ABSTRACT
The restraint or choice perspective seems to qualify as a theory of crime and a theory of the tendency to commit crime. Substantive positivism automatically finds unsatisfactory accounts of the motivation to crime that assume it is given in human nature and the nature of criminal acts. Substantive positivism focuses on the causes of phenomena, on independent variables, and has little or nothing to say directly about the nature of its dependent variables. Given the broad acceptance within substantive positivism of the notion that crime is a social or environmentally caused phenomenon, modem biological positivism has been reluctant to go beyond the claim that biology is relevant to crime. Substantive positivism creates distinctions among phenomena in order to produce the homogeneity thought to be prerequisite to explanation. If criminal acts appear diverse, substantive positivism divides them into person and property crimes.
