Chronic, Dangerous, or Both? Using Psychopathy to Help Explain the Unfolding of a More Serious Criminal Career

• In Event: Chronic and Serious Offending: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Abstract

The psychopathy construct was recently proposed as a key indicator of the unfolding of a more serious criminal career and that using measures of recidivism or descriptions of ‘chronic’ offending would result in an underestimation of the predictive utility of the construct. The current study tested this proposal using a sample of 326 male and female offenders whose trajectories of offense severity were measured from ages 12-28. Trajectories defined by the highest degree of offense severity identified individuals who were often not frequent offenders but rather lower-rate offenders involved in particularly serious crimes such as homicide. Higher symptoms of psychopathy, measured using the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version, increased the odds of association with this type of trajectory. Traditional trajectory analyses modeling general offending to identify a ‘chronic’ group of offenders are missing within this group some of the most serious offenders that warrant intensive attention from the criminal justice system. That individuals with high symptoms of psychopathy spend an increasingly greater number of months incarcerated over their 20s suggests decreasing opportunities for involvement in crime, which may help explain, at least in part, declines in frequency of offending observed in the age-crime curve.

Authors

• Evan McCuish, Simon Fraser University

• Patrick Lussier, Université Laval

• Raymond Corrado, Simon Fraser University