The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (4 page)

I was not sure how to deal with Grant’s earlier statement. I had promised him confidentiality, and I was not sure if the details he gave me could be shared with someone else. I decided to keep my conversation with Grant confidential, but I felt it safe to get details about Gary from Dorothy.

Dorothy volunteered that Gary was always into something. He caused a lot of problems with the team leader running the group therapy sessions; he had punched a hole in the wall recently after a yelling match with the therapist (apparently the treatment team was pleased with this outcome because it was progress for Gary, since he hit a wall and not the therapist); he’d been caught making brew (a concoction of yeast, fruit, and water that ferments into an alcoholic beverage and is usually stored in the inmates’ toilets); and he had been suspected of beating up a couple of other inmates, although nobody had come forward with complaints.

I saw under Gary’s photo on Dorothy’s housing chart that he was serving time for two rapes with a sentence of fifteen years. He’d served fourteen years and was up for release soon. He was at RHC because the Canada Department of Corrections was trying to get him some treatment before they were forced to release him on
completion of his sentence. I later learned that Gary had been rated as very high risk to reoffend, and the administration was trying to find a way to mitigate that risk.

Gary was gigantic. Many inmates are ripped from working out several hours a day, but Gary was well over six feet tall, barrel chested, with huge shoulders, and he weighed in at nearly 275 pounds.

I twirled the brass key in my hand … my anxiety increased a bit as I realized the futility of trying to stop 275 pounds of angry sex offender with a tiny brass key.

As Gary walked by on his way to group therapy, I could feel his eyes on me. I relaxed a bit once I saw him pass through the doors on his way to the therapy rooms.

Gordon meandered by, spotted me, and headed over to the station.

“I got some new guys signed up for you,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a crumpled piece of paper with over fifteen names written on it.

“Thanks for helping out,” I said.

“No problem. Hey,” he said, looking around and making sure no one could overhear. “Do you think I could get a commission or something for helping you out?”

I smiled.

“Nice try. I’m afraid that the best I can do is let you go first on the next phase of the research. We are not allowed to involve the participants in the recruitment of other subjects. But I appreciate your helping out.”

Gordon replied, “Oh, well. It was worth a try … so when’s the next phase start?”

“A couple weeks. Just putting the equipment together now,” I said.

“Cool.” Gordon turned and walked away.

I looked down the list of names and saw that it appeared Gordon had gone cell to cell the preceding night and gotten his entire tier to sign up. Or more likely, he just wrote down the names of everyone in his cell block and never even bothered to talk to them. Had I become cynical after just a single day?

I exited the nurses’ station, looking left to make sure the door through which Gary exited had not opened to let anyone back into the housing units, and walked down to the small common room at the end of Gordon’s tier. Inmates were milling around. I called out the first name on my new list, “Mike West. Is Mike around?”

“Yup. That’s me,” a voice called out from the back of the room.

“You got a minute to talk about doing a UBC research study?” I asked.

“Sure” came the answer. A tall, thin man walked over to me and said, “Let’s go. Gordon told us all about it last night.”

I began to think that I might have been too quick to judge Gordon’s intentions or, rather, his motivation to get a commission.

“Mike” had a drug problem. He started out our interview by quickly volunteering that he wasn’t as violent as the rest of the guys in here. He just did a robbery that got a little out of control, and people got hurt.

“I was just trying to get money for my next fix,” he recalled.

Mike grew up just outside of Toronto. He made it through high school and started working construction, gradually moving up the ranks till he was an operator of heavy machinery. He’d had a number of jobs, with the longest lasting over four years. He was pushing forty when I met him, having completed five years of a six-year sentence for aggravated assault and battery, evading police, reckless endangerment, and a few other charges. Mike was married going on ten years. His wife had moved so she could visit him frequently. She lived only a few miles from the prison and worked as a waitress in a local restaurant.

