Without Conscience

by Robert D. Hare

  If, as I believe, our society is moving in the direction of permitting, reinforcing, and in some instances actually valuing some of the traits listed in the Psychopathy Checklist—traits such as impulsivity, irresponsibility, lack of remorse, and so on—our schools may be evolving into microcosms of a “camouflage society,” where true psychopaths can hide out, pursuing their destructive, self-gratifying ways and endangering the general student population. Troubling indeed are the implications of the silence of those twenty Canadian youths who knew of a murder, knew the identity of the murderer, but, whatever their reasons, told no one. They suggest that our society may be not only fascinated but increasingly tolerant of the psychopathic personality. Even more frightening is the possibility that “cool” but vicious psychopaths will become twisted role models for children raised in dysfunctional families or disintegrating communities where little value is placed on honesty, fair play, and concern for the welfare of others.

  “WHAT HAVE I DONE?”

  It is hard to imagine any parent of a psychopath who has not asked the question, almost certainly with a sense of desperation, “What have I done wrong as a parent to bring this about in my child?”

  The answer is, possibly nothing. To summarize our sparse data, we do not know why people become psychopaths, but current evidence leads us away from the commonly held idea that the behavior of parents bears sole or even primary responsibility for the disorder. This does not mean that parents and the environment are completely off the hook. Parenting behavior may not be responsible for the essential ingredients of the disorder, but it may have a great deal to do with how the syndrome develops and is expressed. There is little doubt that poor parenting and unfavorable social and physical environments can greatly exacerbate potential problems and that they play a powerful role in molding the behavioral patterns of children. The complex interplay of these forces helps to determine why only a few psychopaths become serial killers while the vast majority go through life as “ordinary” criminals, shady businessmen, or legal predators.

  Although the origins of psychopathy remain murky, the improved accuracy in diagnosis and the growing body of research allow us to begin formulating better ways to deal with the psychopaths in our communities. That is the subject of this book’s final chapters.

  IN 1981, IN Milpitas, California, thirteen teenagers kept silent for three days after a boy murdered a fourteen-year-old girl in their class. During that period the group made trips into the hills to view the body. River’s Edge, a 1987 movie based on the facts of the case, depicts those children as members of a “blank generation.” To anyone acquainted with the current communication styles of some teenagers, the portrayal will seem alarmingly familiar. This skillfully made film offers unusual insight into the ways in which a lawless subculture of the young can be camouflaged.

  The world these children inhabit is a white working-class neighborhood of a type rarely depicted realistically in films. There, children drenched in television violence form a secret underworld while their parents struggle to make ends meet and their family lives spin out of control. Distracted and distressed by the grind of daily life, at best the parents in the movie manage to shout, “Is that you?” to their children as they pass in and out of the house and go their separate ways.

  One of the movie’s most powerful scenes shows a teacher, still able to care, trying to get through the “cool,” ironic style that masks these kids. He asks, then practically begs, the class to say something about how the loss of their dead classmate affected them. Only the “nerd” in the class is willing to admit to caring at all; the rest seem hopelessly confused by the question. Desperately seeking some evidence that he’s reaching his students on a meaningful level, the teacher turns to one of them, a girl named Clarissa who was one of those who finally told the authorities of the murder: “Say what Jamie meant to you ...” The response, even from this girl, is a flat, empty stare. Whether the girl had no feelings or refused to divulge them to an authority figure the filmmakers leave to the audience.

  The absence of empathy, compassion, or even comprehension of loss drives this teacher into a fit of fury: “Nobody in this classroom gives a damn that she’s dead.... It gives us a chance to be morally superior but nobody in this classroom really gives a shit that she’s dead. Because if we did we wouldn’t be here, we’d be out on the street half-crazed from lack of sleep tracking down the guy who killed her.”

  The chilling response to the teacher’s outburst? Silence.

  It’s just a movie, true. But the portrayal in River’s Edge of a society where emotional poverty, impulsivtty, irresponsibility, self-aggrandizement, and self-gratification are the norms rings frighteningly true. Whereas, as Robert Lindner put it in 1944, frontiers and borders once drew the psychopath with the “sparkle and glitter of personal freedom,” today our streets, our schools, and even our homes might afford the psychopath the chance to blend in undetected, undiagnosed, and actively encouraged. I hope that this book will draw attention to this frightening possibility by putting psychopathy in children into bold relief.

  Chapter 11

  The Ethics

  of Labeling

  I was kicked out of school in eighth grade for beating up the teacher. The social worker said, “He’s disadvantaged. Send him to summer camp.” When I was seventeen I was charged with rape. The psychiatrist said, “He’s a psychopath. Send him to jail.” It ruined my life. They thought I was rotten so I proved them right.

  —A convicted serial rapist who committed his first violent sexual offense at age eleven

  Throughout this book I have argued that precise assessments of psychopathy are essential if we are to increase our understanding of this socially devastating disorder. But there is an even more pressing need for accuracy in diagnosis: Before we can develop effective management and treatment programs for psychopaths we must correctly identify them.

