Psychopathy as a Predictor of Institutional Misbehavior Among Sex Offenders

This study compares the utility of two measures of psychopathic traits, the Antisocial Features (ANT) scale of the Personality Assessment Inventory and the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R), to predict serious institutional misconduct among incarcerated sex offenders over a 2-year follow-up period. Archival disciplinary data for 58 offenders were classified as major infractions involving physical aggression, verbal aggression/acts of defiance, or nonaggressive offenses. Significant correlations were obtained between both measures of psychopathy and each type of disciplinary offense except physical aggression, the occurrence of which was rare in this sample. Regression analyses indicated that each measure accounted for unique—or incremental—variance in one of the criterion measures. Overall classification accuracy based on standard cut scores was somewhat more positive for ANT than for the PCL-R.