Psychopathy and Crime

Psychopathy is a disease of the mind, in which the psychological state of someone has emotional or behavioral problems serious enough to require psychiatric evaluation. Psychopaths have no concern for the feelings of others and a complete disregard of any sense of social obligation. Psychopaths are characterized by lack of empathy, poor impulse control and manipulative behaviors. They use charm, manipulation, intimidation, and the use of severe to mild violence to satisfy their own needs.

Psychopathy is derived from two Greek words: psych, meaning soul, and pathos, meaning suffering. They were once used to explain any form of mental illness. Psychopathy was recognized in the early 1800’s at which time Pinel explained the condition as insanity without delirium. In the 1940’s, Hervey Cleckley produced a checklist which consisted of 16 distinguishable characteristics of a psychopath: superficial charm and average intelligence, absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking, absence of nervousness or neurotic manifestations, unreliability, untruthfulness and insincerity, lack of remorse or shame, antisocial behavior without apparent compunction, poor judgement and failure to learn from experience, pathological egocentricity and incapacity to love, general poverty in major affective reactions, specific loss of insight, unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations, fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink, and sometimes without, suicide threats rarely carried out, sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated, and failure to follow any life plan.

Psychopathy is not usually diagnosed when you are a child or adolescent. There are though precursors that show symptoms of psychopathy in children and are usually diagnosed as conduct disorder. Most of these children seem to be immune to punishment and there is nothing that can be done to modify this behavior, so the majority of parents give up on their own children. Common precursors to psychopathy in children are: a longer then usual bedwetting period, cruelty to animals, fire setting and vandalism, lies, truancy, theft, aggression to peers and elders, and defiance of authority.

Psychopaths can seem just like you or me, but when you are not around them this is when their mental disorder kicks in. Psychopaths that have been put in jail committed three times as many crimes per year then non-psychopaths. 97% of convicted psychopathic criminals cause at least one violent crime compared to 74% of non-psychopaths. Psychopaths are shown to be more violence throughout their entire life compared to a regular people. Psychopaths tend to have a greater chance of failing on parole and mandatory supervision and have a faster rate of failing then non-psychopaths. Psychopathy predicts recidivism on conditional release as well as or better than do actuarial risk instruments. Psychopaths recidivate at a rate of three to four times higher than that of non-psychopaths.

Doctors use a simple test to predict psychopathy called a Psychopathy Checklist-Revised or known as the PCL-R test. This is a checklist that has twenty items on it that included: glibness or superficial charm, grandiose sense