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