Antisocial Personality Disorder

You have the opportunity, when you go and see your parole board, to talk to them and to impress upon them that you're a different person than you were five years ago, or a year ago, two years ago-- your history. But the thing is, I mean, human nature is a hard thing to project. We know-- at least, I mean, criminologists seem to know that certain people, crime seems to decrease as they get older. And they start to go, oh, jeez, half my life has been wasted away in prison. And I've done all these horrible things.

They no longer want it. They're tired. They're burnt out. But it's really hard to-- how do you prove it?

I mean, I can jump up and down, do a little dance. And I can say, hey, I'm not going to commit a crime. I'm tired of being in jail. I'm tired of victimizing people. I'm tired of being a victim myself. I'm tired of all this stuff. I want a chance. I want to go out there. How do you prove something?

Pat Frizzel is serving a prison term for manslaughter and robbery. Having served most of his sentence, he hopes to convince a parole board that he is ready to be released. He works in the prison library and spends much of his time reading. During his prison term, Frizzel volunteered for a study of psychopathy and its relationship to criminal behavior. Prison psychologists feel he is seriously trying to develop a more pro-social way of thinking.

It's sort of up to you.

Identifying some of the characteristics of psychopathy raises the question about whether or not this behavior can be changed. Is there a way of treating those afflicted? One treatment technique has involved group therapy for some psychopaths serving prison terms for violent crimes.

So most of the treatment programs that have been developed in the past have tried to treat or to change or modify some sort of subjective experiences, such as anxiety, lack of self-esteem. These are all wrong for the psychopath. A psycho doesn't have these problems. His problems are that his behavior is at odds with what society considers to be acceptable. So we're going to have to figure out ways of actually changing this individual's behavior.

So the standard programs that we use in the criminal justice system, in most prisons, are really geared to the average offender. These are people that have problems of various sorts. It could be that they have a lack of education, poor reading skills, poor interpersonal skills, too much anxiety. We can treat these things. And the programs are typically reasonably successful for the average offender, but not for the psychopath.

--see in your head?

Much of what has been learned about the mind of the psychopath seems to raise as many questions as it answers. But Bob Hare and investigators like him continue to search for a definitive explanation of this frightening and disturbing disorder.