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.

This comprehensive and challenging text unravels the phenomenon of homicide. In introducing the broad spectrum of different features, aspects and forms of homicide, Fiona Brookman examines its patterns and trends, how it may be explained, its investigation and how it may be prevented.

State-of-the-art critical reviews of recent scholarship on the causes of juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice system responses, and public policies to prevent and reduce youth crime are brought together in a single volume authored by leading scholars and researchers in neuropsychology, developmental and social psychology, sociology, history, criminology/criminal justice, and law.

This handbook presents a series of essays that captures not the past of criminology, but where theoretical explanation is headed. The volume is replete with ideas, discussions of substantive topics with salient theoretical implications, and reviews of literatures that illuminate avenues along which theory and research evolve.

Originally published: 2012. First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 2015.

The fifth edition provides reviews of diverse topics as public views about crime and justice, youth crime and justice and state crime and human rights.

The rational choice perspective (RCP) is currently the core theoretical approach underpinning situational crime prevention (SCP). To date, many crimes have been studied through the lens of RCP, which increased our understanding of these phenomena, how they are committed and how they could potentially be prevented through SCP. This book, designed with the hope of moving RCP forward for SCP purposes, takes a challenging but novel step in providing leading experts from different disciplines with the opportunity to express themselves on how we could best achieve this task. This book explores various perspectives, which include the development of frameworks based on the role of situations in crime or forensic sciences for improving crime prevention practices. The need to consider affective states and other offender-related factors to improve our understanding of offender decision-making models is highlighted as a means to better predict which SCP mechanisms may be most useful in discouraging particular types of offenders. Finally, it is also argued that the use of RCP should be more pragmatic and that this perspective should be preserved and adapted based on what we find in our experiments. Taken together, these theoretically distinctive and challenging contributions ultimately guide how crime prevention practices could be best approached in the future.