Understanding criminal behaviour

This chapter discusses the specific contribution of criminal psychology to the task of understanding offending. Criminologists employ three main approaches for measuring crime: official crime statistics, victim surveys, and self-report studies. Each of these three approaches has their limitations, and, where possible, information about the nature and prevalence of crime should be obtained from a variety of sources. Criminal psychology can be viewed as the application of psychological science to the understanding of criminal behaviour. Humans clearly have an evolutionary history that is relevant for the understanding of criminal behaviour. Developmental approaches to understanding criminal behaviour focus on how particular developmental trajectories might influence criminal behaviour. One major approach to explaining individual differences in offending focuses on the psychological characteristics of individuals. All criminal behaviour occurs within a specific social and environmental context. Thus, situational approaches to understanding criminal behaviour focus on how features of the social and physical environment may facilitate offending.