He started using marijuana, a gateway drug he called it, in high school. Dealers started him off using, then selling, then asked him to try some other stuff. He tried heroin and was hooked right away. Mike tried to use recreationally, but eventually he was using regularly. He kept it hidden from family, friends, and even his eventual wife, until he had no way to explain where all his money was going. He started doing burglaries, pawning stolen TVs and electronics equipment. He fell into debt, took out loans, sometimes from the
wrong people, and eventually started doing armed robberies. Simple stuff, he explained—rob a mom-and-pop place and get four hundred to five hundred bucks, enough to buy a week’s worth of drugs. He had tried to stop using, he told me, but it just wasn’t in the cards. Then “D-day,” as he put it. As he completed a robbery of a 7-Eleven, he ran outside and jumped into his car. A cop car happened to be passing by and got the call. A high-speed chase ensued and ended with a crash. He put the family of the car he hit into the hospital with serious, life-threatening injuries. As he told the story toward the end of our interview, tears welled up in his eyes.

“I really messed up,” he said. “But now I’ve been clean and sober for more than five years.”

Mike spent a year in jail prior to trial and being sentenced to the federal prison. In Canada, sentences less than two years’ duration are served in provincial facilities, similar to county or city jails in the United States. Sentences longer than two years deserve federal time and are served under the Canadian Department of Corrections, a nationwide entity with prison facilities in all the provinces.

Mike detoxed in the provincial jail and received psychological and pharmacological treatment—substance abuse cognitive behavioral therapy and medication to help with the withdrawal effects, the dosage of which was eventually titrated down till he was clean. He wasn’t going back to that life, he had promised his wife and family. He was doing his time and going to go back and get a construction job and start a family. The white picket fence. He didn’t have to say it; it was clear that his dreams only went that far.

Mike was emotionally connected to his family, his wife, and even other inmates. He taught rudimentary math and English to other prisoners and received good behavior credits. He did not have a single institutional infraction, instance of drug use, or a fight. Mike steered clear of problematic inmates. He had been originally sentenced to a medium-security facility, but within a year had been transferred to minimum security. He was deemed to pose little escape risk and was a model inmate.

“How did you end up here in maximum security?” I asked.

“For the young guys,” he said. “They [the prison psychologists] told me it would be good for me to participate in the therapy so that
I don’t fall back into any violent behavior and that kicking the drug habit, as I did, was useful to show the other kids here that drugs are no good for anybody. So that’s what I do. I tell them about my life and how I could have been so much better.”

Mike scored an 11 on the Psychopathy Checklist. It’s a very low score for an inmate in maximum security, well below the average inmate score of 22 on the Psychopathy Checklist. Mike’s not going back to prison, I figured; he’s learned from his mistakes.

Mike suggested that I interview his roommate. “I think there is something wrong with him. Maybe you can figure it out, eh?”

I followed Mike back up to his cell and chatted up his roommate, “Bob.” Bob was full of energy and enthusiasm, up for just about anything. Bob was a character. I could barely get a word in during our interview. I’d ask him a question and then next thing I know he’s been telling me stories for fifteen minutes. It was the first interview where I laughed out loud. I wasn’t exactly sure if someone in my position was allowed to laugh out loud when conducting a clinical interview, but I just rolled with it, egging him on and telling him that he was hilarious. And honestly, the things he’d gotten into—well, they were funny.

Because I wasn’t in an adversarial role with the inmates, they tended to be very open and forthcoming in our interviews. Everything they told me was confidential. It was not going to end up in their files or get them in any trouble. (And, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve changed the names and details so that no one reading this book can identify about whom I am talking.) I was there because I wanted to understand them. I remembered feeling like Columbo when I first started working in prison; I wanted to know what made these guys tick, how they got this way. My goal at that time was to use what I learned in my interviews to try to improve risk assessments.

