It’s bad to be a psychopath.  Criminal defense lawyers, for all our commiserating with our clients, the unfairness of the system, and our empathy, the reality is that some of those who commit crimes, and yes, some defendant do indeed commit crimes, are psychopaths.  Represent one and you can understand why it’s a bad thing.

Psychologist Robert Hare created a test, called the PCL-R, to determine who is a psychopath.  From all reports, the test is a good one, though I’m not qualified to tell one way or the other.  And so, its widespread use and acceptance within the criminal justice system should similarly be good, right?  Not necessarily.  NPR interviewed Hare, who explains his concern over the use, and abuse, of his test.

SPIEGEL: Hare began collecting these interviews in the 1960s, at a time when research on psychopaths was considered both obscure and basically irrelevant to understanding crime. You see, at that point, Hare says, there was a very clear consensus about where crime came from. Criminals were made, not born.

Dr. ROBERT HARE (Psychologist/Creator, PCL-R): In those days, social factors, environmental factors were the explanation for all crime. When you’re born, just a blank – you’re a blank slate and I can train you to be anything you want.

SPIEGEL: But Hare didn’t really buy this. He thought inborn personality was important. He says, as a psychologist, when he looked at people he just saw these incredible differences in temperament.

Dr. HARE: Differences of impulsivity, differences in the capacity for empathy, for feeling guilt. As, you know, we have individual differences in intelligence, well, we should have individual differences in the personality traits that are responsible or related to crime.

What Hare found was that some people were, well, different.

Dr. HARE: It’s sort of like trying to explain to a colorblind person what the color red is. Can we teach a colorblind person how to see red, what red is? You can have all the dictionary definitions you want, but this person will never quite get it.

And so he developed PCL-R, which could be used to predict who was likely to continue to engage in criminal behavior, certainly a very important piece of information in determining who should be released from prison and who was a psychopath.  What could go wrong?

When the test found its way into the hands of prison psychologists, its reliability suddenly dissipated.

Daniel Murray did a study of the real-world reliability of the test, and found definitive discrepancies.

Mr. MURRAY: You know, we don’t know if people giving it in the field have received formal, rigorous training or if they’ve just sort of bought the manual and maybe read a couple papers and decided they’re going to start using it.

SPIEGEL: But Murray thinks it’s also something else. He says that in his study, psychologists hired by the prosecution consistently scored higher than psychologists employed by the defense, probably, Murray says, because they’re being paid for those opinions, and that money influences them.

A tool is only as good as the mechanic using it.  Whether it’s the uncalibrated radar on the side of the police cruiser, or a sophisticated psychological test that will label a person a psychopath and keep him imprisoned forever, the human factor is always a weak link.  Our adoration of science, for taking the onus off of people to make hard decisions, allowed this tool to become a weapon in the hands of the wrong people.  What a shock.

Of the many tools available to provide what judges and parole boards will latch onto as absolutely conclusive, a test that “proves” a defendant to be a psychopath is about as destructive as it gets.

Mr. HARE: Empathy is highly genetic in origin, modified and shaped by the environment, of course. But if you’ve got an adult who has virtually no empathy in the normal sense of the term, you’re not going to send him to school to learn empathy, Empathy 101. It’s just not going to work.

SPIEGEL: And when you think about criminals in this way, as people who are almost genetically predisposed to crime, you are much less likely to invest in their rehabilitation than if you say their acts as a product of unfortunate environmental circumstances.

This is why it’s so important to figure out if bias and bad training are affecting Hare’s test to the point that it is potentially mislabeling people. After all, once someone is labeled as a psychopath, what can you do with him? Nothing but lock him away.

There are psychopaths out there.  They are monumentally dangerous, because they are incapable of comprehending harm to others the way others do.  If you have never had the pleasure of sitting in the same room as one, then you can’t begin to appreciate the seriousness of this emptiness where normal human empathy should be. 

But a big red rubber stamp that says “psychopath” in the hands of some prison-paid psychomonkey is a perversion of the problem.  The net effect is that their testing cannot be presumed reliability, and Dr. Hare’s methodology in their hands is just another weapon to be used against those people the government doesn’t like.

The problem isn’t the test, but its abuse in the wrong hands.  And once someone is labeled a psychopath, it’s essentially impossible to change.  After all, tests can’t be wrong and the defendant is crazy.

H/T Dissent from Pogo was Right