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Trust Me, I'm A Psychopath
By Alasdair Palmer
The Telegraph - UK
11-30-3


"Within two years of their release, psychopaths who go on [rehabilitation] courses reoffend at almost twice the rate as those who do not."
 
Anthony Hardy, released early from custody, went on to commit two horrific murders. How do such men dupe officials into believng that they are reformed?
 
Anthony Hardy was jailed last week for the murder of three women. He had dismembered the corpses of his last two victims and hidden their body parts near his home in Camden, north London. The police had been alerted by neighbours who had complained about the disgusting smell.
 
Hardy is the latest in a long list of men who have either been convicted and imprisoned, or detained under the Mental Health Act, and then been released early - only to start committing the same horrendous, or even worse, crimes.
 
Two examples of such men include Paul Brumfitt, who received three life sentences after admitting killing two women in 1980. Having convinced psychologists and the prison authorities that he was no longer a threat to the community, Brumfitt was released in 1995 after serving 15 years in prison. He went on to murder 19-year-old Marcella Davis, butcher her body and burn it.
 
In 1995, Roy Whiting was released two years early after being convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl. After his release, he kidnapped, assaulted and murdered eight-year-old Sarah Payne.
 
The Home Office does not keep statistics on the number of psychopaths who reoffend after convincing the authorities that they are "safe" - but clearly many do. And few doubt that there are flaws in the system. It may, however, be even worse than that.
 
Dr Robert Hare, a Canadian professor of psychology who has studied psychopaths for 35 years, believes that participating in such courses actually increases the chances that a psychopath will reoffend when he gets out.
 
Within two years of their release, psychopaths who go on such courses reoffend at almost twice the rate as those who do not. More than 80 per cent of the psychopaths who complete therapeutic courses reoffend soon after release. However, fewer than half of those who do not undergo such courses go on to reoffend.
 
Yet the offenders who had been on the therapy courses had convinced prison and psychiatric staff that they had "genuinely addressed their own offending behaviour", and were "responding positively to therapy". Indeed, those offenders who were most successful at convincing their therapists that they had gained insight into their own behaviour and changed for the better actually went on to reoffend at the highest rates.
 
How could psychological assessment and therapy actually make psychopaths more likely to commit crimes? "It is probably that they pick up techniques for gaining people's trust in the sessions," says Dr Hare. "What they learn is not that they have done wrong. What they learn is how to be more effective at committing the wrongs they so enjoy committing.
 
They pick up a new vocabulary - they start saying things such as 'I never learned to get in touch with my feelings', or 'My parents never loved me' - and they find new ways of convincing others that they are decent people. And if someone trusts you, it is a lot easier to harm them. As one particularly cunning and brutal psychopath who had been through prison 'therapy' explained to me, 'These programmes are like a finishing school. They teach you how to put the squeeze on people.' "
 
Which is why, once psychopaths have managed to persuade prison or medical authorities to release them early, they often extend and even intensify their vicious attacks. Paul Beart, who was convicted in 1997 of a horrendous sex attack, is typical.
 
He went on a course of assessment and therapy, and convinced those assessing him that he had "addressed his offending behaviour"' and so was safe to release. Within five months of being freed, Beart committed an even worse crime than the one for which he was originally convicted: he kidnapped Deborah O'Sullivan as she walked home from work, and then sadistically tortured her to death.
 
After that offence, the judge who sentenced him stated that Beart was "an untreatable sexual sadist". Mrs Justice Hallett added that she was "astonished that you could have fooled the people who treated you into believing that you were a model prisoner". But the truth is that psychiatrists and psychologists are very often fooled.
 
"The psychiatric profession and its associates are very reluctant to admit they are wrong or that they have made a mistake, let alone to accept that they have been conned by a psychopath," says Dr Hare. "Therapists tend to insist that their diagnosis was right at the time and on the evidence they had - even when that is manifestly disproved by subsequent events."
 
Dr Anthony Farringdon, the psychiatrist who assessed Roy Whiting after he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and assaulting a nine-year-old child, is a perfect example of that tendency. On the basis of an interview with Whiting, Dr Farringdon stated in his report that Whiting did not have paedophile tendencies. Despite thinking that "Whiting has a relatively high risk of re-offending", Dr Farringdon insisted that he did not have "any recommendation for the court".
 
Clearly influenced by that report, Judge John Gower - who could have given Whiting 10 years - sentenced him to a mere four. Whiting was released after two. Within a few weeks of his release, he had murdered Sarah Payne. Nevertheless, Dr Farringdon, interviewed soon after Whiting was convicted of the murder, continued to insist that he stood by his report: "I do not feel guilty about what I wrote. It was the best I could do with the time and information I had."
 
Dr Hare is convinced that psychiatric assessments would be a great deal more accurate, and less liable to have catastrophic results, if the psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and others who decide on whether an individual should be released were first able to identify whether or not they were dealing with a psychopath.
 
"It cannot be too strongly emphasised," he says, "that psychopaths are a special category. They go against everything we want to believe about people, because they are totally without normal feelings for others. We tend to think it must be possible to reach everyone who has committed a crime and make them see that what they have done is wrong.
 
"But with psychopaths, it isn't. They're not 'mad' in any conventional sense. Indeed, they can often be highly rational and logical, in a brutally means-end way." For instance, a psychopath is capable of attacking someone he thinks is being too noisy - simply because that is the quickest and easiest way of getting rid of the noise."
 
Such people are not just horrible: they are remarkably dangerous. Inspired by the wildly inaccurate psychological reports he came across in his first job working in a prison - he found one report in which "a psychologist had concluded that a callous killer was actually a sensitive, caring individual who only needed the equivalent of a warm hug" - Dr Hare has spent his career designing a test which, he says, enables competent and trained psychologists to identify whether or not someone is a psychopath.
 
The test consists of a battery of different assessments, each of which aims to determine the extent to which an individual has the characteristics which define psychopathy. "These are things such as: being deceitful, conning and manipulative; lacking a sense of remorse; being glib and superficial; being egocentric and very self-confident; and lacking empathy for others."
 
There are actually 20 characteristics that have to be assessed, through a combination of interviews and a careful reading of the subject's record. The assessor has to assign a number - 0, 1 or 2 - according to the degree to which the individual being assessed has each characteristic. The higher the total, the more psychopathic the individual.
 
The "Psychopathic Checklist (Revised)" has been applied in many countries across the globe, including Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Britain, Sweden, the United States and Canada. The results have been consistent: those who receive high scores are very much more likely to reoffend after release. They are not just twice or three times more likely to reoffend. In one study, the men (and occasionally women) with high scores committed crimes at eight times the rate of those who have very low scores.
 
Her Majesty's Prison Service has considered introducing the checklist, and making it mandatory before prisoners are released, since 2000. Nothing, however, has yet been done. "The reality is that people whom the test would pick up as dangerous are being released early because they have conned and manipulated their way through the system," insists Dr Hare. Unsurprisingly, Hare has every hope that the Prison Service will soon introduce the test for all those being considered for release.
 
In the meantime, however, we can keep on expecting individuals with tendencies similar to those of Anthony Hardy, Paul Beart and Roy Whiting to persuade the authorities to release them early. How many more women and children will be killed because psychiatrists, psychologists and officials have been fooled by undetected, unrepentant psychopaths?
 
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.
 
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