Meaning
A proverbial warning that crime ultimately brings the criminal more trouble than profit: punishment, not gain, is the final consequence of lawbreaking. Merriam-Webster defines it as used to say there is more trouble than benefit from committing a crime. It is the classic moral tag at the end of a crime story - and just as often inverted ironically by, or about, criminals who plainly prosper. A proverb, so it usually appears as a complete sentence. Frequently played for irony ('crime pays') when a villain prospers - the Woody Allen line is the best-known example - and still used earnestly by police and prosecutors justifying confiscation of criminal gains. Regional use: First printed in Britain; popularized worldwide by 20th-century American film, radio and comics.
Origin
Older than its twentieth-century American popularizers. The Phrase Finder traces the earliest print appearance to the British Law Magazine and Law Review in 1860, where a prisoner in solitary confinement concludes that crime does not pay - a Victorian moral saying. That antedates the claim in the American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy that the maxim was first recorded in 1927, originating as a slogan of the FBI and given wide currency by Dick Tracy: the FBI-origin story must be read as popularization, not coinage. America did mass-market the saying. MGM's short-film series Crime Does Not Pay ran from 1935 to 1947, each episode introduced by 'your MGM crime reporter', and Lev Gleason's comic book Crime Does Not Pay (July 1942 to July 1955, created by Charles Biro and Bob Wood) became the best-selling crime comic before the Comics Code crackdown. Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run (1969) fixed the standard joke inversion: 'I think crime pays. The hours are good, you travel a lot.'
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- crime does not pay
- crime never pays
- crime pays
Usage Examples
- He made a fortune smuggling watches, but the fines and legal fees wiped him out - crime doesn't pay.
- The judge reminded the young offender that crime doesn't pay before sentencing him to community service.
- Every heist movie ends the same way, hammering home the old lesson that crime doesn't pay.