by Kerry Daynes
*
I was set to meet Liam at what is known as a forensic step-down service. ‘Step-down service’ sounds like a support group for someone who has recently retired from an illustrious career as the head of a major business empire, but in fact it’s a place for former offenders who need extra help, or who need overseeing, in the transition from prison or (more often) secure hospital back into the real world. It’s a halfway house, usually for those who might need more support than others, people with multiple or complex problems or drug dependencies, or those considered to have a high risk of reoffending.
I have always thought that anyone transferring out of a prison into a step-down project is incredibly fortunate – although they may not necessarily always agree. Moving in is very different to finding yourself blinking in the daylight on the outside of the prison gates, all your worldly goods in hand and nowhere to go next. It is a supportive and effective environment – projects often have their roots in the church, with high ideals and an emphasis on making a valuable contribution to society. There is guidance with education and employment, often access to therapy and counselling, and a general steer in readjusting to the real world. But there are also restrictions, which might include a locked room at night, curfews and other strict parameters which the step-down resident needs to observe.
Ex-offenders who live in step-down services are more often than not managed by a MAPPA (multi-agency public protection arrangement) team. This involves input from the police, the probation services and the managers of the step-down project, who continually assess the risk a person might pose and do their best to keep everyone safe by adjusting the level of monitoring and restrictions placed on them accordingly. It isn’t easy to be a member of the MAPPA – as a group you can only manage the likelihood of someone committing a crime through the limited powers of each agency, and decision making is often fraught with conflict and dilemmas.
Liam was referred to me after he had asked for some of his restrictions to be lifted. He’d been living at the project for the last seven months without contention and had been peacefully and successfully sharing an annexe – a purpose-built extension at the back of a big Edwardian house – with five other men.
All the standard, detailed risk assessments had been completed by his MAPPA team, but before they handed him more freedom they felt that one last assessment was outstanding. The Psychopathy Checklist, also known as the PCL-R, or as Jon Ronson described it in his bestselling book, ‘The Psychopath Test’. Ronson’s paraphrasing title is a misnomer though, because strictly speaking the PCL-R isn’t really a test at all.
It’s a personality profiling process, developed in 1991 by Canadian researcher Dr Robert Hare. It identifies the extent to which a person demonstrates the 20 qualities of a psychopath and provides a sliding scale of psychopathy that all but the most virtuous of us are likely to fall on somewhere. Based on extensive interviewing and tooth-combing of file information, the person conducting the assessment – who must be a specially trained and qualified psychologist – scores each characteristic between zero and two, depending on whether it is present, partially present or absent. The maximum score possible therefore is 40, although to score 30 or more is to earn the dubious label of psychopath, and probably find you are never invited to dinner among polite society again.
The PCL-R groups the defining characteristics of a psychopath under two broad themes: personality traits and lifestyle factors. The former includes grandiosity, manipulativeness, indications of recklessness and a lack of concern for others. Traits which are undeniably unpleasant but shared by all manner of people, particularly those who actively seek out and thrive in the public gaze, such as celebrities, politicians and, according to one 2016 study, one-fifth of all corporate executives. Hare famously said that if he couldn’t have studied psychopaths in prison settings, he would have studied stockbrokers or telemarketers instead. The lifestyle characteristics of the PCL-R address a person’s track record for non-conformity, their propensity for breaking rules, commitments and the occasional heart. Points are scored for criminal behaviours including juvenile delinquency, engaging in a variety of different offence types and a history of breaking legal conditions or parole.
Although considered a gold standard assessment in forensic psychology, the PCL-R is also the subject of much debate. The problem is that what was conceived by Hare as a measure of personality and nothing more, has been repurposed, packaged up and commercialized to the extent that it is now widely used as an all-too- conclusive violence risk-assessment tool, meaning its results can have profound and long-lasting impacts on those who are expected to take it. In fact, it is only the few specific items on the PCL-R that measure a person’s past criminal record that predict future offending and are therefore relevant to risk assessment. Opponents argue that the PCL-R is by no means an exhaustive examination of an individual, and that the concept of ‘psychopathy’ within this context is too simplistically circular: someone has done bad things and so that qualifies them as a psychopath, and if they’re a psychopath ergo they’ll do bad things.
Put simply it can sometimes seem like the tail wagging the dog, and me being asked to carry out that particular investigation at the step-down project was a case in point. I didn’t feel it was going to add very much by way of assessing Liam’s risk, given that he had already undergone a number of other risk assessments. In terms of his criminal behaviours, it would only tell us what we already knew about Liam’s past. Also, taking into account that he had spent large chunks of his adult life so far in prison, he simply hadn’t had the opportunities to amass the kind of curriculum vitae that’s needed for a high score on the PCL-R.
