Psychological Criminology: An Integrative Approach

The book provides a comprehensive coverage of psychological theories of crime and criminality. Rather than present various psychological perspectives as a series of discrete and rival explanations, the aim of the book is to emphasise the connections among approaches, and to show how, taken together, they provide a more complete picture of crime and criminality than each provides individually. Theories are arranged in a temporal sequence, from distal to proximal causes of crime. Some theories focus on factors that are present at birth; other theories focus on factors that influence the offender over the lifespan; and other theories focus on factors that are present at the crime scene. The analysis spans 100,000 years, from the evolutionary roots of criminal behaviour in the ancestral environments of early humans on the African savana, to the decision to engage in a specific criminal act.