Psychopathy and institutional misbehavior among incarcerated sex offenders: A comparison of the psychopathy checklist-revised and the personality assessment inventory

The present study compared the utility of two measures of psychopathic traits, the Antisocial Features scale of the Personality Assessment Inventory (Morey, 1991) and the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Hare, 1991), to postdict serious institutional misbehavior among incarcerated sex offenders. Archival disciplinary infraction data for 92 offenders were coded as major acts of physical aggression, major acts of verbal aggression/ defiance, or non-aggressive major offenses. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analyses indicated that ANT performed comparably to the PCL-R in terms of predicting the occurrence of these infractions during the prior two years, although there was a trend for PCL-R scores to be associated somewhat more strongly with physically aggressive offenses. Regression analyses indicated that each measure accounted for unique variance in the criterion variables, suggesting that both may evidence incremental validity in terms of their relation to disciplinary infractions.