Elsevier

Journal of Criminal Justice

Volume 43, Issue 4, July–August 2015, Pages 345-356
Journal of Criminal Justice

The role of symptoms of psychopathy in persistent violence over the criminal career into full adulthood

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2015.04.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Joint trajectories of violent and non-violent offending were modeled.

  • Psychopathy was associated with involvement in high levels of violence.

  • Chronic violent offenders were not also the most chronic non-violent offenders.

Abstract

Purpose

The extant criminal career literature supports the assertion that risk factors for violent offending are the same as those for non-violent offending. However, such studies have not examined the role of psychopathic personality disturbance (PPD) in the development of persistent violence across the life course. A situational action theory perspective was used to help illustrate the utility of PPD in explaining persistent violent offending.

Methods

Convictions for violent and non-violent offenses were measured for Canadian male (n = 262) and female (n = 64) offenders at each year between ages 12 and 28. Semi-parametric group-based modeling was used to identify joint trajectories of violent and non-violent offending. Symptoms of adolescent PPD and other criminogenic risk factors were also measured.

Results

Through the joint trajectory model, five violent and five non-violent trajectories were identified. PPD emerged as a strong predictor of membership in the trajectory associated with chronic violent offending but lower levels of non-violent offending.

Conclusions

Contrary to earlier criminal career research, the most persistent violent offenders were not also the most frequent general offenders. Theories that help explain why individuals are involved in persistent violence are needed. Incorporating PPD into such a theoretical framework appears necessary.

Introduction

Several criminal career studies have indicated that violent offending and general offending can be explained by the same risk factors (e.g., Capaldi and Patterson, 1996, Farrington, 1989). Not surprisingly, parsimonious theories that view violence as part of a general antisocial tendency are predominant (Capaldi and Patterson, 1996, DeLisi and Vaughn, 2014, Farrington, 1991, Farrington, 1998). However, as Hart (1998) argued earlier, explanations of violence that did not consider psychopathic personality disturbance (PPD) were incomplete. Given that measures of PPD have been notably absent in criminal career research (Farrington, 2005, McCuish et al., 2014), it is premature to conclude that specific explanations of violent offending are unwarranted.

The importance of PPD in predicting violence outcomes is well recognized within the literature on risk assessment. Some within this field have argued that PPD is the single best predictor of violent offending (e.g., Douglas et al., 2006, Harris et al., 2001). Consequently, symptoms of this construct has been included in several violence risk assessment tools, such as the SAVRY (Borum, Bartel, & Forth, 2002), HCR-20 (Webster, Douglas, Eaves, & Hart, 1997), and VRAG (Quinsey, Harris, Rice, & Cormier, 1998). Just as the risk assessment literature can help guide criminal career researchers’ incorporation of PPD as a key covariate of offending trajectories, the criminal career paradigm can help guide risk assessors’ measurement of offending outcomes. Specifically, the typical approach within the violence risk assessment literature is to focus only on the ‘next offense’ (i.e., recidivism outcomes), instead of on the development of violent offending over the life course. From both a theoretical (e.g., Blumstein et al., 1986, DeLisi and Piquero, 2011) and empirical (Lussier & Davies, 2011) perspective, the former approach is misleading as an indicator of the seriousness of an offender. In addition, focusing more narrowly on recidivism outcomes likely also underestimates the strength of the relationship between PPD and violence. Hart (1998) argued that more sophisticated analytic strategies that better accounted for the complexity of offending over time were necessary to adequately capture this relationship. Modeling violent offending trajectories is one method of capturing the complexity of patterns of violence over time (see Brame et al., 2001, MacDonald et al., 2009, Piquero et al., 2002). Thus far; however, the role of PPD in helping to explain the unfolding of violence trajectories has not been examined.

Retrospective and prospective longitudinal data from a sample of Canadian male (n = 262) and female (n = 64) adolescent offenders incarcerated between 1998 and 2001 were used to model joint trajectories of violent and non-violent offending. The use of an offender-based sample meant that the full range of violence involvement and the full range of symptoms of PPD were accounted for. Symptoms of PPD were measured using the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL: YV; Forth, Kosson, & Hare, 2003) to help explain variance in joint trajectories of violent and non-violent offending. The aim of the current study was to bring together one of the most important risk factors for violence according to the risk assessment literature (i.e., PPD), and one of the most comprehensive measures of an individual’s criminal career (i.e., measures of offending trajectories).

