Murderous Minds (20 page)

Chapter Six

Back Again? Predicting Bad Behavior

2011 WAS THE FIRST YEAR SINCE
the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 when more police officers died at the hands of criminals than died in automobile accidents. The toll: 72.
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By some estimates, half of these officers may have been killed by criminal psychopaths.

Jump ahead to the fictionalized year 2054. John Anderton is the head of the “Pre-Crime” police unit that has pretty much wiped out crime in Washington, D.C. Unlike police officers 40 years before, Officer Anderton and his colleagues clean up the capital by arresting individuals
before
they commit crimes.

This scenario is from the film The Minority Report, in which Pre-Crime cops get their tips from two male twins, Arthur and Dashiell, and one female, Agatha, who have been genetically modified to possess the gift of pre-cognition; they are full-time psychic “Pre-cogs.” With no labor union, these pasty, and no doubt water-logged, people lie passively in a shallow tank of what must be carefully maintained Pre-cog-sustaining fluid while awaiting visions of future crimes which they pass along to the officers of the special police unit. The minority report of the title refers to a dissenting prediction by one of the Pre-cogs: Agatha. This crucial report is generated when Anderton, played by actor Tom Cruise in the film version of the story, is himself fingered as a future murderer.

The movie predicted the ubiquity of personalized advertising, electronic newspapers, and the potential widespread use of self-driving cars and retinal or iris scans years before many filmgoers had much if any experience with them. But there is a theme that is more important than these technological developments for a rapidly changing society. Anderton’s efforts to evade his fellow Pre-crime cops, find out why he has been accused of a future crime, and prove his innocence, are the stuff of entertainment, but it is the ethical issue raised by the story that makes the film interesting, especially with regard to psychopathy research. What are the rights and obligations of society, and of a pre-accused offender, if a “future” crime is predicted?

The basis of the film is a science fiction short story with the same title. It appeared in the January 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe Science Fiction. The author, Philip K. Dick, was called a pulp fiction hack in Wired magazine
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and “one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 20th century” in the New York Times.
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He had been writing for four years when The Minority Report appeared in the 35-cent pulp magazine. Dick’s name and the title of his story appear on the front cover, but The Minority Report is not the subject of the magazine’s cover illustration. To grab the attention of readers, the editor chose an image of giant flea-like creatures threatening a blond female, dressed in a yellow jumpsuit, encased in a protective bubble with all parties floating in the vacuum of space.

Despite the cover art of the magazines that published much of Dick’s work, he didn’t write about giant insects or depend much on aliens or spaceships in his stories. His approach to science fiction stressed alienation more than aliens. He tended toward stories with issues concerning the nature of reality, the reliability and unreliability of the senses, and the controlling influences of powerful entities like corporations and governments. He had to write fast and often because he struggled most of his life trying to live on pulp fiction fees, which he once compared to eating dirt.

Despite, or because of, his poverty, Dick succeeded in creating a large body of work—45 novels and 121 shorter pieces—before he died in 1982 at age 53 of a massive stroke. The plots of many of the stories, like their author, contain significant elements of paranoia, which may have been related to his fondness for amphetamines and to their side effects.

Dick once intended to say in a speech he never delivered: “We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener.”
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A few paragraphs later, he planned to tell his audience: “So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.” He wrote this before the Internet, before Facebook, before news and entertainment became confused in increasingly Corporate-owned media outlets and before brain-scanning technology became so common that it became a tool for marketing and public relations firms.

Although he never benefited from it, his oeuvre has and will continue to provide material for Hollywood films and some wealth at least for his estate. The films Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, A Scanner Darkly, Next, Paycheck, and The Adjustment Bureau as well as The Minority Report are all inspired by or based on his stories.

Despite Dick’s imaginative scenario, many people doubt that science will provide a basis for arresting people before they commit a crime in the near future, or ever. Nevertheless, although some psychologists and statisticians are skeptical of the progress so far, research funded by the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering is now under way to identify brain activity patterns that could, in the opinion of the scientists doing the research, be used to at least help predict if someone is likely to end up back in prison.

There is more than one goal attached to the expensive and time-consuming effort required to scan and explore the brains of criminal psychopaths in the hope of one day understanding the influence biology has on their behavior. One is purely intellectual: to satisfy our curiosity by answering one version or another of the question “How could anyone be so evil?”

A goal more likely to attract research funding is to learn enough about the brains of human predators so we can perhaps change their behavior and protect innocent people from becoming their victims. Using emerging insights into how the brains of criminal psychopaths function or malfunction to predict and prevent future crimes inevitably raises references to The Minority Report.

To Free or Not to Free

How can we know who will reoffend and who won’t? Who do we release on parole and who do we lock away forever, certain they will always be dangerous? Parole boards and judges rely on a convict’s age, past history, prison record, and on the opinions of prison psychologists, the availability of social supports such as family and friends, and the word of convicts themselves when they decide who will be retained and who will be released. When they make the right decision, a rehabilitated convict is released back into society. When they make the wrong decision, something as, or almost as, serious as a crime is committed: a rehabilitated convict is detained when he is no longer a threat. Or, if a deceptively unrepentant prisoner fools the parole board, he is released into a population of potential victims. One only need to remember Edgar Smith and Jack Abbott, the murderers who fooled William Buckley and Norman Mailer respectively, with disastrous—and in one case fatal—consequences.

