Psychopathy is one of psychology’s most resilient creations, impervious to myriad controversies over its checkered history and troubling legal implications.
Its roots lie in 19th century theories of innate criminality. Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, founder of criminal anthropology and a proponent of scientific racism, posited “a group of criminals, born for evil, against whom all social cures break as against a rock – a fact which compels us to eliminate them completely, even by death.” This explanation of crime as rooted in biological degeneracy was embraced by the white supremacist eugenics movement of the early 20th century. The study of the “psychopathic personality” gained traction during the decades leading up to World War II, and strongly influenced German scientists of the Third Reich.
By the late 20th century, movie renditions of the “bad seed,” hard-wired by biology, had helped to cement the psychopath as a cultural icon. The current era of mass incarceration serves as a hothouse for its dark vision of humanity. By foregrounding intrinsic evil, psychopathy marginalizes social problems and excuses institutional failures at rehabilitation. We need not understand a criminal’s troubled past or environmental influences. We need not reach out a hand to help him along a pathway to redemption. The psychopath is irredeemable, a dangerous outsider who must be contained or banished. Circular in its reasoning, psychopathy is nonetheless alluring in its simplicity.
Although modern psychopathy is more nuanced than its 19th-century ancestor, diagnosing it remains an essentially subjective task. With its moralistic underpinnings, psychopathy functions as a coded language in correctional settings, for example. In a series of ethnographic studies, anthropologist Lorna Rhodes of the University of Washington found that prison clinicians use it and its watered-down cousin, antisocial personality disorder, to sort bodies into categories of “bad” (disliked) versus “mad” (pitied), thereby restricting access to limited treatment resources. Not surprisingly, found another researcher, African American prisoners are about twice as likely as equally eligible whites to be assigned this diagnosis.
Forensic psychology’s current fixation with psychopathy owes in part to the modern notion that proper safety precautions can make life virtually risk-free. In response, courts and the public have tasked psychologists with predicting which individuals will engage in violent or otherwise depraved conduct in the future. Whether psychopathy can meaningfully assist in the quest for a crystal ball remains an open question.
In the meantime, with its invocation of monstrosity and danger, psychopathy exerts a powerfully prejudicial impact on judges and jurors. When assigned this pejorative label, juveniles are more likely to be transferred to adult court for harsher punishment, men who have committed sex offenses are more likely to be preventively detained as so-called “sexually violent predators,” and capital murder defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty. Masking it implicit bias beneath a veneer of scientific objectivity, in adversarial settings psychopathy can literally be the kiss of death.
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