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offender, gender of the victim, type of prior crimes, age of onset of criminal behavior, and so on. These latter variables do a decent job at gross rankings of who is likely to reoffend and who is not, but they are not particularly good at predicting who will be a violent offender or who will commit a sex offense. Then there are psychological variables, like intelligence and personality, including psychopathy. Finally, there are dynamic variables, things that change, like marital status, education, employment, family relationships, and so on. These variables are entered into large databases, and scientists analyze them and try to determine which ones predict which inmate is going to get in trouble again. Armed with this information, researchers developtests that parole boards can use to help make their tough decisions a little bit easier.
    This was the landscape at the beginning of my career. Risk assessments were just coming onto the forensic scene, and my first goal was to try to improve the diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of predicting risk. I wanted to help the forensic decision makers identify who the high-risk offenders were, in particular the psychopaths, so we could make sure that they didn’t get released, or at least not released without very special provisions in place so that they didn’t reoffend.
    The field of psychopathy research in the mid-1990s was still in its infancy. There had not been a single brain-scan study of psychopaths. It wasn’t until 1991 that there was even a good way to do a clinical assessment of them (the year the first edition of the Psychopathy Checklist manual was published). The one thing that was known was that psychopaths were at very high risk to reoffend. An inmate who scored high on the Psychopathy Checklist was four to eight times more likely than an inmate who scored low to reoffend in the next five years—and more likely to reoffend violently. 4 Clearly, it was a critical component of any risk assessment.
    Bob told me a story of how he used to hike across the border to the United States (there are few fences covering the three-thousand-mile border between Canada and the United States) and then hitchhike down to the Indian reservations to buy cartons of cigarettes, as many as he could fit into his large backpack. He would hitch a ride back to near the border and hike back to Canada bringing with him dozens of cartons of cigarettes. Then he would sell them in Canada for a huge profit. Cigarettes were heavily taxed in Canada. He made quite a bit of money.
    “Who do you sell them to?” I asked.
    “Oh, that’s the best part,” he answered. “You have to sell them to people who won’t turn you in; I sell them to pregnant women. They are too embarrassed to go into the stores to buy them, so they are always willing to buy them from you at more than they would even pay at retail in Canada. It’s great. Easy money.”
    Bob had done every type of criminal activity that I have ever heard of—and a few that I hadn’t. He had done credit card scams, identity theft (I made sure my wallet was secure before I left the office), burglary, stolen cars, occasional mugging, random stints of drug use and dealing drugs and prescriptions (he once blackmailed a physician to write false prescriptions for him, running all over town to different pharmacies to get them filled), and most recently, Bob had been convicted of manslaughter.
    Bob also had a fetish. He liked to be a Peeping Tom, and he collected women’s underwear. After one arrest, the police found over three thousand pairs of women’s underwear in his closet.
    Bob described being questioned in his apartment on suspicion of burglary by the cops and sitting there in handcuffs on the couch.
    “I warned the cop,” he said, “not to open the closet.”
    As the officer unlocked the door, the closet burst open and dozens of pairs of women’s underwear landed all over the policeman (many of which were dirty; Bob seemed to prefer