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| NEW ORLEANS, LA—As passengers stroll the decks of sleek ocean liners on cruises to the Caribbean, Hawaii, South America, and other romantic ports of call, few think about such worldly matters as their personal safety. However, a recent lawsuit against Carnival Cruise Lines by a woman claims that her daughter was raped by another passenger as the ship traveled down the Mississippi River. Furthermore, the underage girl was intoxicated at the time of the alleged incident, prompting a spokesperson for the cruise line to comment, "It's very, very rare, within the scope of the millions of passengers that the cruise industry carries on an annual basis, that we have this sort of allegation. It's not unprecedented, but it's extremely rare."¹ However, numerous other cases against cruise lines over the years have included instances of theft, assault, and sexual battery.² Are these just accusations, or is crime rampant aboard cruise ships? If the answer to the latter is yes, what other kinds of crimes typically occur?
Crime on the high seas illustrates some of the complex issues surrounding the nature and meaning of crime. Although crime may be defined as conduct that is prohibited by criminal law, it has many designations in legal statutes. Moreover, its dynamics go well beyond the sterile classifications, provisions, and subsections that appear in state and federal criminal codes. Crime includes patterns and systems of behavior that occur at one or several points in time. It can involve varying sets of circumstances, social and political environments, and victim–offender relationships. Too, crime can be an isolated event that occurs at only one point in the offender's lifetime; it can reflect the best-developed aspects of a well-established career in illicit enterprise; or it can consist of the activities of an organization structured for the pursuit of illegal behavior. In any study of crime it is important to understand not only the content of criminal codes but also the wider social context in which crime occurs, for all of these factors influence public images of crime, societal reactions to crime, and the justice system's management of crime and criminals. This chapter therefore begins by discussing the legal aspects of various crimes as they are described in criminal codes, and then it briefly analyzes a few specific patterns of crime that receive widespread attention in the popular media. |