  With our crime rates and prison populations spiraling out of control, with mental health facilities growing packed beyond capacity, with unprecedented trends in violent crime, substance abuse, unwanted pregnancy, and suicide surfacing among our youth, I firmly believe that mental health and social work professionals sorely need to use the concept of psychopathy to guide their decision making. Properly used, the diagnosis of psychopathy has the potential to clear up some of the confusion about how and why our social order is in such difficulty. However, improper use of the label has powerful destructive potential for the misdiagnosed individual. It is for these reasons that the Psychopathy Checklist is such a valuable tool. Not only does it provide clinicians and decision makers with a reliable and valid diagnostic procedure, it provides others—including members of the criminal justice system—with a detailed description of precisely what goes into a diagnosis of psychopathy. Rather than having a clinician simply say, “In my professional opinion this individual is a psychopath,” the reasons for the diagnosis are clearly spelled out.

  AT A RECENT professional meeting, a prison psychologist told me that the institutions in his state routinely use the Psychopathy Checklist to keep the “blame line” for poor parole decisions from reaching them. “It helps us in our recommendations to the parole board,” he said. “We tell the board whether or not an offender is a psychopath and explain the implications of the diagnosis. It’s then up to the board to decide how to use the information. If he’s a psychopath and they let him out and he kills someone, we’re off the hook and the parole board has to do the explaining to the public and the victim’s family. If he’s not a psychopath and all the other evidence indicated he was a good risk and he kills someone, we’re still okay. So is the parole board. We all did the best we could, and no parole is without risk.”

  The psychologist also said that it was only a matter of time until the family of someone killed by a parolee sued the state on the grounds that it had released “a psychopathic killer who had not been properly diagnosed.” The Psychopathy Checklist, he said, was useful insurance against such a claim.


  ONLY THE PAROLE BOARD

  WAS SURPRISED

  The public is often perplexed when a criminal with a long record receives what seems an unusually early release from prison. The reasons vary, but in most cases the parole board feels that the offender no longer poses a significant threat to society. In most cases their decisions are sound, but occasionally they make inexplicable and tragic mistakes. For example, consider the case of Carl Wayne Buntion, described on the television show A Current Affair, May 7, 1991. He was released from a Texas prison in 1990, fifteen months after receiving a fifteen-year sentence for sexual assault. Six weeks later he shot and killed a police officer during a routine traffic stop.

  Why was this man paroled so soon after beginning a long sentence for a violent crime? After all, it was not as if this had been his only crime. His record went back at least to 1961, and he had consistently violated his paroles, which he seemed to get rather easily and quickly. Indeed, in 1984 he was sentenced to two concurrent ten-year terms, but he was out on his seventh parole by 1986. When asked, “How can you say a man with this record is not a threat to society? Clearly this man is a repeat offender,” the chairman of the parole board replied, “That’s a matter of judgement.” He also said that the parole board did not share any of the blame for the police officer’s death—“No more than his mother should be blamed for bearing him [Bunrion] as a son.”

  Buntion’s girlfriend described him this way: “He is intelligent, he has a wonderful sense of humor, he is very easygoing, very laid back; he is a gentleman.” Neither the victim of his sexual assault nor the family of the murdered officer is likely to agree with this rather bizarre depiction of a grossly antisocial man. As television reporter David Lee Miller put it, “Love may be blind, but what’s the excuse for the Texas Parole Board for failing to see the truth about Carl Wayne Bunrion?”

  Is Buntion a psychopath? Probably. Had the institutional authorities insisted that a proper assessment be made as part of his application for parole, and had the parole board been astute enough to integrate the diagnosis and his criminal record, it is unlikely that Buntion would have been released from prison. After all, it would not have taken a genius to predict that a Carl Buntion was not suddenly going to become a model citizen.

  However, the sad fact is that parole boards are more likely to be composed of political appointees who have few relevant qualifications than of people who understand criminal behavior and appreciate the potent role of psychopathy in the prediction of recidivism and violence. Moreover, board members often have too little time to do a thorough job. And in many cases they are reluctant to use, or are confused by, the clinical reports provided by psychiatrists and psychologists. Having seen my share of such reports, I understand why many parole boards do not find them very helpful in making difficult decisions about early release from prison. Many clinical reports are vague or full of jargon, and some provide diagnoses that lack empirical evidence of their ability to predict recidivism and violence.

  THE POWER OF LABELING

  Accurate diagnoses that also have predictive validity can be extremely useful to the criminal justice system. The success of the Psychopathy Checklist in predicting recidivism and violence attests to this. However, it is also important to understand the dangers of inaccurate diagnosis and faulty labeling. In the correctional system, for example, a single entry in a file by an intake officer or a prison psychologist can mark an inmate like Cain. Suppose, for example, that a young man in prison for a series of burglaries has become eligible for parole. The overworked and underpaid prison psychologist gives the man a brief interview and makes a cursory examination of his file, noting that a few years earlier a psychiatrist had said that he was an “antisocial personality.” In writing his report, the psychologist states that, in his clinical opinion, the inmate is a psychopath and therefore a poor parole risk. Parole is denied by a board swayed by what it thinks the label means and concerned about the rising crime rate. The inmate subsequently becomes depressed and commits suicide. At the inquest, the hapless psychologist testifies that he made his diagnosis on the basis of file information and a fifteen-minute interview.