Fool Me Twice

Ironically, some traits of criminal psychopaths, such as the ability to con and manipulate, may get them released sooner than criminals without these traits. That is what Stephen Porter and his colleagues at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia concluded after reviewing the files of 310 Canadian men who spent two or more years in prison after being convicted of federal crimes.
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They categorized the men according to their PCL–R test results, and found that 90 of them scored 30 or higher out of 40 points. Thirty, you’ll recall, is the cut-off for a diagnosis of psychopathy in Canada and the U.S.

The prisoners in the Canadian study were also categorized according to their crimes: non-sex offender, child molester, mixed rapist/molester, or rapist. Then the researchers coded the results. No one (except the offenders)
knew who was who until all the results were in. Not surprisingly, the men with high psychopathy scores were more likely to commit violent as well as non-violent offenses like burglary than were the men with low psychopathy scores. They were not, however, more likely to commit sexual offenses, except in one subcategory: sex offenders who were also psychopaths were linked to more cases of child molestation in this particular group of criminals.

One of the study’s findings suggests that the ability of criminal psychopaths to manipulate others by faking feelings, and by putting on convincing shows of remorse for parole boards, works for them. Or at least it helps with the “out” part for those who have an “in-and-out-of-prison” lifestyle.

“They use non-verbal behavior, a ‘gift of gab,’ and persuasive emotional displays to put on an Oscar award-winning performance and move through the correctional system, and ultimately parole boards, relatively quickly despite their known diagnosis,” Porter told the BBC.
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A sexual or nonsexual psychopath offender sitting in front of a Canadian parole board was nearly 2½ times more likely to convince the board members to let him out on conditional release than a non-psychopath. It appears that his ability to con and lie, to charm and deceive, can work well even for a criminal psychopath who can’t figure out how to keep from getting caught and thrown into prison in the first place. His typically antisocial behavior on the outside, of course, brings him back to prison more often—and brings him back sooner—compared to those with fewer psychopathic traits, yet he still had the ability to charm or convincingly lie his way out to begin with.

The psychopaths on average took a year to return to prison while the non-psychopaths took two. According to Hare, psychopaths have a recidivism rate twice as high as non-psychopaths and triple the rate if you measure the times that their violent behavior, versus something like drug dealing or theft, lands them back in prison.
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A review conducted in 1998 found that psychopaths were three times more likely to return to prison after a year than non-psychopaths.
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And they were four times more likely to be sent back for committing violent crimes. But, of course, no one knows how many were not caught after committing crimes. The researchers concluded that “specialized education and training in dealing with psychopathic offenders is urgently needed,” something with which many victims would agree.

Disagreements among academics about the diagnostic validity of the PCL–R extend to its ability to predict antisocial behavior. Nevertheless, “there is clear evidence that the PCL–R is predictive of violent behavior and both general and violent recidivism,” Michael Vitacco, Ph.D., and his co-authors declared in one review.
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This, however, doesn’t mean it can predict future behavior for a particular individual with certainty. It is one factor among others, including a criminal’s age, which can be a useful indicator of risk of reoffending after release. Antisocial behavior in persons with high psychopathy scores may decline with advancing years. Or not.

As they approach age 50, “psychopathic offenders seem to ‘fall off the radar,’ in terms of showing a dramatic drop in convictions,” Julia Shaw of the University of British Columbia and Stephen Porter observed.
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But it’s not clear why. They could, the authors suggest, have actually stopped offending. Or they might be spending more time in prison and so lack the opportunity to continue committing crimes. It is possible that they die sooner because risk-taking is common among many psychopaths. It is also possible that some gain a bit more experience controlling their impulses as they age. And, of course, fatigue and illness that often accompany aging may make violent acts less likely.

“Ultimately,” forensic psychologist Luisa Williams of the Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Trust said in 2009, “the acid test of whether an offender will reoffend lies only in their future behavior.”
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That is still the case and helps explain why the hunt continues for better ways to predict the future behavior of offenders being considered for release from prison.

Impulsive Insights

Many features of psychopathy can contribute to antisocial behavior, but it would be hard to imagine traits better designed for landing someone in prison repeatedly than a predilection for impulsive behavior combined with a lack of remorse and a lack of guilt.

The consequences of psychopathic impulsivity are what you might expect. Hare’s experience revealed that “jobs are quit, relationships broken off, plans changed, houses ransacked, people hurt, often for what appears as little more than a whim.” A revealing and common response is: “I did it because I felt like it.”
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Unsuccessful psychopaths, those who can’t avoid prison, either don’t devote much mental energy to predicting likely outcomes of their behavior, or else are somehow impaired and so unable to foresee or appreciate the consequences of their actions.

Hare illustrates psychopathic impulsivity with a story one of his high PCL–R scoring subjects told him.
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While walking to a party, this man decided to buy some beer. When he discovered he had left his money at home, he felt it was too much trouble to walk the six or seven blocks back to retrieve it. Instead, he found a heavy piece of wood and used it to rob a gas station that was conveniently nearby. It’s not difficult to trace the gas station attendant’s serious injuries in part to the attacker’s impulsivity issues.