It is a strange experience to adopt a new area of scholarly interest after so many years of devotion to the topics that sustained us since before graduate school. But that is exactly what we did in 2005, as we watched the devastation Hurricane Katrina wreaked on our home city of New Orleans. As criminologists, we were of course most interested in antisocial behavior in disaster and there were plenty of anecdotal examples of crime in the wake of Katrina. It was tempting, even for us as scholars, to look upon these examples and declare disasters to be criminogenic. But to do so would have flown in the face of decades of disaster sociology, which instead finds an abundance of prosocial behavior in the wake of disaster. We set out on a decade-long journey to develop and refine what is meant by crime in disaster, what is meant by the wake of disaster, what are the most effective and appropriate ways to measure disaster crime. and what, if anything, can be done to prevent crime in the wake of disaster. Along this journey, we became increasingly convinced that criminological theories were well suited to explain the antisocial behavior that sometimes happens after disasters, and this book, Toward a Criminology of Disaster, is our best and most deliberate attempt to connect the empirical and the theoretical.