gambling
• Exhibitionism

It is necessary to know that outlawing of such acts might lead to further
crimes, accomplished in the attempt to commit aforementioned actions.
Particular examples include crimes for getting money to buy drugs, smuggling
(especially popular in Switzerland was smuggling of coffee at the beginning
of this century) or the exploitation of prostitutes. For most outlawed
victimless crimes which involve goods or services, a black market will evolve.
When deciding what is victimless crime or not, it must be clear that such
“secondary” crimes are a result of the outlawing of such actions and
are not to be confused with the actual consequences. But I will not go into
discussion of these particular actions, and whether they should be considered
criminal acts and outlawed or not. [**]

2. Thesis

One might expect that the attitude towards victimless crimes is subject to
changes over time. While this is true, no evident direction of this attitude
change will be remarkable. It is not to expect that a general trend regarding
victimless crimes will be visible, instead, different actions will be judged
completely different. There is to expect however, a typical difference between

• Urbanized and rural territories
• Higher and lower educations
• Younger and older people

The first ones generally taking a more liberal position. Eventually, there will
be some differences between male and female persons on certain subjects, but
no apparent coherent point of view towards different actions. It is not to
expect that a generally more liberal or restrictive point of view is depending
on gender.

What I also expect is that the attitude towards victimless crimes changes
over time in waveforms, altering states of more liberal and more restrictive
views, but not a general trend towards liberal or prohibitive views. I expect
the views on different subjects to evolve differently.
In a geographic context, the attitude towards victimless crimes is also
expected to be different. While most restrictive societies as islamic ones
will likely outlaw various actions of their people, such as not wearing a
veil as woman (clearly a victimless crime, since only the moral standards of
the respective society are hurt), western society will also show different
standards. The USA for instance, clearly has more strict moral standards.
It was, for instance, possible for the US-state Colorado to outlaw
homosexuality [5] in 1993 for a short period of time.

Despite these differences, I expect that there will be no evident trend in
the attitude towards victimless crimes in general. People will judge
different victimless crimes different, depending on culture. There is no
consciousness that these crimes have their victimlessness in common.

3. Survey

Based on the available data, which, in my case, consist essentially of the

Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1995 [4],

which is an annual statistical report of the USA by the Utilization of Criminal
Justice Statistics Project at the Hindelang Criminal Justice Research Center,
University at Albany, Albany, New York, USA, for the U.S. Department of Justice,
Bureau of Justice Statistics.

I took a look at the college freshmen report. This
is a report from a survey on a sample which consists of 200’000 people entering
the freshmen classes each fall. The Survey is conducted by the Higher Education
Research Institute (HERI).

3.1 college freshmen report on homosexuality, abortion and marijuana.

Tables 2.110, 2.111 and 2.114 in the above mentionned sourcebook give us the
following data. This compiled table (Table 1) shows no information on the
gender of the subjects.

I also calculated the average, deviation and variance for the sum of all
values. The average is 52.72, deviation 14.85 and variance 220.57. This
means that the values are enough dispersed to not have any interconnection.
To see the things better, we can put this as graphic, and can recognize
general trends and the dispersion of attitude towards different subjects.

Since the data used in this survey is very big, one can assume that the
data given represents a better educated part of US-citizens very well,
it might well be the most representative survey ever conducted. Representative
in this case, of course, for college freshmen in the USA. On the fact that
this survey is conducted every fall since 1976, one can try to make assumptions
on the future, respectively the present. The college freshmen of 1976 will
now be roughly in their mid-thirties. According to the data, 12.9 percent
of college graduates think marijuana should be free, 12.9 percent think it
should be a minor violation, 50 percent think it should be used for medical
purposes and 22.1 percent oppose anything but a complete prohibition. The
current values for college freshmen seem also not to differ very much from
the current general attitude towards victimless crimes (excerpt from Tables
2.68 and 2.111 of source [4]).

