Chapter 15: Psychosocial Criminology

Tony Jefferson

Psychosocial criminology Criminology has always been psychosocial, in the sense that it has had an interest in both the psychic and the social dimensions of crime from its origins over two centuries ago. More directly, there has been a social psychology of offending behaviour at least since the 1920s. But, mostly the psyche and the social have been kept apart, or utilised without a definite notion of what might be entailed in attempting to bring them together, to think of them as always simultaneously operative on human behaviour, which means to think psychosocially about the object of enquiry. In the last decade or so, the term psychosocial has been explicitly defined as a particular way of theorizing the relationship between psychic and social factors, and its relevance for understanding a variety of criminological topics has been explored (Jefferson, 2002; Gadd and Jefferson, 2007a; Jones, 2008). As we shall see, this ...

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