ABSTRACT
This chapter is the story of a program of research that began a quarter century ago and of the collaboration on which it was founded. The collaboration started when we began working together at the Oak Ridge maximum security division of the Mental Health Centre, Penetanguishene, Ontario (a provincial psychiatric hospital). For years beforehand, our institution was the home of a radical and world famous therapeutic community (the Social Therapy Unit [STU]) for the treatment of offenders with mental disorders. Despite its fame and many testimonials, the program had never received an empirically sound evaluation. Because of a power struggle between the program’s clinical leadership and the security-oriented nursing staff, the program’s integrity was suddenly destroyed in 1978. From the outset, our collaboration featured conversations in which we decried the abolition of the program before anything was learned about its effectiveness. We had many talks about how such an evaluation could be achieved. Because the program’s clinical leaders had been especially optimistic about its benefits for psychopaths, these talks also concentrated on the nature of psychopathy, whether it truly existed, and how it could be measured. In 1985, we finally submitted a research proposal to evaluate the effects of the STU and to do so separately for those patients who were psychopaths. To measure psychopathy, we proposed the use of a promising new assessment device known as the Psychopathy Checklist. We obtained funding from the Ontario Mental Health Foundation and a mimeographed manual for the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL—R) from Vancouver and began our work.