It is not to expect that the data for Europe will come very close to these
numbers, but one can assume that the attitudes will spread similar on different
subjects [****]. Also interesting might be the high-point
in 1989, in which the most prohibitive opinions regarding homosexuality and
marijuana are recorded, along with the smallest number of prohibitive
views towards abortion. This can not be explained with a general restrictive
– and perhaps religious influenced – opinion, but it seems that this goes
along with the victory of the republicans, taking over more than fifty percent
of the seats in the white house. Also, the rise of the anti-marijuana attitude
cannot be quite explained. Perhaps the government had more money to spend after
the oil-crisis and during the eighties for making anti-hemp propaganda. This
would correlate with the following recession in the nineties, in which this
attitude is somewhat less common.

4. Conclusion

There is no evident trend towards legalization of victimless crimes. The
attitudes towards victimless crimes differ on each subject, so there seems
to be no coherent view of that matter among the citizens. So we have

• People view different victimless crimes not as victimless crimes,
  but as entirely different crimes and handle them as such, based
  on their cultural and historic background.
• The attitude towards specific victimless crimes varies extremely with
  time.
• The time seems to be a much more important factor on attitude than
  the age is.

This states effectively, that my assumption on the trend I’ve made at the
beginning is true. There is no evident trend in the attitude towards victimless
crimes in general. Time being obviously an important factor, can now be
leading to another questions. Why is there such an immense variation in time?
Is this somehow interconnected to a yet unknown variable like economy? And
why do the attitudes towards victimless crimes not have a similar progression?
And on the socio-psychological base, has society probably more influence on a
person than its youth has?

I close this file now, leaving more new questions open than I answered.

Peter Keel

Footnotes

[*]

We should see that this gives material to lots of discussions
whether someone else gets hurt by some special action or not. There is, for
instance, an ongoing discussion on the topic of what makes a human a human,
and at which point abortion therefore should be disallowed.

[**]

There is also the contrary of victimless crimes, that is,
legal actions which have victims. An example of this might be the destruction
and pollution of our environment, which is mostly legal but which inflicts us
all.

[***]

Some US-American specialities:
Looking at the data [4] I have present, I realize that this
presumably would not fit European countries. The American society seems to be
more strict and more un-enlightened than European countries. For instance if we
look on Table 2.60: 50.8% think that the most important purpose
on sentencing is to give criminals what they deserve, only 19.8% think this
should serve to educate and counsel offenders. Or on Table 2.72 we see that
74% of the American support death penalty, only 20% oppose it, despite the
fact that death penalty cannot be proved to be a measure to minimize violent
crimes. This gives some general assessment on American society.

[****]

There is very little information available on the
internet concerning Europe. While I was able to find immense resources
of statistical data for the USA, the rest of the world remains in the dark.
Also, much more data than I actually could get is available in databases
I had no access to. It either would cost money to access it, or to make
them send the information on discs. This applies for instance to the
swiss Bundesamt für Statistik. In this case, the information on paper
is actually free of charge, but the machine-readable version is not.

---

Bibliography

[1]Schur, Edwin M.Crimes Without Victims. © 1995, Prentice Hall, Inc.

[2]Wilkins, Leslie T. Social Deviance. © 1963, Tavistock Publications;
Electronic version © 1995, Harrow and Heston, Publishers; Internet
WWW-Page at URL:
https://www.scj.albany.edu/wilkins/SD000000.HTM

[3] Mill, John Stuart On Liberty, London, 1859
Internet Gopher at URL:
gopher://wiretap.spies.com/11/Library/Classic/liberty.jsm

[4] Utilization of Criminal Justice Statistics Project,
Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1995, Hindelang
Criminal Justice Research Center, University of Albany, 1995
Internet WWW-Page at URL:
https://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/

[5] Soapbox Magazine, Issue 2, February 1993
Internet posting to alt.censorship by
(cskelton.0inw@realm.tdkcs.waterloo.on.ca) on 30 March 1993

[6] Reiman, Jeffrey H. Prostitution, Addiction and the Ideology of
Liberalism, in Contemporary Crisis, Issue 3 (January 1979),
pp. 53-67. © by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.