ABSTRACT
In recent years, psychopathy has become an increasingly prominent con struct in the field of criminal justice. Its growing importance is due large ly to the development and use of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL; Hare, 1980) and the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991), which have afforded clinicians and researchers highly reliable and valid meth ods of assessing psychopathy (e.g., Hare, 1996). Although their numbers in the general population are small, psychopaths contribute dispropor tionately to the prison population —on the order of 15% to 25% (Hare, 1996). Moreover, psychopathic offenders (i.e., those who attain high PCL or PCL-R scores) commit more than twice as many crimes and, compared with nonpsychopaths, are two to five times more likely to reoffend (Hare, 1996; Hemphill, Templeman, Wong, & Hare, 1998; Kosson, Smith, & Newman, 1990; Serin, 1996). For example, Quinsey, Rice, and Harris (1995) followed a cohort of offenders for 6 years after their release from prison. These researchers found that over 80% of the psychopaths from this group committed violent offenses during that 6-year period, com pared with only 20% of the nonpsychopaths.
