NCJ Number
170819
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 22 Issue: 1 Dated: (February 1998) Pages: 109-128
Date Published
1998
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This study examined the relationship between psychopathy and recidivism among women offenders.
Abstract
Recidivism data on a sample of 78 female inmates were examined at a 1-year interval in relation to the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), inclusion criteria for the Antisocial Personality Disorder Diagnosis from the Personality Disorder Examination (PDE), and selected scales from the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; Antisocial and Aggression scales). The egocentricity subscale of the PAI, Factor 1 of the PCL-R, and the verbal aggression subscale of the PAI were the best predictors of future recidivism. Specific differences emerged between male and female offenders when comparing the current data with previous studies of male psychopaths. Thus, psychopathy apparently is both less pronounced in female offenders and less predictive of later recidivism than it is with male offenders. Female offenders who continue to recidivate are likely to manifest the traits of callousness and unemotionality. In addition, ROC (receiver operating characteristic) analysis suggests that adjusting cutoff scores would improve classification accuracy only minimally for psychopathic individuals with regard to recidivism. Study limitations and future research are also discussed. 3 tables, 4 figures, and 52 references