The Psychopath Fallacy
Feeding the Myth of Irredeemability
The Myth of Irredeemability
This post is about the overdiagnosis of “psychopathy,” and how that creates a vicious cycle with the heavily punitive justice system in the United States. In my recent post about how copaganda appears in the TV series Dexter, one point I made was that the show presents serial killers as existing in abundance. When you look at the actual numbers, police in the U.S. kill more people each year than serial killers do, which brings to mind the old saying about the cure being worse than the disease. I also examined how the majority of Dexter’s victims are presented as irredeemable to allow the audience to feel good about their deaths.
To make Dexter sympathetic, his victims have to be irredeemable. The show rarely deals with complexity and his victims are almost entirely remorseless. One common trait of colonialism as described by Frantz Fanon is Manichaeism, or the tendency to see things only in black and white, good and evil. In the show, attempts at complexity are quickly flattened out so Dexter can keep killing and remain a sympathetic character. This ties in well with the first example because serial killers are generally identified as sociopaths [sic], with Dexter being the only one who is “good,” while still feeling a deep need to kill people.
The “sic” above is because I should have used the term psychopath, which, according to a quick search, is differentiated from sociopathy by a lack of empathy and is “extremely uncommon – it is estimated that only 0.5-1% of the population meets the criteria for this disorder (Wynn et al., 2012).”
I want to focus on this aspect of the irredeemable person though, because while it is taken to extremes in Dexter, it is a core feature of the United States’ criminal justice system. I frequently highlight that prisons are not effective at preventing crime and cause cycles of poverty which increase crime. When I suggest that we should do away with prisons, I often get the response: “What about psychopaths who will just keep committing crimes without any remorse no matter what we do?”
This argument rests on several false assumptions:
There are a lot of psychopaths
Psychopaths are all criminals
People with psychopathy will reoffend if released from prison
There is no way to rehabilitate a person with psychopathy
We accurately diagnose psychopathy to know who to apply assumptions 2-4 to
If you follow this faulty logic, the only solution is to permanently lock the “bad” people away and only release the “good ones”. Or, as an Alabama official suggested, “the only way to ensure public safety is to execute all convicted prisoners” (quoting my paraphrase). However, as we’ll see below, none of these statements are true. And even if you concede the point that some small, undetermined percentage of people will never change no matter what we do, the strongest argument you can make is that we will need some small number of prison cells to hold them. This may be true, but it also speaks to the serious injustices occurring on a daily basis in prisons across the U.S. which do not provide opportunities for rehabilitation and prevent parole and probation to keep huge numbers of people locked up.
What this reasoning leads to is people, especially those who commit serious crimes, being treated as irredeemable villains (justified by the term psychopath) rather than human beings capable of learning and growth. This false notion is so common that even today there are people on death row awaiting execution who were convicted of crimes when they were teenagers and their brains were still developing. According to reporting from The Marshall Project:
“Prisoners in Texas can be sentenced to death only if a jury decides they are guilty and will pose a danger to society. That controversial “future danger” finding has been part of Texas death-penalty law since the 1970s. But brain science has evolved over the past half-century, and experts question whether it’s possible to make that determination with any accuracy if someone was just 18 or 19 at the time of a crime. Research shows that the prefrontal cortex — a part of the brain associated with emotional regulation and understanding consequences — keeps developing into a person’s 20s.”
Across the United States, states have reduced sentences and changed how we deal with children in the justice system due to changes in our understanding of human psychology and brain development. We know that until at least your mid-twenties your brain is developing and your decision-making is not at its most developed level.
In spite of this, we’re stuck in a chicken/egg situation where we have absurdly strict laws which lead us to incarcerate a higher percentage of our population than anywhere in the world. To justify those laws, many people assume that “criminals” can’t change. That they are defined by the worst thing they have done. Otherwise, the cognitive dissonance would be astounding. We believe that someone can learn and be rehabilitated back into society yet we’re locking them away for 30+ years as a teenager? Most people cannot hold those two thoughts at once, so one of them must give, and for far too long it has been the idea of redemption and growth.
The Prevalence of Psychopathy in Punishment
This June, The Marshall Project reviewed a new book on diagnoses of psychopathy in the criminal justice system which found that
there is shockingly little science behind the diagnosis of psychopathy, according to a new book by Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, a philosophy and forensic science professor at the University of Toronto. In “Psychopathy Unmasked: The Rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis,” Larsen argues that the widespread use of this personality disorder in legal settings has had massive and largely negative consequences in courts and prisons across the world.
Hard numbers are elusive, but Larsen estimates that across the world, hundreds of thousands of people suspected or convicted of crimes have been assessed with some version of the “Psychopathy Checklist” since its publication in 1991. (It’s popularly known as the “Psychopath Test,” due to the bestselling book by journalist Jon Ronson.) Clinicians score people by reviewing records and interviewing them to assess a range of personality traits (“glibness,” “lack of remorse”) and behaviors (“pathological lying,” “juvenile delinquency”). In the U.S., the checklist has informed whether some people in prison make parole and whether others face the death penalty.
But Larsen examined the research literature and found that people who scored high were not, as many believe, entirely unable to exhibit empathy or benefit from treatment. He found that incarcerated people with high scores were not significantly more likely to commit more crimes after release. Larsen suggests the diagnosis itself may be little more than a way to make some sentences harsher while scaring and titillating the wider public.
In other words, assumptions 3, 4, and 5 are false - psychopathy is not always correctly diagnosed, incarcerated people with high psychopathy scores do not reoffend more than anyone else, and people exhibiting traits of psychopathy can show empathy and benefit from treatment.
According to the article, there is more nuance to this issue than the book presents. However, considering the extreme levels of depravity in our state punishment system that are justified by the existence of irredeemable people, it’s a much-needed corrective. It’s also worth pointing out that many serial killers are not psychopaths, or at least have more issues beyond psychopathy, and many successful people are psychopaths.
The connection between serial killers and psychopathy was kind of tacked together once both got popular, but they are distinct. Researchers often claim that psychopathy affects about 1% of the general population, including lots of very successful people. That would be 4 million people in North America right now.
This dismantles assumption number 2, not all psychopaths are criminals. And thus we are left with assumption 1: there are a lot of psychopaths. Depending on your perspective, this could be true. Four million people in North America is a large number were they all together in one place. However, assuming the trait is spread relatively evenly among the population, one percent is a small amount. And the emotional response we feel when thinking about “a lot of psychopaths” relies on the false assumptions we already dismantled in this piece.
The article go on to detail that much of the research around psychopathy is unreliable, including the notion that psychopathy is untreatable, which comes from a 1992 study in Canada in which patients were basically tortured and, shocker, did not improve. Research is now finding that psychopathy can be treated.
As the author notes, the main lesson from his book should be that violence is complex and caused by complex factors. To narrow it down to one, immutable factor of a particular person’s nature is to perpetuate a dangerous myth which justifies the mistreatment and long-term incarceration of many people who could have positive impacts on their communities with the proper care and support. Below are the final words from the interview:
How much is the diagnosis being used across the criminal justice system today? And should we keep using it at all?
We should end the use of the “psychopathy” diagnosis and the checklist because they are not based on sound evidence and can inflame biases. There are other ways to assess peoples’ risk levels and potential for rehabilitation that are more effective. Many psychiatrists are already using them in courts and prisons. We don’t have a good sense of how often the checklist or diagnosis still comes up, but I have noticed, anecdotally, that psychopathy is not the hot topic it once was at academic conferences. Still, I worry that even if the diagnosis fades, something else will replace it: We are always looking for simple explanations for why people commit violence, but the reasons why are almost always pretty complex.
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