  On the other side of the issue, however, accurate assessments can be very useful in the classification of offenders, determining work assignments, making decisions about appropriate treatments and interventions, planning for release, and preparing staff to deal with offenders on a daily basis. A diagnosis of psychopathy also might prevent an offender from being transferred from a prison to a forensic psychiatric hospital (a hospital for mentally disordered criminals), where he or she would have a disruptive influence on the other patients. Or, once in such a hospital, the diagnosis might help determine the security level at which the offender is placed. In a recent example, a patient killed a member of the staff of the largest hospital for mentally disordered offenders in North America.1 The administration and staff met and agreed on the institution of a new policy: A patient with both a high score on the Psychopathy Checklist and a history of violence must undergo a special administrative review before being considered for assignment to a lower level of security within the hospital. The review assists staff in the difficult and nerve-racking task of trying to strike a reasonable balance between the need to reduce violence and the needs and rights of each patient to receive appropriate treatment.

  MOST JURISDICTIONS around the world consider psychopaths legally and psychiatricatly sane. However, in a recent case in Australia the authorities decided that the only way to keep Garry David, “an aggressive psychopath,” from being released from prison was to bring in legislation declaring him and others like him mentally ill. After learning of David’s long history of law-breaking and violence, a Supreme Court judge who heard the case was quoted as saying, “Someone with such a history must be suffering from a mental illness and if psychiatrists fail to realize this they must be ‘crazy’ themselves.” In spite of vocal opposition from the psychiatric community, David was certified mentally ill and detained in a high-security psychiatric hospital. (From Neville Parker. The Garry David case. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 25, 1991, 371-74.)

  LONG-DISTANCE DIAGNOSIS

  In one of life’s more satisfying coincidences, I received a call from CBS asking me to comment on a possible link between psychopathy and the personality of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The Persian Gulf War was at its height, and the general population was swamped night and day by images and commentary on every aspect of the hostilities and the politics generating them. Predicting Hussein’s next move had become a global obsession, and CBS had apparently decided to temper the fervor with some “expert opinion.”

  I declined the invitation. Like the top-of-the-head diagnosis furthered by “Dr. Death” (described in the following pages), the long-distance diagnosis of public figures, even by experienced diagnosticians, can easily become a parody of professional procedure. The result can be a form of glorified gossip, lent credence not by the facts but merely by the expert’s credentials.

  In the case of Saddam Hussein, the dangers were especially evident, since, as we were apt to hear repeatedly during the early days of the war, “The first victim of war is the truth.” Not only were biographical materials on Hussein limited, but the highly influential variables of culture, religion, and other components of a belief system profoundly different from ours called for careful study and understanding from anyone attempting a psychological diagnosis.

  During that same period, Daniel Goleman reported on remarks by Dr. Jerrold Post, professor of psychiatry and politics at George Washington University (“Experts Differ on Dissecting Leaders’ Psyches from Afar,” The New York Times, January 19, 1991, p. C1 ff). In testimony to the U.S. Senate, Dr. Post depicted the Iraqi president as suffering from “ ‘malignant narcissism,’ a severe personality disorder that leaves him grandiose, paranoid and ruthless.” Even lay people got in on the act. Appearing on CNN on February 13, 1991, Representative Robert Dornan described Hussein as �
��sociopsychopathic.”

  In his New York Times article, Goleman went on to show that psychological profiles of public figures have their roots in Freudian theories and have been considered valuable by the U.S. government, but that experts differ in their opinions of their worth. Particularly in the case of Hussein, “critics note that other interpretations are equally plausible, and that [Post’s] diagnosis is based on a slim body of evidence.”

  Nevertheless, Post used his diagnosis both to describe Hussein’s psyche and to make predictions about his future actions, stating before January 15, the deadline that former President Bush gave Hussein for withdrawing from Kuwait, that “Mr. Hussein would probably back down from a confrontation at the last minute.”

  The facts proved otherwise: Hussein dug in. Post acknowledged that there are limitations to the predictive power of clinical diagnoses: “These are patterns and tendencies. You can say how someone has reacted in past crises, but you can’t make hard predictions based on personality alone.”

  In an interesting twist to the story, an Iraqi who appeared on a February 7, 1991, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news program said, “Bush wants to kill all Arabs. He is a psychopath.”

  A MOTHER WHO saw a newspaper article about my work telephoned one day to say, “From the article it looks like my son is a psychopath.” She then asked if I would administer the Psychopathy Checklist to her son, currently serving three years for theft. I explained that it would not be possible for me to do so, and that, in any case, a firm diagnosis of psychopathy might make it more difficult for him to secure early release. “But that’s just the point,” she exclaimed. “I don’t want him to get out! He’s been nothing but trouble to us. When he was seven he molested his younger sister. By the time he was nine the police were spending so much time at our home I should have charged them rent. He’s in jail now for stealing from his father’s firm.”