Introduction
Several professional experiences served as sources of motivation to write a book that presented psychopathy as a unified theory of crime. The first relates to the current authorâs clinical experiences as an expert witness and consultant on various criminal cases involving offenders who perpetrated multiple homicides. Almost without exception, despite variation in age, race, ethnicity, and geographic region in which they lived, these defendants were effectively the same person in terms of their life history. To move retrospectively, they perpetrated multiple homicides either over an extended period of time or in a single flashpoint of violence. These homicides were the crescendo of a long, expansive antisocial career that involved multiple periods of confinement in prisons, jails, and, before that, commitment facilities and detention centers. Their criminal career displaced any genuine involvement in a legitimate career in terms of viable employment or educational achievement. Indeed, the degree to which they were engaged in illegal activities as evidenced by their criminal record was so staggering that it almost seemed mythical. The commitment to antisocial behavior documented by one arrest after another followed by an additional form of punishment after another was nothing less than absurd. It was the same story when reviewing materials on their behaviors during adolescence and during childhood. What was potentially difficult to predict at the time became abundantly clear in retrospect: Juvenile delinquent, thug, problem child, angry child, disturbed child, child in need of assistance, and other indicators of behavioral dysfunction were the signals that the individual was sharply different from others in terms of their emotional and behavioral functioning. They were sharply different.
And this discussion only refers to their behaviors. Their interpersonal style was ugly, mean, unpredictable, blaming, touchy, inconsiderate, and insincere. The only thing more absurd than their criminal careers and their arrest record was the offenderâs genuine belief that all of the criminal activity was really other peopleâs faults. For every arrest, there was a justification; for every violation of probation, there was an excuse; for every prison sentence, there was a claim that the offender was the true victim. According to these offenders, the real victims had it coming, or deserved it, or were also criminals who shouldnât be felt sorry for. All of this blame externalization was uttered in a cold, detached, matter-of-fact voice that was absent of emotion other than indignation and self-martyring, or a glimmer of anger.
Admittedly, the current authorâs expert witness clinical experience involves a relatively small number of cases, but my interaction with the criminal justice system as a practitioner and researcher involves tens of thousands of cases that span the tremendous variance of the criminal population. Very few of them were the multiple homicide offenders described earlier. Instead, most offenders in my experience were seemingly normative individuals whose use of alcohol and other substances coincided with their criminal activity. Thus, arrests for driving while intoxicated, public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and related offenses are commonly seen along with occasional assaults against a stranger, usually at a bar or club, or against an acquaintance or intimate, usually in oneâs residence. Some offenders also incorporate property offenses, such as theft, credit card fraud, or forgery. Other offenders burgle homes or businesses and then sell the stolen property. A segment of the offender population frequently carries firearms and other weapons, and accumulates arrests for more serious crimes including armed robbery, aggravated assaults, and other crimes involving physical force.
The latter tens of thousands of cases embody tens of thousands of unique personalities. But there are certainly organizing themes. Offenders have a tendency toward behavioral approach as opposed to behavioral withdraw. They seek sensations, experiences, thrills, and risks. Behavioral approach is usually not the result or outcome of sustained contemplation, but is instead reactionary, hasty, and impulsive. They do not think, and then act. They just act. There is also a sloppiness to their lives that facilitates bad decisions and enables and creates opportunities for bad situations. Offenders are not generally those who pack their lunch the night before, organize their next-dayâs clothes, and go to sleep at a reasonable hour so that they can get seven to ten hours of rest. Instead they go out on a Wednesday night and go drinking, and then attempt to drive home but get arrested. Their sense of responsibility, their self-control, their judgment, their decision-making, and their wherewithal tend to be low. Their global lifestyle tends to be haphazard, poorly planned, and disorganized which makes their continued struggles less likely to contribute to conventional behaviors and more likely to contribute to behavior problems.
As an observer of crime who watches the news and reads the newspaper, other characteristics of crime and the individuals who commit it have also caught my attention. Crime is a selfish act that subordinates the rights, property, and, at times, humanity of the victim to the criminalâs (usually) immediate wants and desires. A shoplifter wants to have a product without paying for it, or more typically, without having to wait in line for a cashier in order to pay for it. An identity thief accesses and transfers funds from the victimâs account to his or own account merely because he or she has the data access to do so. A rapist is driven by a mixture of anger, entitlement, and sexual desire and sexually abuses a victim to satisfy these needs. A person who commits assault, and sometimes murder, uses fists, feet, knives, or other objects to end an argument, to make a person stop talking, or to make the victim otherwise submit to their wishes. Crime is a gratifying behavioral option in an exigent circumstance to the offender. What could be more selfish and narcissistic than taking another personâs property, health, or life without any consideration of how that victimization damages them?
