What a tort is and how it differs from a crime

Most people are generally aware of what crimes are (murder, arson, theft, bigamy, for example) but are vague about what lawyers call torts. There's a good reason: leading legal writers agree that no one has satisfactorily defined a tort. This is partly because torts are so common, so widespread and so varied. You are far more likely to be the victim of a tort than of a crime, and you are also far more likely to commit a tort than a crime.

A tort is a civil wrong against an individual. A crime, on the other hand, is an offense against the public at large, or the state. An automobile driver, who carelessly bumps into your car in a parking lot and crumples the fender, has committed a tort against your property. Because the law recognizes your legal right to freedom from injury to your property caused by other people's carelessness, you are entitled to sue the driver and be awarded damages for his breach of your right. But he has committed no crime. Suppose, however, that after leaving the parking lot the same driver goes to a nearby bar, downs six whiskeys, then drives through a crowded city street at fifty miles an hour. Now he has committed at least three crimes: drunken driving, reckless driving, and endangering the lives of others. But unless he actually damages another car or injures someone, he has not violated the rights of any individual. His offenses are against the people as a whole. For these offenses, he may be arrested and prosecuted by the state.

Organized crime

In addition to the segment of the population made up of individual criminals, acting independently or in small groups, there exists a so-called underworld of criminal organizations engaged in offenses, such as cargo theft, fraud, robbery, kidnapping for ransom, and the demanding of "protection" payments. In the United States and Canada, the principal source of income for organized crime is the supply of goods and services that are illegal but for which there is continued public demand. Examples include drugs, prostitution, loan-sharking (lending money at extremely high rates of interest), and gambling. To ensure freedom from the law, the organizations must subvert both the police and the courts.

Organized crime in the United States is best viewed as a set of shifting coalitions, normally local or regional in scope, between groups of gangsters, business people, politicians, and union leaders. Many of these people have legitimate jobs and sources of income. So-called street-level criminals are normally independent of major crime syndicates. Among other advanced industrial nations, the closest similarities to this organizational model occur in Australia, where extensive narcotics, cargo theft, and labor racketeering rings have been discovered, and in Japan, where there are gangs that specialize in vice and extortion. In Britain groups of organized criminals have not developed in this way, principally because the supply and consumption of alcohol and opiates, gambling, and prostitution remain legal but partly regulated, owing to a more liberal and pragmatic attitude of successive governments, aware of the impossibility of total enforcement. This apparent laxity reduces the profitability of supplying such demands criminally. Far Eastern groups, such as the Chinese Triads, are important in the supply of drugs to and by way of Britain. Except for cargo, thieves who work at airports and local vice, protection, and pornography syndicates, British crime organizations tend to be relatively short-term groups, drawn together for specific projects, such as fraud and armed robbery, from a pool of long-term professional criminals.

In many Third World countries, apart from the drug trade, the principal form of organized crime is black-marketeering, including smuggling and corruption in the granting of licenses to import goods and to export foreign exchange. Armed robbery, cattle theft, and maritime piracy and fraud are organized crime activities in which politicians have less complicity. Robbery is particularly popular and easy because of the widespread availability of arms supplied to nationalist movements by those who seek political destabilization of their own or other states, and who may, therefore, exploit the dissatisfaction of ethnic and tribal groups.