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The United States criminal code is the set of criminal/penal laws which punish criminals for offenses against the State. The goal of this process is criminal justice which is comprised of both deterrence and punishment. Criminal acts include both the physical criminal act (actus reus) and the mental state with which the act is performed (mens rea). The criminal code is a complication of all the general and permanent laws which outline criminal offenses and the maximum and minimum punishments that the court can impose on an offender (also called the Federal Sentencing Guidelines).

The criminal code is Title 18 of the United States Code. The US Code is an organized complication of the permanent and general laws enacted by the US Congress. The process by which an approved congressional bill becomes part of the criminal code is as follows. Once a bill is enacted (passed by Congress and signed by the President) the original text of the law is sent to the Archivist of the United States who assembles yearly volumes of all the laws enacted by Congress. This annual volume is called the United States Statutes at Large .

The United States Statutes at Large is ordered chronologically, making it a very difficult tool for legal research. For this reason, the Office of the Law Revision Counsel (LRC) of the House of Representatives is responsible for codifying and organizing the US Code by broad logical legal areas. There are fifty titles of the Code, which are further divided by subtitles, parts, subparts, chapters, subchapters, and sections. When the LRC completes a particular area of the law, it proposes to enact those titles as positive law, which is then considered “legal evidence of law” in force. The criminal code is one area which has been enacted into positive law.

A new edition of the Code is published by the LRC every six years, though the Code is constantly updated. The Code is a series of paper volumes but is also made available electronically. There are two free electronic versions of the Code and criminal code available online at the Cornell Legal Information Institute and FindLaw. Attorneys typically use the annotated versions of the US Code to access the criminal code. Westlaw and LexisNexis privately publish the United States Code Annotated (USCA) and the United States Code Service (USCS), respectively. These versions of the criminal code are preferred because they contain notes that summarize relevant court decisions, law review articles, and other useful information.

As mentioned, the criminal code is Title 18 of the US Code. The parts of the criminal code are broken into five broad, yet more specific categories:

• crimes
• criminal procedure
• prisons and prisoners
• corrections and youthful offenders
• and immunity of witnesses.

These sections of the criminal code are further broken into chapters, each of which contain the text of specific criminal laws which have been past by the US Congress.

If you would like to learn more about the criminal code of the United States Code, please contact a qualified defense attorney.

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