Free Psychology Books: Forensic and legal psychology (2012) by Costanzo & Krauss

Forensic and legal psychology (2012) by Costanzo & Krauss

Every year, each of us teaches a course in either Forensic Psychology or Psychology and Law. This combined teaching experience—spanning more than three decades—prompted us to write this book and guided our writing process. Our goal was to produce a student-friendly textbook, a book that is both acces-sible and rigorous. Drawing on research in social, cognitive, clinical, and devel-opmental psychology, we have attempted to show how psychological science can be used to enhance the gathering of evidence, improve legal decision-making, re-duce crime, and promote justice. One aspect of this book that makes it a distinctive alternative to existing text-books is writing style. Of necessity, all textbooks designed for a particular course must be similar in content. Often, it is how content is presented that makes a book appealing to students and instructors. Great care has been taken to write Forensic and Legal Psychology in a lively, engaging style. When presenting research findings, we have tried to portray the research process as a kind of detective story—an ef-fort to unravel a mystery through systematic data collection. We have also made extensive use of real cases and trials to draw students into the material and to illustrate the relevance of research findings. To make sure our writing was clear and engaging, every chapter was reviewed and edited by both students and scholars. Finally, to enhance the visual appeal of the book and to clarify research findings, we have used tables, graphs, photos, and figures throughout the text. 

Forensic and Legal Psychology is intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to the varied, expanding field of psychology and law. The chapters that follow explore virtually every aspect of the legal system that has been studied by psychologists. We emphasize how research and theory can deepen our under-standing of key participants (e.g., criminals, police, victims, lawyers, witnesses, judges, and jurors) and basic psychological processes (e.g., decision-making, persuasion, perception, memory, and behavior change) in the legal system. In ad-dition to core chapters on topics such as eyewitness identification, jury decision-making, child custody, and the insanity defense, we have included full chapters on a few topics not well-covered in most textbooks. For example, our chapter on the psychology of forensic identification(DNA, fingerprints, and physical trace ev-idence) explores an increasingly important area of psychology and law. Contrary to media depictions, the process of matching trace evidence to a criminal suspect relies heavily on human judgment and is prone to error based on perceptual and cognitive biases. We have also devoted an entire chapter to the rapidly evolving area of workplace law(a topic that includes issues such as sexual harassment, prejudice and discrimination, and work-family conflicts). Full chapters are also devoted to risk assessment(a key consideration in arrest, sentencing, and parole...........

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