Psychopathy and Crime: Testing the Incremental Validity of PCL-R-Measured Psychopathy as a Predictor of General and Violent Recidivism

It has been argued that psychopathy plays a vital role in the criminal justice system. To test this assumption, the incremental validity of the psychopathy construct was examined in 198 male Canadian prison inmates serving time for nonsexual offenses and 122 male U. S. inmates undergoing forensic evaluations. When these two samples-which had been used previously to test the incremental validity of the four Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R: Hare, 2003) facet scores (Walters, Wilson, & Glover, 2011)-were treated as a single group, second-order confirmatory factor analysis and item response theory principles indicated that a three-factor hierarchical model of the PCL-R facets (interpersonal, affective, lifestyle) fit the data better than a four-factor hierarchical model (interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, antisocial). When the two samples were examined separately, a composite of the first three PCL-R facets (interpersonal, affective, lifestyle) failed to predict general and violent recidivism above and beyond the contributions of age and criminal history. These results bring into question the utility of the psychopathy construct, as measured by Facets 1, 2, and 3 of the PCL-R, to predict important criminal justice outcomes like recidivism. Additional research using alternative measures of psychopathy and a wider array of outcome measures is required to determine the extent to which the psychopathy construct contributes to our understanding of criminal behavior.