Elsevier

Journal of Criminal Justice

Volume 51, July 2017, Pages 17-23
Journal of Criminal Justice

Latent profile analysis of psychopathic traits among homicide, general violent, property, and white-collar offenders

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2017.06.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Latent profile analysis of psychopathic traits was conducted.

  • A large systematic sample of inmates from 10 prisons was used.

  • Five latent classes of psychopathic traits were identified.

  • Psychopathy classes associated differently with various types of offending.

Abstract

Purpose

The aim of this study was to identify meaningful subtypes of psychopathic traits among prisoners. Another aim was to estimate the association between psychopathy class membership and type of offending (homicide, general violent, property, and white-collar offences).

Methods

A systematically selected representative sample of 1126 adult male prisoners completed a personality-based self-report measure of psychopathy, the Psychopathic Personality Traits Scale (PPTS).

Results

Latent profile analysis revealed five distinct classes of psychopathic traits: a “high psychopathy group” (7.1%)”, a “moderate psychopathy group” (10.8%), a “high interpersonal manipulation group” (20.8%), a “moderate affective/cognitive responsiveness group” (16.8%), and a “low psychopathy group” (44.6%). Multinominal logistic regression showed that general violent offenders were most likely to belong in the high psychopathy group, whereas property and white-collar criminals were most likely to be the members of the high interpersonal manipulation group.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that most inmates, even those detained in maximum and medium security units, do not meet the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy. The significance of the present findings is discussed in relation to past and future research as well as clinical practice.

Section snippets

The present study

It has been noted that psychopathy may be over-diagnosed in criminal populations due to (a) the widespread use of measures based upon behavioral conception of psychopathy (such as the PCL-R) and (b) the utilization of cut-off points derived from the sum of scores, which defies research suggesting that psychopathy is multi-dimensional in character (Boduszek and Debowska, 2016, Boduszek et al., 2015, Debowska et al., 2014b, Kennealy et al., 2010). Although studies using person-centered advanced

Sampling procedure

In this study, we applied systematic sampling procedure to minimize sampling bias and maximize the generalizability of findings. According to the 2015 census, the prison population in the Republic of Poland consists of 76,145 inmates. There are 215 correctional units, including main prisons, remand prisons, and detention centers. For the purpose of the study, we only approached male inmates from randomly selected five maximum and five medium security prisons. Access to those prisons was granted

Results

The fit statistics for the LPA of psychopathy are presented in Table 1 below. The lowest BIC value is observed for the 5-class solution and the Lo-Mendell-Rubin's adjusted likelihood ratio test shows that there is no significant improvement in fit for the 6-class solution. The entropy test confirms the supremacy of the 5-class solution over alternative solutions. On the basis of these statistics, the 5-class solution is considered the best fitting model.

Fig. 1 shows the profile plot for the

Discussion

In spite of the fact that some prior research employed person-oriented methodology to examine the patterns of co-occurrence of psychopathic traits among forensic (e.g., Dhingra et al., 2015, Mokros et al., 2015) and non-forensic (e.g., Coid et al., 2012, Colins et al., 2016) populations, those past studies utilized measures grounded upon behavioral conception of psychopathy (i.e., those including items inquiring into antisocial behavior and/or impulsivity). As such, the current study was the

Conflict of interest

Authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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      In addition, we compared the psychopathic profiles on key outcome variables (impulsivity, anxiety, depression, and aggression). Based on findings of prior LPA studies among criminal offenders (Boduszek et al., 2017; Jeon, 2018; Ribeiro da Silva et al., 2019), we expected to find three to five psychopathy profiles in the present study, including one group showing low psychopathy scores and another showing highest psychopathy scores. We also expected that individuals with different profiles would score significantly on those outcome variables (Hicks et al., 2004; Hicks & Patrick, 2006).

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    This project was supported by the Polish Prison Service.

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