Crime
Overview
Crime is the breach of rules or law
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...

s for which some governing authority
Government
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...

 (via mechanisms such as legal systems) can ultimately prescribe a conviction
Conviction
In law, a conviction is the verdict that results when a court of law finds a defendant guilty of a crime.The opposite of a conviction is an acquittal . In Scotland and in the Netherlands, there can also be a verdict of "not proven", which counts as an acquittal...

. Individual human societies may each define crime and crimes differently, in different localities (state, local, international), at different time stages of the so-called "crime" (planning, disclosure, supposedly intended, supposedly prepared, incomplete, complete or future proclaimed after the "crime").

While every crime violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime; for example: breaches of contract
Breach of contract
Breach of contract is a legal cause of action in which a binding agreement or bargained-for exchange is not honored by one or more of the parties to the contract by non-performance or interference with the other party's performance....

 and of other civil law
Private law
Private law is that part of a civil law legal system which is part of the jus commune that involves relationships between individuals, such as the law of contracts or torts, as it is called in the common law, and the law of obligations as it is called in civilian legal systems...

 may rank as "offences" or as "infractions".
Quotations

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905), Chapter 5; reprinted in The Works of H.G. Wells. Vol. 9 (1925).

 
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