But I had been asked to do it and the rationale of the PCL-R was not up for discussion at the time. Like so much forensic psychology, completing this job was about due process and ticking boxes – getting on with doing, not thinking. But I knew that Liam’s MAPPA team were being thorough and I am all for being thorough, so I went along to meet him.
*
The step-down project was in a converted house and there were no meeting rooms or private spaces, so I waited for Liam in the communal kitchen. It was like any regular domestic kitchen except perhaps unusually clean, and peppered with giveaways like the notes above the plug sockets saying ‘Do Not Unplug’, the fire blankets on the wall and the rota for kitchen cleaning duties on the back of the door. Blue fitted cupboards clad the walls, punctuated by a large window overlooking the garden that was plotted out allotment-style – a scheme to keep residents busy.
I was looking out over the garden when Liam walked in, and when I turned around to greet him I noticed him obviously look me up-and-down, taking in my figure before he got to my face. This is something that most women experience at some point, but despite it being familiar I still take notice when it happens, not only for the cheek of it, but for the deeper, more telling indication that, for the man in question, clocking-up a woman’s vital statistics is the priority in this situation.
He didn’t smile at me and only just managed to shake my hand rather limply before he pulled his chair out and sat down, elbows on the table and fingers clasped together in front of his face. He was uncomfortable and irritated. But I could understand that – who greets the news that they are doing a ‘psychopath test’ with good humour?
Having done the introductions I conducted my own, less transparent, brief physical assessment of him – a man now in his late 30s, medium height and build, wearing jeans and a plain black sweatshirt. He was unremarkable in almost every way, his hair shaved short at the back and sides, a slackness in his shoulders and the pallor of someone who doesn’t get out much.
I explained the PCL-R, reassured him that it is a widely used forensic assessment, and asked him if he had any questions. He said he just wanted to get on with it. And added that it was about time it was done, because he wanted his restrictions lifted. For a moment I felt like a travel agent dealing with an unhappy holidaymaker who was complaining because h
is room didn’t have a view. His sense of entitlement seemed bold, and out of context here.
But he was right, his restrictions were tight. His room was locked and alarmed at night and he wasn’t able to leave the house without consent from the manager. If he did go out he was required to stick to his work placements and probation appointments, and to central, densely populated areas of the town centre. He also had to produce evidence of where he had been in the form of receipts and bus tickets. This is by no means solid proof of someone’s movements, but is part of a mutual trust-building ethos which the step-down resident should ideally be keen to comply with.
We began the process. The PCL-R interview schedule isn’t something that can be quickly filled out on an A4 clipboard. It’s a lengthy and protracted process, a green paper booklet with pages of prompts and probes designed to gather information about everything from family background and intimate relationships to financial matters and criminal activities. It can take a number of hours to get through, and is best done over a period of days. The nature of the conversations you have, and all the additional information you gather along the way, mean it’s a deeply involved and intense experience for both the interviewee and the person asking the questions. I knew I’d be visiting Liam there over a number of weeks.
Liam settled into the interviews quite quickly but his answers were on the brief side. I felt he was giving me as much information as I probed for and nothing more. The idea is to make the conversation feel as natural and unforced as possible, but I was struggling to gain any sort of rapport. He didn’t want to work with me and looked at me throughout in a way that said, Come on then woman, get on with it. He was scoring a big fat zero on item one of the checklist: superficial charm.
(Superficial charm is one of the 20 characteristics of the PCL-R, but that doesn’t mean that an individual with an overall high score will automatically get points here. I have found that the further north of the country I go the less likely a client is to score highly on this. In fact, my favourite research study of all time investigated why Scottish criminals scored less on the PCL-R than their American counterparts. Investigators found it was because they lack the Americans’ glib, charming manners! American psychopaths tell you to ‘Have a nice day’, Scottish ones, not so much.)
With no designated meeting rooms in the house it was a case of pitching our tent where we could, so we mostly sat in the communal lounge area on the shabby chenille sofas, a fish tank full of multicoloured guppies gulping away behind Liam as I talked to him over the coffee table, which was sticky with the overspill of a hundred mugs of sweet tea. It felt like a two-star guesthouse – something that might come up on one of those reality TV shows about shoddy hospitality. We didn’t get any peace, either. The radio was on and other residents would come and go, switch on the TV, feed the fish, ask if we had any cigarettes.
I wasn’t jumping to any conclusions but I felt fairly certain his score wasn’t going to indicate an unusually high psychopathy level. I would need to make my final calculations, but experience told me that his final score was going to be in the region of 15–18 out of a possible 40. Your average score for a prison inmate is between 19 and 22; your typical man or woman in the street, unless they are Mary Poppins, tends to score between 3 and 6 (my own score, if I am brutal with myself, is 4).
After our penultimate session I thought I’d take a second look through Liam’s file documentation. That’s when I remembered the collection of receipts and travel tickets and asked to see them. They might tell me more about this brusque man and what he did in his free time and, as I said, I’m all for being thorough. What I saw made the hairs on the back of my neck start to prickle.
