The Oxford Handbook of Offender Decision Making

Although the issue of offender decision-making pervades almost every discussion of crime and law enforcement, only a few comprehensive texts cover and integrate information about the role of decision-making in crime. The Oxford Handbook of Offender Decision Making provide high-quality reviews of the main paradigms in offender decision-making, such as rational choice theory and dual-process theory. It contains up-to-date reviews of empirical research on decision-making in a wide range of decision types including not only criminal initiation and desistance, but also choice of locations, times, targets, victims, methods as well as large variety crimes including homicide, robbery, domestic violence, burglary, street crime, sexual crimes, and cybercrime. Lastly, it provides in-depth treatments of the major methods used to study offender decision-making, including experiments, observation studies, surveys, offender interviews, and simulations.

Comprehensive and authoritative, the Handbook will quickly become the primary source of theoretical, methodological, and empirical knowledge about decision-making as it relates to criminal behavior.

Wim Bernasco is Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Henk Elffers is Professor in the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at VU University Amsterdam and a Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement.

Jean Louis van Gelder is Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement.