This book offers a clear, up-to-date, comprehensive, and theoretically informed introduction to criminal psychology, exploring how psychological explanations and approaches can be integrated with other perspectives drawn from evolutionary biology, neurobiology, sociology, and criminology. Drawing on examples from around the world, it considers different types of offences from violence and aggression to white-collar and transnational crime, and links approaches to explaining crime with efforts to prevent crime and to treat and rehabilitate offenders.
This revised and expanded second edition offers a thorough update of the research literature and introduces several new features, including:
- detailed international case studies setting the scene for each chapter, promoting real-world understanding of the topics under consideration;
- a fuller range of crime types covered, with new chapters on property offending and white-collar, corporate, and environmental crime;
- detailed individual chapters exploring prevention and rehabilitation, previously covered in a single chapter in the first edition;
- an array of helpful features including learning objectives, review and reflect checkpoints, annotated lists of further reading, and two new features: ‘Research in Focus’ and ‘Criminal Psychology Through Film’.
This textbook is essential reading for upper undergraduate students enrolled in courses on psychological criminology, criminal psychology, and the psychology of criminal behaviour. Designed with the reader in mind, student-friendly and innovative pedagogical features support the reader throughout.
1. Understanding criminal behaviour: An overview
2. Juvenile delinquency and developmental theories of crime
3. Mental disorder and crime
4. Aggression and violence
5. Violent offending
6. Sexual offending
7. Collective violence
8. Drugs and crime
9. Property offending
10. White collar, corporate and environmental crime
11. Crime prevention
12. Criminal justice responses to crime
13. The rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Russil Durrant is Senior Lecturer at the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
"The second edition of An Introduction to Criminal Psychology provides an excellent overview of the psychology of crime. The new chapters on property and white collar crime, and expanded treatment of prevention and treatment are valuable additions. Dr Durrant manages to balance deep scholarship and theoretical sophistication with clarity of writing, and his ability to link abstract ideas with practical examples from around the world is unique in my experience. Lecturers will find the new sections on crime and film and research in focus particularly helpful in their teaching. In my view, this is a first rate text and should be on the prescribed reading list for all undergraduate courses on crime and psychology."
- Tony Ward, MA(Hons), PhD, DipClinPsyc, MNZCCPsych, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
"An Introduction to Criminal Psychology, 2nd edition, is an accessible and easy to read yet comprehensive introduction to criminal psychology. The book not only provides a thorough overview of psychological explanations for a wide range of offences, but it also offers an integrated account of how these approaches can be used to reduce and prevent crime. It is a ‘must have’ text for any undergraduate course with a focus on psychological explanations of criminal behaviour."
- Dr Paola Castillo, Lecturer in Psychology, Charles Sturt University, Australia