The seemingly innocuous paperwork of someone’s daily life has much to tell, particularly when it is presented and filed in chronological order. Patterns emerge and personal preferences quickly become clear. There was a thick bundle of receipts, held together with a yellow elastic band and I began to thumb through them, like the pages of a flicker book, the picture emerging unexpectedly. We knew Liam went into town most days and that he was expected to stay in the busy part of the shopping centre. His receipts showed that he bought bread for the project on Wednesdays, he bought a monthly angling magazine and often bought mints at the same stationers, before heading straight to the same Costa Coffee, a busy cafe with the kind of two-person counter service where one person stays on the till and the other makes the coffees and serves them further down the counter. Liam’s receipts showed that over time – a period of a few months – he had begun to visit the Costa exclusively on the same days – always Thursday and Friday afternoons and any time on Saturday. Sometimes he went in there as many as three or four times on the same day. He always had the same drink – a cappuccino – and I noticed from the name on the receipt that it was almost always the same person who served him: Esther.
I didn’t say anything to Liam about it when I saw him and we worked through what were the final sections of the PCL-R interview quite quickly. Afterwards I used the staff computer to type up my notes, then had a look online to see where the coffee shop was, thinking that maybe I’d pop in there. The feeling that Liam’s commitment to this branch of Costa might be driven by something more than an appreciation of their cappuccinos was weighing on my mind. While I was searching the shopping centre website, an advert for a well-known men’s deodorant popped up in the sidebar, showing a woman bent seductively over an oven. The strap-line read ‘Can she make you lose control?’
I looked at the time on the screen – it was lunchtime. I decided to take a stroll into town. This wasn’t an especially extraordinary thing to do, I had to eat after all, but it also seemed like a good opportunity to walk in Liam’s shoes for a moment.
*
On the short walk down the pedestrianized shopping street to Costa I passed a pretty blonde teenager. She was wearing headphones and was dressed in a school uniform that she had tried to make as non-school- uniform as possible. I remembered my own days as a self-conscious schoolgirl – far too keen to grow up – and I smiled at her as she walked past.
She didn’t smile back. I got the kind of blank, mildly disdainful look you get from teenagers who are listening to music and have no interest in you, which was healthy as far as I was concerned. But it got me thinking about how a look like that would be interpreted by Liam and, yes, by my own stalker. What would they feel or see in that brief exchange? Would that smile rebuffed, that slightest of rejections, inflame their anger?
How dangerous people are at any given time in their lives depends on a wide range of elements, not least the situation in which they find themselves. If Liam felt the girl slighted him I knew it would have stoked his loathing, because in this scenario she was in the unfortunate position of being both coveted and loathed. He wanted to be desired and felt entitled to be obeyed, but if he felt rejection and perhaps ridicule his veins would begin to course with resentment: She thinks she is better than me.
I wondered if his mind would have taken him back momentarily to previous attacks and he would have reimagined the pain he had seen and savoured – his victims’ bodies powerless, their faces terrified and humiliated. He had wanted them to feel his power, his anger, and to pay. I recalled how, in the PCL-R interview, I had asked him about how he felt in the moment he had attacked his girlfriend. He didn’t know what he was thinking, he said, only rage and the need to stop her from laughing at him, looking down at him, insulting him. That had sent him ‘berserk’. But he felt calmer afterwards, he said. The payback had been satisfying.
In a situation like this, a crowded high street in the middle of the day, that kind of rage wouldn’t be able to reach such a climax without attracting attention; there were no isolated spots, his options were limited. But it would still bubble away, under the surface.
I opened the door to the cafe, the warm air and smell of coffee and Danish pastries wafting over me. I picked up a sandwich from the fridge and a bottle of water and joined the small queue to pay.
The girl at the counter asked if I wanted anything else but I was too busy looking at her name badge to hear her the first time: it was Esther, a short girl with fair hair in a ponytail, she looked about 17.
*
The next week I was at the step-down again to brief Sheila the project manager and Liam on the results of his PCL-R assessment. As predicted, he had a fairly average score, there was nothing screaming psychopath. It didn’t warrant balloons and a congratulations card, but it was at least something mildly positive to start with – no psychopath sticker today!
But the tone quickly darkened when I said I had, however, found something that gave me cause for concern and was relevant to the likelihood of his reoffending. I laid out the bundle of receipts from his trips to the coffee shop on the table between us – well over 100 of them – and said, treading the line somewhere between non-accusatory and firm: ‘I’ve noticed that you visit this cafe when a particular girl is on shift. I would really like to get your take on this, Liam.’
Instantly, his eyebrows came together like a pair of curtains and his mouth fell into a flat, hard line. Then he pointed at me and spat: ‘You fucking bitch.’
Sheila and I glanced briefly at each other and then back to Liam. We didn’t say anything.