Although not all individuals with PPD are violent, and not all violent offenders have high symptoms of PPD, individuals with PPD are disproportionately involved in violence (Hare and Neumann, 2008, Hart and Hare, 1997, Ribeiro da Silva et al., 2012). The relationship between symptoms of PPD and an earlier time to recidivism has been demonstrated in both youth and adult incarcerated populations (Corrado et al., 2004, Douglas et al., 2006, Harris et al., 1991, Serin, 1996, Vaughn and DeLisi, 2008, Vaughn et al., 2008). Despite being one of the most important individual-level risk factors for violent offending, Vitacco, Neumann, Caldwell, Leistico, and Van Rybroek (2006) noted a clear lack of prospective longitudinal studies examining the relationship between PPD and persistent violence. In fact, there has been a general lack of research on the long-term predictive validity of PPD. Recently, McCuish et al. (2014) found that high scores on both the three and four factor models of the PCL: YV were indicative of involvement in chronic general offending from age 12 to 28. Using the same data, Corrado, McCuish, Hart, and DeLisi (2015) found that the influence of PPD symptoms on trajectory membership was maintained after controlling for several important criminogenic covariates. However, in both studies, contrary to expectation the affective and interpersonal factors of the PCL: YV were unrelated to chronic general offending. Corrado, McCuish, et al. (2015) proposed that these prototypical symptoms of PPD (see Cooke et al., 2012, Hoff et al., 2012, Kreis and Cooke, 2011) were more well-suited to explaining persistent violent offending. The manner in which PPD appears to operate on the unfolding of a trajectory characterized by persistent violence is described below.

The relatively few violence-specific criminological theories may be due to the assertion that general theories of serious criminality also sufficiently explain violent offending (Capaldi and Patterson, 1996, Farrington, 1991, Farrington, 1998). Not surprisingly, there are even fewer criminological theories that specify the relationship between personality types, such as PPD, and persistent violence. If a relationship between PPD and persistent violence does exist, theories that help explain the causal mechanisms responsible for this relationship will become critical, as prediction alone cannot sufficiently explain the development of persistent violence (e.g., Laub, 2006). Wikström’s situational action theory of violence (Wikström, 2006, Wikström and Treiber, 2007, Wikström and Treiber, 2009), at least potentially, provides a framework for specifying the complex hypothesized relationship between PPD and violence. Although situational action theory is an event-based perspective, Wikström and Treiber’s (2009) description of the conditions that precipitate violent events are conditions that are also consistently present among individuals with PPD.

In situational action theory, the two main conditions facilitating violence are propensity and situational (e.g., environmental) context (Wikström & Treiber, 2009). In reference to propensity, Wikström and Treiber (2009) asserted that an individual’s set of moral rules combined with low levels of self-control increases their propensity to use violence as an action alternative (e.g., as an alternative to walking away or diffusing the conflict). They also argued that situational contexts such as intoxication, provocation, and peer influence facilitated violent offenses by increasing an offender’s level of disinhibition. In a situational context not conducive to violence, an individual with a high propensity for violence will still offend, provided that external deterrent factors (e.g., presence of police, responsible adults) are absent or not recognized by the offender (Wikström & Treiber, 2009). A high-propensity individual, therefore, may be more likely to be involved in persistent violence than individuals with a low propensity, because the latter would be dependent upon the consistent manifestation of situational contexts that are conducive to violence.

Although testing situational action theory is not the purpose of the current study, through its concepts of propensity, situational context, and deterrence, this theory provides a framework for explaining why individuals with PPD are more likely to be involved in persistent violence. Regarding Wikström and Treiber’s (2009) concept of violence propensity, Gretton, Hare, and Catchpole (2004) noted that adolescent offenders with PPD were characterized by a strong and long-term risk for violence that distinguished them from other offenders. PPD may also increase the likelihood of situational contexts that are conducive to violence. For example, early research indicated that individuals with PPD tended to commit violence indiscriminately (e.g., against both strangers and persons known to them, against both males and females), and were both instrumentally and reactively motivated. In contrast, individuals without PPD symptoms were more likely to require specific situational contexts to facilitate involvement in violence, such as a victim previously known to them or an event that elicited a strong emotional response (Hart and Dempster, 1997, Serin, 1991, Williamson et al., 1987). In effect, the conditions necessary for violence are set at a lower threshold for individuals with PPD. Furthermore, regarding Wikström and Treiber’s (2009) emphasis on factors that may deter even high propensity individuals in situational contexts conducive to violence, it is noteworthy that several studies have found that individuals with PPD were less sensitive to the possibility of punishment (Lykken, 1995, Newman et al., 2005). Thus, factors known to deter other offenders may have less of an impact on individuals with PPD.

