Psychopathy and compliance correlates for male delinquents in a community program

Psychopathy, the constellation of behaviors and attitudes characterized by aggressive predation, manipulation, callousness, exploitation, and which is often connected with criminality, can exact a substantial interpersonal and social toll. While the prevalence of psychopathy is extremely low among the general public, it is a significant population within the realms of criminal justice and mental health. Researchers have linked psychopathy to chronic antisocial behavior across the life span, and have established strong links between adult psychopathy and certain subpopulations of behaviorally dysfunctional youth. Within the last ten years much work has gone into conceptualizing and applying the construct of psychopathy to adolescents, to better understand the disorder and to better predict its manifestation in adulthood. This ongoing and important research has substantial implications for juvenile justice and for identifying better treatments and more appropriate points of intervention.; This study sought to investigate how psychopathic male youth comply with the parameters of a community-based residential program. Using an archival sample of 200 court adjudicated males placed at the Ocean Tides in Rhode Island across 27 years, this study established that the presence of adolescents high in psychopathic traits was found at a rate of 13.5%. Overall mean scores were found to be no different than those of the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) Probation norms, but were found to be significantly lower than those for the Institutionalized population.; Outcome and treatment participation variables were developed from available file information and included measures such as cooperation with various treatments, length of time in program, and behavioral change over time. Positive compliance measures (including length of stay in program and positive behavioral change during program) were demonstrated to correlate negatively with higher scores on the PCL:YV. The positive compliance measures had positive correlations with the PCL:YV scores of juveniles who did not demonstrate a high level of psychopathic features. These results have significant implications for the placement of adjudicated delinquents in community programs, and for the location of treatment interventions for the subsample of delinquents with characteristics of high psychopathy.