This study in the emerging field of criminal mobility draws upon criminological, economic, and geographical insights to consider questions on where crimes take place, and why certain neighbourhoods have higher crime rates than others.

This book provides a concise but comprehensive review of the full range of classic and contemporary theories of crime. With separate chapters on the nature and use of criminological theory as well as theoretical application, the authors render the difficult task of explaining crime more understandable to the introductory student. All of the main theories in criminology are reviewed including classical and rational choice, biological, psychological, and evolutionary, social structural, social process, critical, general, and integrated approaches. Copious examples of the spirit of the theories are supplied, many with a popular culture (e.g., film and music) connection.

Consisting of 28 articles, this comprehensive reference work on the study of crime, examines: its causes, effects, trends, and institutions, current philosophies of punishment and ways of controlling crime.

Crime control continues to be a growth industry, despite the drop in crime indicators throughout the nation. This volume shows how state-of-the-art geographic information systems (GIS) are revolutionizing urban law enforcement, with an award-winning program in New York City leading the way. Electronic "pin mapping" is used to display the incidence of crime, to stimulate effective strategies and decision making, and to evaluate the impact of recent activity applied to hotspots. The expert information presented by 12 contributors will guide departments without such tools to understand the latest technologies and successfully employ them. Besides describing and assessing cutting-edge techniques of crime mapping, this book emphasizes: * the organizational and intellectual contexts in which spatial analysis of crime takes place, * the technical problems of defining, measuring, interpreting, and predicting spatial concentrations of crime, * the common use of New York City crime data, and * practical applications of what is known (e.g., a review of mapping and analysis software packages using the same data set). Students, academics, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in the areas of criminal justice, corrections, geography, social problems, law and government, public administration, and public policy analysis will need to look at the interdisciplinary nature of both GIS and spatial dimensions of crime in order to comprehend the variety of different approaches address important analytic problems, reassess public facilities and resources, and prepare to respond more quickly to emerging hotspots.

A Modern Guide to the Economics of Crime discusses the evolution of a field, whose growing relevance among scholars and policymakers is partly related to the persistence of crime and violence around the world and partly to the remarkable progress made in recent years in the economic analysis of individual and organised crime. With contributions from some of the leading scholars in the economics of crime, the volume highlights a variety of topics, conceptual frameworks and empirical approaches, thus providing a comprehensive overview of the most recent developments of the field.

Opportunity theories of crime seek to explain the occurrence of crime rather than simply the existence of criminal dispositions. They emphasize the fundamental element in the criminal act of opportunity: how this arises, how it is perceived, evaluated and acted on by those with criminal dispositions. This volume brings together influential research articles on opportunity theories of crime by leading theorists such as Cohen and Felson on routine activity theory and Clarke and Cornish on the bounded rational choice perspective. The articles also include more recent theoretical developments and studies of situational crime prevention of specific twenty-first century crimes. These articles attest to the sheer volume as well to as the richness and the variety of work designed to reduce crime that has forever changed the face of criminology and criminal justice.

"This book contains a selection of papers, which were presented and discussed at the first GERN Summer School for PhD students held in September 2012 at Ghent University, Belgium"--Backcover.