Finally, because symptoms of PPD are asserted to be at least moderately stable over time (Lynam et al., 2007, Vachon et al., 2012), from a developmental perspective on violence, it is likely that violence involvement will continue over the life course. In sum, situational action theory, although an event-based perspective, can help guide the specification of how individuals with PPD (a) have a high risk for violence, (b) have personality profiles that create situational contexts that keep them primed for violence, and (c) have personality symptoms associated with a lack of concern for consequences to themselves and others that limits the effectiveness of deterrence. However, there are several conceptual challenges associated with assessing the hypothesized association between PPD and persistent violence.

The specific risk factors associated with persistently violent offenders are relatively unknown, in part because this type of offender is rarely found within the samples typically examined in criminal career research (Farrington, 1997, Piquero et al., 2002). Given the low prevalence of both PPD and persistent violence in general population samples, identifying risk factors for persistent violence likely requires research using adjudicated samples with sufficient base-rates of both PPD symptoms and violence (DeLisi, 2001, McCuish et al., 2014). By using a sample of formerly incarcerated serious and violent young offenders whose offending histories were coded from age 12 to 28, the current study was unaffected by low base-rate concerns.

As another conceptual challenge to the study of PPD and persistent violence, many argue that violent offending occurs within the context of a versatile criminal career characterized primarily by non-violent offending (Barnes, 2014, Doherty and Ensminger, 2014, Farrington et al., 1988, Loeber et al., 2008, Weiner, 1989). If persistent violent offenders are simply chronic general offenders, then any relationship between PPD and persistent violence may simply reflect the relationship between PPD and general offending. Controlling for an offender’s involvement in non-violent offending is therefore necessary before making conclusions about the relationship between PPD and persistent violence. One way to control for involvement in non-violent offending is through joint trajectory modeling, which is an extension of the traditional semi-parametric group-based model, and can be used to facilitate the simultaneous modeling of violent and non-violent offending trajectories (Piquero, Jennings, & Barnes, 2012).

Using joint trajectory modeling, Brame et al. (2001) indicated that persistent violent offenders were also chronic non-violent offenders. However, Brame et al. (2001) constrained their model in a manner that required individuals in a specific violence trajectory to also be assigned to a specific non-violent trajectory. In effect, instead of estimating the amount of overlap between different trajectories, it was assumed that all high-rate violent offenders were also high-rate non-violent offenders. This may have artificially inflated the degree of concordance between offenders belonging to high-violence/high-non-violence trajectories (see MacDonald et al., 2009). In contrast, Piquero et al. (2002) allowed trajectories of violent and non-violent offending to be measured independently in a sample of serious young offenders and found an imperfect concordance between violent and non-violent trajectories. However, negative life circumstance and other covariates were not helpful in distinguishing offenders associated with different trajectory groups. This second validity issue was addressed in the current study by using joint trajectory modeling to simultaneously estimate violent and non-violent offending trajectories and by including PPD as a covariate expected to predict chronic violent offending but not chronic non-violent offending.

Section snippets

Sample

Data for the current study were derived from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender study conducted in British Columbia, Canada. As part of this study, adolescent offenders between the ages of twelve and nineteen were interviewed in open and secure custody facilities within the Greater Vancouver Regional District and surrounding areas. Focus within the current study was on the sub-sample of offenders (n = 326) that had been assessed using the PCL: YV. With the exception of seven

Model identification and interpretation

The first stage of the SPGM analysis involved identifying the number and shape of violent and non-violent offending trajectories that best fit the data. A zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) model with cubic functional form was used to estimate the distribution of the trajectories. Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC) values were used to identify the number of trajectories that best represented the data. Similar to prior studies examining joint trajectories, the same number of violent and non-violent

Discussion

Research on offending trajectories is quite common (Jennings and Reingle, 2012, Piquero, 2008), as is research on the relationship between psychopathic personality disturbance (PPD) and offending (DeLisi, 2005, DeLisi, 2009, Edens et al., 2001, Gretton et al., 2004, Hare et al., 1988, Salekin, 2008). Yet, the former research often does not examine risk factors underlying trajectories, and the latter research is typically concerned with violent re-offending rather than long term patterns of

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (410-2004-1875).

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