- "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?
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.
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