Editors’ Introduction

Decision making is central to all human behavior, including criminal conduct. Virtually every discussion about crime or law enforcement is guided by beliefs about how people make decisions in one way or another. This interdisciplinary handbook integrates insights about the role of human decision making as it relates to crime. It contains reviews of the main theories of offender decision making and also reviews of empirical evidence on topics as diverse as desistance, crime locations, co-offending, victimization, and criminal methods and tools. It further includes in-depth treatments of the principal research methods for studying offender decision making and a series of chapters on specific types of crime