Most people are never arrested in their lifetime, and among those who are, it is usually a one-off experience from which they recover, appear to learn rather quickly, and modify their behavior accordingly which is very different than the experiences of chronic offenders (Barnes, 2014; DeLisi, 2016; Moffitt, 1993; Vaughn et al., 2011; Vaughn, Salas-Wright, DeLisi, & Maynard, 2014; Wolfgang, Figlio, & Sellin, 1972). In other words, normal people, or those who engage in normative types of antisocial behavior, are relatively easy to rehabilitate because they have a variety of human capital assets that not only make continued offending unlikely but also make behavior change likely. Thus, instead of attempting to drive home after drinking alcohol, they call a cabâand this simple behavioral modification goes a long way to guarantee that the individual will never be arrested for drunk driving again.
Thus, most people abstain from crime to such a degree that they avoid arrest thoroughly or are arrested rarely, or episodically. But other criminal offenders do not seem to recover, and they never seem to learn from their mistakes. There is little in the way of behavioral modification, and instead their involvement in crime, their use of drugs and alcohol, and their inability to navigate correctional sentences becomes their life pattern. When offenders are confronted explicitly about their criminal behavior or their use of various substances including alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and others, they often are not righteous in acknowledging their behavioral flaws. Instead, they are in deep denial and attempt to rationalize their drug use and criminal activity in a way to suggest that their behavior is not criminal at all, and that they are in fact victims of external forces. These rationalizations are usually flimsy and poorly thought through but are nevertheless articulated quickly and with some degree of charm and conviction. When confronted about other forms of dysfunction in their lives, such as chronic unemployment, failure to pay child support, and other irresponsibility, there is similarly always an answer that rationalizes but never blames their own conduct. There are recurrent examples of this tendency: âThe job was bad,â âThe boss was out to get me,â âIt didnât fit my schedule,â âThe pay was too low,â or âI canât pay child support when I am not working.â A genuine acknowledgment of oneâs frailty and failures is not the strong suit of a criminal offender.
In reflecting on these experiences, the current author was overwhelmed by the apparent ability of one theoretical construct that seemed to explain it all. That theoretical construct was psychopathy. Psychopathy seemed to offer a template of an individual who would engage in all sorts of problem behaviors. It was a match, and virtually a perfect match to the criminal offenders of my clinical, practitioner, and observational experience. Moreover, it was a much more believable match to criminal offenders, and a more reliable and valid template than other theories of crime, many of which had at best a loose association to some specific feature or process in a criminal offenderâs life. Too many theories of crime are academic musings from criminologists, many of whom unfortunately have little to no applied, practitioner, or clinical experience with real criminal offenders. Conversely, psychopathy is the real deal, and its essence is a formidable explanatory mechanism for the motivations to commit crime. And the network of psychopathyâs traits can span the variance of the criminal population from the normative offender to the pathological one.
Despite my intellectual and applied interest in psychopathy as a vehicle to explain and understand crime, the current author soon discovered that I had a different take on psychopathy than many academicians in the fields in which I work. For instance, in his insightful critique of psychopathy as the basis for a general theory of crime, Walters (2004, p. 144) suggested, âExtreme cases in which serious crime and psychopathy coexist, coupled with biased assimilation and illusory correlation, may explain why some scholars remain steadfast in their support of psychopathy as a major correlate, if not cause, of crime.â Indeed, the current book is intended to explicitly and unapologetically advance psychopathy as a unified theory of crimeâa far more bold ambition than merely invoking psychopathy as a crime correlate.
