ABSTRACT
Crime and criminality have long captured the imagination of the media and of the public at large. Despite this attention, people often struggle to dene what actually constitutes a criminal act. We have long been able to identify behaviours which we feel contravene morality, and certainly have no diculty recognising when someone has behaved unfairly towards us. To report a crime to the police, however, requires more than identifying unfair treatment and someone who is behaving immorally (see Chapters 1 and 2). So what is it that guides our acknowledgement of a crime and belief that someone has acted criminally? These are important questions but the answers are not so readily forthcoming. In order to understand crime and criminality it is necessary to explore how our concept of crime developed through social, religious and legal change, and more importantly their interaction (see Part I, Chapters 1 and 2). To help understand crime and criminality, the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach will be taken in this textbook. In addition to utilising a multidisciplinary approach, a recurrent theme of this textbook will be the relationship between nature (i.e. our biology) and nurture (i.e. our environment) in explaining criminality. In order to progress a nature-nurture understanding of crime and criminality, a plethora of theories and research ndings from a variety of academic disciplines will be presented (with Part II presenting nature-and nurture-driven explanations and a nature-nurture interaction).
