Spiritist theories of crime and homicide are based on the beliefs that supernatural forces interact in the world and that earthly phenomena are caused or affected by supernatural interference. Naturalistic explanations of crime include classical, positivistic, and critical theories. Social policy ramifications of the classical school are that humans can be persuaded to change their behavior. Positivistic explanations of crime assume human behavior is influenced, at least in part, by factors largely outside the control of any specific individual. Positivistic explanations encompass individual determinism, heredity and defectiveness, mental deficiency, mental illness, sociocultural, sociostructural, social process, and symbolic interactionism theories. Critical criminology has two distinct but related lines of thought: (1) conflict theory basically views crime as the product of whoever wins the power struggle over the labeling apparatus; and (2) Marxist theory asserts crime is primarily the product of capitalist political economies. Critical criminology turns the focus away from attempting to explain just criminal behavior and toward understanding social responses to crime. 42 references
Theorizing About Homicide: A Presentation on Theories Explaining Homicide and Other Crimes (From Nature of Homicide: Trends and Changes - Proceedings of the 1996 Meeting of the Homicide Research Working Group, Santa Monica, California, P 24- 37, 1996, Pamela K Lattimore and Cynthia A Nahabedian, eds
NCJ Number
168570
Date Published
1996
Length
14 pages
Annotation
An approach to organizing crime theories, specifically homicide theories, is presented, and brief narrative explanations of the major categories are offered.
Abstract