For Dr. Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, crime is the behavior of a man, but not all behaviors are crimes and to distinguish those that are from those that are not, he points out: that they are prohibited behaviors with which a penalty is associated due. Therefore, there is no crime when the conduct of a man is not adapted to any of those devices.
So he ends up defining the concept of crime as "typical, unlawful and guilty conduct".
"It is everything that is punishable by law."
Currently, the Federal Penal Code, in its article 7, defines crime as the act or omission punished by criminal laws.
Gustavo Malo Camacho, takes the typical, unlawful and guilty conduct as a concept of crime and points out that this is the concept that supports an important part of criminal doctrine and from which the concepts of atypicality, unlawfulness and guilt are followed at the same time.
For Maurach, crime is a typically unlawful, attributable action.
For Beling, it is the typical unlawful action, guilty, subject to an adequate criminal sanction and that meets the objective conditions of penalty.
Max Ernesto Meyer defines crime as the typical, unlawful and imputable event.
For Jiménez de Asúa it is a typically guilty unlawful act, subject to objective conditions of penalty attributable to a man and subject to a criminal sanction.
In the Penal Code of 1871 it was established that: "crime is the voluntary infraction of a criminal law, doing what it prohibits or failing to do what it commands." This definition includes the classic rationalist content of the Penal Code that incorporated it, emphasizing the violation of the provisions of the criminal law, to immediately add a specifying element.
On the other hand, the project to reform it in 1912, in article 4, established that: "The offenses set forth in the Third Book of this code and the others designated by law under this name are crimes."
The Penal Code of 1929, indicated that the crime is the injury to a right legally protected by a criminal sanction, which implied a definition in the contractualist style of the illustration, when signing the concept of the injury of the right, which contrasts with the eminently positivist content of this order.
In 1931, an important reform was made to the way of defining crime, since article 7 of the Penal Code prevents that: crime is the act or omission punished by criminal laws.
The previous concept is added in 1991, with a second paragraph that in its important content also includes, expressly, the behavior by omission, as well as the ways in which the behavior can be presented.
Such a definition seems to us to include a naturalistic content, which is abbreviated in positivism, since it refers to crime as behavior, by action or omission, which sanctions criminal law and not as "violation of criminal law", as it did the Code of 1871 or the “injury to the law”, as did the Penal Code of 1929.
The definition of crime has been in constant discussion, although the one that existed was the following:
Since this date, an infinite number of definitions have emerged, for example, we have the definition of the criminal Olga Islas de González Mariscal, where she previously stated that, in addition to the typical budgets and elements, for the crime to be configured, a degree is required specific guilt, determined by knowledge of the violation of criminal legal duty.
Not in accordance with the concept that crime "is a typical, unlawful and guilty conduct", Rafael Garófalo, then points out that crime "is the violation of the feelings of piety and property possessed by a population to the minimum extent that is indispensable for the adaptation of the individual to society ”.
From the above we can conclude that the elements of the crime are the following:
Positive: Negative:
1.- Action or omission Absence of act.
2.- Typical Atypicality.
3.- Unlawfulness Causes of Justification.
4.- Imputability Unimputability
5.- Guilt Inculpability
6.- Punishability Excusing excuses
