Psychology: Psychopathy

• Psychopathy is a personality disorder relevant in criminal justice systems.
• Psychopathy can involve interpersonal, effective and lifestyle characteristics.

Interpersonal Characteristics

• Dominance
• Arrogance
• Callousness
• Superficiality
• Manipulativeness
• Grandiosity

Affective Characteristics

• Short temper
• Inability to form bonds
• Lack of guilt or anxiety

Blackburn and Coid identified the following factors in Psychology in 1998

• Primary psychopathy involves aggressive and impulsive traits.
• Primary psychopaths are confident and extroverted, but can also be hostile.
• Individuals in politics, security etc can be considered psychopaths.
• Secondary psychopaths involve aggressive and impulsive traits
• Secondary psychopaths traits may include social anxiety
• Secondary psychopaths can be avoidant and distrustful.
• Secondary psychopaths are usually hostile, moody and have trouble tolerating boredom.
• Secondary psychopaths are capable of unplanned crimes.
• Affective violence involves impulsive motivation and defensive behavior.
• The characteristics of affective violence include the following.
• A hot blooded and affective reaction.
• Aggression in response to a threat
• Low goal directedness and high arousal
• Being carried away by uncontrollable anger.

Predatory Violence

• Proactive behavior unrelated to early behavioral problems, delinquency, or poor behavioral controls.
• Victims are usually strangers.
• Cold blooded and high goal directness and low arousal is involved.
• There are more traits in psychopaths than affective psychopaths
• Instrumentality, and emotionally detached.
• Lack of empathy
• Cornell et al (1996) Found violent offenders who had at least committed one predatory act showed higher Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) scores than offenders who had only committed violent acts of an effective manner.
• Declercq et al. (2012) researched the relationship between psychopathy and predatory violence

The Nature of Violence

• Involves assessing future aggression and antisocial behavior.
• Identification of situations likely to result in violence.
• Includes criminal profiling.
• Planning of a treatment strategy.
• Brookman's study in 2015 identified homicide as a highly diverse offense category.
• Serial sexual killers' decision-making processes are distinct from those embroiled in spontaneous lethal confrontations.
• Some killers possess a level of experience or "expertise" that others do not.
• Serial killers can develop "offense scripts" to guide decision-making.

Rational Choice Perspective

• Criminal behavior is goal-directed.
• Offenders interact with the immediate environment, weighing up potential risks and rewards.
• Appraisal of benefits and risks renders the offender "rational"
• Rational decision making can be limited by cognitive biases, lack of information, alcohol, drugs, and emotional arousal

Expertise

• Nee and Ward(2015) defined expertise as the acquisition of cognitive processes and consequent behavior that are superior to those new to a given domain
• Topalli identified expertise as perceptual and procedural skills (2005)
• Killers may have experience with forms of sub-lethal violence which informs more devastating acts of violence
• "Expert" child sexual offenders use multiple offense scripts, allowing them in grooming techniques and target selection

Microdynamics of Homicides Situations

• Provides clues to the factors influencing decision-making before and during the commission of a crime.
• Is defined as the social context uniting offenders and victims composed of physical and social dimensions

Microdynamics relationships

• Victim-offender relationships
• The interactional dynamics of offenders, victims, and third parties
• Lethality of situations dependent on temporal and spatial aspects of the environment
• Access to weapons
• Routine activities of those inhabiting particular locations
• Situational role of drugs and alcohol

Luckenbill's 1977 6 Stages of Interchange Model

• The victim affronts the offender with insults or noncompliance
• The offender interprets this as personally offensive
• The offender retaliates with a challenge or physical attack to restore “face” and demonstrate strong character
• The victim does not comply with the offender’s challenge or command and physically retaliates
• A commitment to battle is forged, enhanced by securing a weapon
• The termination and aftermath: the offender flees the scene or awaits the police
• Felson and Steadman (1983) revealed Offenders were likely to kill armed, intoxicated victims
• Each participant's actions are driven by the other person's behavior and implications for well-being and honor

Adversary Weapon Effects

• Adversary effects is the threat posted by persons in a conflict.
• Would-be offenders consider such effects when deciding whether or how to attack or counterattack
• Offenders with lethal intent expect armed victims willing to retaliate
• Fear of retaliation can lead participants to use weapons

Bystander/Third Party Effects

• Offenders' decisions can be influenced by the effects of audience members
• In the aftermath of lethal confrontations, bystanders take the place of the victim.
• This serves the offender as the pivotal reference for their exiting orientations
• Bystanders can be broken down into the following 3 roles
• Partisanship
• Inaction
• Settlement

Juvenile Offending- Developmental Parameters

• Parameters of the juvenile offending model can involve activation, escalation and desistance

Juvenile Offending- Activation

• Involves stabilisation, acceleration and diversification
• Stabilisation involves impact on the persistence of offending over time
• Acceleration involves impact on the frequency of offending over time
• Diversification involves impact on the variety of offending over time

The Desistance Stage

• Is described as a slowing down of offending until complete termination, involving lapses and relapses
• Has 3 processes which are culmination, specialisation and deceleration
• Culmination involves where offending stops progressing
• Specialisation involves a slowing down of the variety of offenses
• Deceleration involves the gradual slowing down of offending

Crime versatility and specialisation

• Persistent offending becomes diverse and versatile and could become more patterned and specialised
• Includes whether offenders limit offending to sexual crimes
• There is a general trend for juveniles to repeat the same type of sexual offense in the term
• Those that initiate their sexual abusive behaviors in adolescence are most likely to commit differing offences.

Moffitts 1993 taxonomy

• Argued LCP represents about 5-10% of male births as potentially escalating to rape and sexual assault
• Childhood showing onset conduct disorder and early onset deliquency
• More likely to persist into adulthood
• AL are adolsecent limited offenders
• tend to specialise in property and statutory offenses and desist from offending before reaching adulthood
• The groups might be virtually indistinguishable - in terms of their offending which can pose challenges for clinicians