There were also disciplinary factors that motivated the writing of this book. In my home discipline of sociology, there has been a longstanding orientation to construct theories of crime that avoid individual-level constructs and, often, that are openly hostile toward the use of individual-level constructs to understand variance in antisocial behavior. As a result, theories in the sociological tradition have focused on neighborhoods (e.g., Shaw and McKayâs social disorganization theory), peers and primary groups (e.g., Sutherlandâs differential association theory), social structural and economic factors (e.g., Merton, Cohen, Cloward, and Ohlinâs cultural deviance theory and anomie theory), and even the criminal justice system (e.g., assorted variants of labeling theory) as the usual suspects for what causes criminal behavior. It was only in the last quarter century that the field acknowledged the salience of individual-level self-regulation factors (e.g., Gottfredson and Hirschiâs self-control theory), and that acknowledgment only came after the undeniable success of dozens of empirical tests. Ideologically, sociology never wanted aspects of the offenderâor even worse, traitsâto explain his or her offending.
A different problem exists in my adopted discipline of psychology. Here too there is an assortment of theoretical perspectives, and unlike sociology, psychological theories of crime directly point to the individualâs personality (e.g., Eysenckâs PEN [psychoticism, extraversion, and neuroticism] theory, the five-factor model approach of Costa, McCrae, and others), emotions and cognitions (e.g., Mischel and Shodaâs cognitiveâaffective personality system theory), and social psychological processes (e.g., Crick and Dodgeâs social information processing theory) that engender problem behaviors. The focus is appropriately aimed at the offender. But psychology is a discipline that is intensely (some might say obsessively) focused on measurement issues and how the validity and reliability of various instruments comports with the constructs the instruments are intended to gauge. This means that considerations of theory often take the form of highly statistical examinations of the psychometric properties of various forms of measurement. The substantive value, meaning, and implications of the theory unfortunately get lost in the minutia of confirmatory factor analyses. Make no mistake, the current author is fan, consumer, and occasional participant in such research, but even I wonder about its relevance in advancing understanding about the gist of psychopathy.
These two disciplinary problems are especially problematic vis-Ă -vis one of my major research interests: psychopathy. Sociology would prefer to deny altogether the cluster of negative traits and behaviors embodied by psychopathy and instead point to aggregate structures and processes as the causes of crime. Even when there is an admission of the recalcitrantly antisocial nature of psychopathic individuals, the preference is to refer to them as sociopaths. Fundamentally, the difference is where the blame should be directed for their behavior: society versus the individual. For the record, sociopathy was coined by German psychiatrist Karl Birnbaum in 1914, and sociopathic personality disturbance was the official diagnosis of this condition in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published in 1952 (American Psychiatric Association, 1952). Psychology had become so involved in the measurement of psychopathy including its putative latent structure that the broader importance of the construct as a causal force for crime often seemed to be an afterthought. In addition, too much of the methodological energy in psychological studies of psychopathy seemed directed at or in response to its predominant measure (the PCL-R [Psychopathy Checklist-Revised]), rather than developing alternative measures and conceptualizations toward a more earnest goal of understanding the condition.
Psychopathy raised other issues, some of which were scholarly and academic and others which were lay and emanated from the popular cultures and its invocation of the psychopathy construct. Together these issues were what the current author refers to as the âeveryone or no oneâ problem. On the popular front, there is a tendency for people to label those with whom they disagreed or simply disliked as psychopathic as a way to impugn their behavior and condemn them. One who is occasionally impulsive, irresponsible, indifferent, tough-minded, cold, or narcissistic is those features occasionally, but that does not mean the individual is necessarily psychopathic. Popularly, this tendency is commonly directed against political figures and other famous persons. Thus, during the Bush Presidency, there were various anecdotes that Vice President Cheney was a psychopath because he appeared to be cold and calculating in his decision-making. During the Obama Presidency, there were various anecdotes that President Obama was a psychopath because he hid his true self and has hidden, diabolical ulterior motives. Not surprisingly, claims that Cheney was a psychopath usually, perhaps overwhelmingly emanated from liberals and claims that Obama was a psychopath usually, perhaps overwhelmingly emanated from conservatives. All of these claims are apocryphal.
Keeping with presidential history, Kiehl (2014) conducted a hypothetical psychopathy assessment of John Wilkes Booth, who infamously assassinated President Lincoln in 1865, and Charles Julius Guiteau, who more obscurely assassinated President Garfield in 1881. Booth is known to even the most casual students of history and is considered to be quite villainous for murdering one of the most influential leaders in American history. In the publicâs view, Booth is an evil, perhaps even psychopathic person. Yet Kiehl concludes that Guiteau should be remembered as the more evil, psychopathic person evidenced by his score of ...