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guilt
Item 7: Shallow affect
Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy
Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle
Item 10: Poor behavioral controls
Item 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior
Item 12: Early behavior problems
Item 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals
Item 14: Impulsivity
Item 15: Irresponsibility
Item 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
Item 17: Many short-term marital relationships
Item 18: Juvenile delinquency
Item 19: Revocation of conditional release
Item 20: Criminal versatility
     
    And first thing the next morning, we were going to learn how to use it.
    Tuesday morning. The attendees milled around in the tent that was to be ours for the next three days. Some were Bob Hare fans. When he stood in a corner telling stories about how he “packs heat, because a lot of psychopaths blame their incarcerations on me,” we gathered to listen. The tent stood next to a pretty tidal estuary. The peach silk drapes fluttered in the summer morning breeze. Bob brought up the occasion—now famous in psychopath-analyzing circles—when Peter Woodcock had explained that the reason he’d killed Dennis Kerr on his first day of freedom from Oak Ridge was because he wanted to know what it would be like to kill someone, and the interviewer had said, “But you’d already killed three people,” and Woodcock had replied, “Yes, but that was years and years and years and years ago.”
    Bob turned to me. “You see?” he said. “Short memories. Just like during that electric shock test.”
    Some of the people listening in chuckled wryly. But there were skeptics here, too. Psychiatrists and psychologists and care workers and criminal profilers and neurologists tend not to like being told what to do by so-called gurus of the movement. I could feel in the room a sense of “Impress me.”
    We took our places. Bob flicked a switch. And onto the screen came a video of an empty room. It was a drab, municipal-looking room painted in a blue so dull it was barely a color. There was a plywood desk, a chair. The only splash of cheerfulness was a bright red button on the wall. Into the room walked a man. He was good-looking, neatly dressed. He had a bit of a twinkle in his eye. He moved his chair until it was underneath the red button. It made a slight scraping noise as he pulled it across the floor.
    “Do you see what he just did?” said Bob. “He moved his chair to right below the panic button. He did it to intimidate my researcher, who’s standing behind the camera. Just a little display of control. That feeling of control is important to them.”
    And the man began to talk.
    We never learned his name, or which prison this room was situated inside. Throughout the morning we referred to him only as Case Study H. His accent was Canadian.
    It all began, quite innocently, with the researcher asking Case Study H about his school days.
    “I enjoyed the social atmosphere of school,” he replied, “enjoyed learning and seeing new things.”
    “Did you ever hurt anyone in a schoolyard fight?” the researcher asked.
    “No,” he replied. “Just schoolyard shenanigans.”
    These were critical questions, Bob later explained, because the answers might inform Item 12 of his checklist: Early Behavior Problems . Almost all psychopaths display serious behavior problems as a child, Bob said, starting around age ten to twelve, like persistent bullying, vandalism, substance abuse, arson.
    “I had a couple of incidences of fisticuffs,” said Case Study H. “Well, one time I broke this kid’s arm. It was really distasteful. I was holding him down and I put excessive pressure on his arm and it just snapped. It was not something I wanted to happen.”
    There was, we noted in our assessment sheets, something weirdly disconnected about his description of the event: “I put excessive pressure on his arm and it just snapped.” It was like he couldn’t properly place himself there.
    Item 7: Shallow Affect—An individual who seems unable to experience a