The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Elliott Barker, crushed by the weight of evidence against his life’s work, became a director of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, specializing in counseling the children of psychopaths.
    “I have certainly always felt that Elliott’s heart was in the right place,” e-mailed a former colleague, who didn’t want to be named and who works at Oak Ridge today. “He’s been the subject of much criticism, of course, for his idea and methods and frequently has had malpractice suits against him. Yes, you guessed right, psychopaths from the program looking to make a lot of money. But Bob Hare and us have always agreed that psychopaths are born that way and not created by controlling mummies and weak fathers.”
    “That’s lucky,” I e-mailed back, “as I am a weak father and my wife is a controlling mummy.”

4.
     
    THE PSYCHOPATH TEST
     
    T hey had psychopaths naked and talking about their feelings !” Bob Hare laughed. “They had psychopaths on beanbags ! They had psychopaths acting as therapists to their fellow psychopaths!”
    He shook his head at the idealism of it all.
    “Incredible,” he said.
     
     
    It was an August evening and I was drinking with Bob Hare in a hotel bar in rural Pembrokeshire, West Wales. He was a quite feral-looking man with yellow-white hair and red eyes, as if he’d spent his life in battle, battling psychopaths, the very forces of evil. It was exciting to finally meet him. While names like Elliott Barker and Gary Maier had all but faded away, surviving only in obscure reports detailing crazily idealistic psychiatric endeavors from days long gone, Hare is influential. Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used. It was the one used to diagnose Tony at Broadmoor and get him locked up for the past twelve years.
     
     
    Bob Hare saw the Oak Ridge program as yet more evidence of psychopaths’ untrustworthiness. Try to teach them empathy and they’ll cunningly use it as an empathy-faking training exercise for their own malicious ends. Indeed, every observer who has studied the Oak Ridge program has come to that same conclusion. Everyone, that is, except Gary Maier.
    “Yeah,” Gary had told me, “I guess we had inadvertently created a finishing school for them. There had always been that worry. But they were doing well in the program. . . .”
    They were doing well and then, suddenly, he got fired.
    “When they saw their leader be trashed like that, I think it empowered them,” Gary said. “There was like a ‘This is bullshit!’ And we got a rebound.”
    Some of the psychopaths, Gary believed, went off and killed to teach the authorities a lesson—that’s what happens when you fire a man as inspiring as Gary Maier.
    He sounded mournful, defensive, and utterly convinced of himself when he told me this, and I suddenly understood what a mutually passionate and sometimes dysfunctional bubble the relationship between therapist and client can be.

     
    I had e-mailed Bob Hare to ask if he’d meet me and he’d replied that he’d be teaching his checklist to a group of psychiatrists and brain imagers and care workers and psychologists and prison officers and budding criminal profilers on a three-day residential course, and if I was willing to pay the £600 registration fee, I was welcome to join them, although a copy of the thirty-page checklist wasn’t included in the price. That would cost an extra £361.31. I negotiated his office down to £400 (media discount) and we were all set.
    This was the Monday evening before the first day and the attendees were milling around. Some, clearly impressed to be in the same room as Bob