ACADEMIA Letters The Relevance of Conduct Norms and Crime Norms Suleiman Lawn Kolomi, Bayero University, Kano INTRODUCTION Throughout human history, there has not been any human society recounted crimeless or deviance free. Hence, it is imperative for every society and social groups to have some guiding rules and regulations, code of conducts, ethics, morals, values, customs, conventions, laws among others; which form a broader societal expected code of behavior known as norms. Norms are set of informal rules and regulations that govern human behavior over time and space in every human society. Human interaction does not take place in vacuum; it has to do with the people interacting with one another within a particular social group or society. In a state of nature, humans are nasty and brutish, some people will likely dominate, subjugate, oppress and certainly kill others; therefore, the need arises to control this state of anarchy through the application of social norms in order to guide the code of conducts and relations of people in a giving society. This paper therefore seeks to explore the concept of social norms, its typologies: prescriptive norms, proscriptive norms and the crux of the paper: conduct norms and crime norms, their relevance in human society and many more. THE MEANING OF NORMS Norms in broad term does not have a universally acceptable defnition, because it is a relative term that encapsulates code of conducts of people within a particular social group or society. Norms constitute “guidelines” or both formal (codifed norms) and informal rules about what individuals are expected to do or not do, and specify appropriate rewards for conformity or negative sanctions for noncompliance. What might be a norms in one society or social group Academia Letters, August 2021 Corresponding Author: Suleiman Lawn Kolomi, suleimankolomi@gmail.com Citation: Lawn Kolomi, S. (2021). The Relevance of Conduct Norms and Crime Norms. Academia Letters, Article 3363. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3363. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0