Forever a Psychopath? Psychopathy and the Criminal Career Trajectory

Despite long-standing diagnostic controversies concerning the construct of psychopathy, it is widely considered to be a personality disorder (and likely will be deemed so in the DSM-V), emerging early in life and persisting across the life span. This chapter aims to provide practitioners with the current state of knowledge surrounding psychopathy and criminal careers. We first provide a background on the temporal stability of psychopathy, after which we examine the trajectories of different types of offenders, including young offenders, violent offenders, and sex offenders. As such, practitioners can consider the relevant section of the chapter to aid in understanding and making prognostications about the particular client at hand.