In the mid-1990s in Canada, thousands of offenders went up for parole every year. Parole boards, composed of appointed individuals with widely varied backgrounds, had the power to decide who got out of prison and who stayed in. When an offender came up for parole, the board wanted to know what the chances were that the
guy was going to reoffend. This could be a life-and-death decision for the inmate and for the public. It’s certainly a decision with enormous economic and, of course, emotional consequences for society in general and for future victims in particular. Parole boards could interview the inmate and make their own release decision (never a good idea); they could ask a mental health professional such as a psychologist, social worker, or psychiatrist to make a professional judgment (again, not a good idea); or they could order a risk assessment workup be done on the offender and use that assessment to inform their decision (always a good idea).

Parole boards are typically not very good at predicting whom to let out of prison. A recent study showed that psychopathic offenders are more likely to convince parole boards to let them out compared to nonpsychopathic offenders.
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This is an ongoing problem because we know that psychopathic offenders are more likely to reoffend than nonpsychopathic offenders. Professional judgment from a psychologist or psychiatrist has also been shown to be very unreliable in predicting who is going to reoffend.
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Because of the limitations of relying on guesswork by a handful of individuals or the unreliable opinion of one individual, scientists have turned to creating risk assessment tools or procedures that consider a number of variables to create an informed, detailed assessment of a specific offender. Criminologists and forensic psychologists have studied what variables promote risk and, similarly, what variables promote resistance to crime. Some of these variables are “actuarial,” like the age of the offender, gender of the victim, type of prior crimes, age of onset of criminal behavior, and so on. These latter variables do a decent job at gross rankings of who is likely to reoffend and who is not, but they are not particularly good at predicting who will be a violent offender or who will commit a sex offense. Then there are psychological variables, like intelligence and personality, including psychopathy. Finally, there are dynamic variables, things that change, like marital status, education, employment, family relationships, and so on. These variables are entered into large databases, and scientists analyze them and try to determine which ones predict which inmate is going to get in trouble again. Armed with this information, researchers develop
tests that parole boards can use to help make their tough decisions a little bit easier.

This was the landscape at the beginning of my career. Risk assessments were just coming onto the forensic scene, and my first goal was to try to improve the diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of predicting risk. I wanted to help the forensic decision makers identify who the high-risk offenders were, in particular the psychopaths, so we could make sure that they didn’t get released, or at least not released without very special provisions in place so that they didn’t reoffend.

The field of psychopathy research in the mid-1990s was still in its infancy. There had not been a single brain-scan study of psychopaths. It wasn’t until 1991 that there was even a good way to do a clinical assessment of them (the year the first edition of the Psychopathy Checklist manual was published). The one thing that was known was that psychopaths were at very high risk to reoffend. An inmate who scored high on the Psychopathy Checklist was four to eight times more likely than an inmate who scored low to reoffend in the next five years—and more likely to reoffend violently.
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Clearly, it was a critical component of any risk assessment.

Bob told me a story of how he used to hike across the border to the United States (there are few fences covering the three-thousand-mile border between Canada and the United States) and then hitchhike down to the Indian reservations to buy cartons of cigarettes, as many as he could fit into his large backpack. He would hitch a ride back to near the border and hike back to Canada bringing with him dozens of cartons of cigarettes. Then he would sell them in Canada for a huge profit. Cigarettes were heavily taxed in Canada. He made quite a bit of money.

“Who do you sell them to?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s the best part,” he answered. “You have to sell them to people who won’t turn you in; I sell them to pregnant women. They are too embarrassed to go into the stores to buy them, so they are always willing to buy them from you at more than they would even pay at retail in Canada. It’s great. Easy money.”

Bob had done every type of criminal activity that I have ever heard of—and a few that I hadn’t. He had done credit card scams, identity theft (I made sure my wallet was secure before I left the office), burglary, stolen cars, occasional mugging, random stints of drug use and dealing drugs and prescriptions (he once blackmailed a physician to write false prescriptions for him, running all over town to different pharmacies to get them filled), and most recently, Bob had been convicted of manslaughter.