Criminal psychology, and its relationship to the practice of law, has become a topic of major significance over the last three decades. Psychologists play a key role in modern criminal investigation and are central to crime reduction measures such as offender profiling, delinquency prevention and tackling fear of crime. Contributors from North America, Europe and Australia examine this link, both adding to and drawing upon the pool of recent theory construction and empirical work in the following areas:

* causes and prevention of offending

* studies of crime and offenders

* the victim's perspective

* witnesses and testimony

* studies of legal processes.

These issues are studied from a 'local' perspective that recognises not only the need for cross-national comparative research, but also the generation of a corpus of scientific knowledge more representative of the complexity of criminal and legal investigation today.