Neoclassical or economic approach
In the late 1960s the economist Gary Becker questioned positivist approaches to crime, arguing that: "[a] useful theory of criminal behavior can dispense with special theories of anomie, psychological inadequacies, or inheritance of special traits, and simply extend the economist's usual analysis of choice" (repr. 1974, p. 2). Characterizing his approach as an effort of "resurrection, modernization, and . . . improvement" (p. 45) of the rational approach of Beccaria and Bentham, Becker argued that criminals were not biologically, psychologically, or sociologically different from noncriminals; and that the decision to offend did not originate in a unique set of motives but was influenced by the same factors that motivate all purposive behaviors. Becker and others developed these ideas in what is now called the neoclassical or economic approach to crime. According to this perspective, people choose criminal over noncriminal alternatives in the same way that they choose particular strategies when they act as consumers in the marketplace. This theoretical explanation (Becker, 1976) is based on the following assumptions: