Psychological Criminology

Psychological Criminology addresses the question: what is it about individuals and their experiences that cause them to commit crime and/or to become criminal?

This book provides a comprehensive coverage of psychological theories of crime and criminality, exploring theories focusing on factors present at birth (human nature, heredity); theories that focus on factors that influence the offender over the lifespan (learning, development); and theories focusing on factors present at the crime scene. It emphasizes the connections among the different approaches, and demonstrates how, taken together rather than as rival explanations, they provide a more complete picture of crime and criminality than each provides individually.

Theories are arranged throughout the book in a temporal sequence, from distal to proximal causes of crime. The analysis spans 100,000 years, from the evolutionary roots of criminal behaviour in the ancestral environments of early humans