After reading the attachment file, Please answer one of the questions in the last paragraph in your own words and what are your thought about it. Write at least a paragraph.

In 1899, a separate justice system for juveniles was founded in the United States, based on the premise that developmental differences existed between youths and adults. More recently, however, rising violent juvenile crime has caused the separation of the two justice systems to erode, such that many states are now trying juveniles in criminal courts and putting them in prison with adults. When a judge decides whether a juvenile will stand trial in an adult court, he or she considers the juvenile’s potential for future violence and the possible success of treatment or rehabilitation in the juvenile system. But how can a judge predict which juveniles will be repeat offenders and which can be rehabilitated?

Among adults, one robust predictor of criminal violence is psychopathy (Salekin, Rogers, & Sewell, 1996), and psychopaths are more likely to commit additional violent offenses after release from incarceration (Harris, Rice, & Cormier, 1991; Heilbrun, et al., 1998); the same seems to be true among adolescents. Psychopathy in both childhood (psychopathic tendencies) and adulthood involves both callous-unemotional traits—such as lack of empathy, lack of guilt, and shallow emotions—and overt antisocial behavior (Blair, 2001). Children who show antisocial behavior early on are at great risk for antisocial and criminal behavior in adulthood (Moffitt, 2003). Callous-unemotional traits may be a risk factor that makes children vulnerable for long-term persistent serious antisocial behavior (Frick, 1998) that is often predatory in nature (Hart & Hare, 1997).

One problem for diagnosis is that normal adolescent behavior shares some characteristics with psychopathy—such as impulsivity and sensation seeking, as well as deficits in judgment, in long-range planning, in perspective taking, and in empathy—but the traits that indicate adolescent psychopathy are more serious variants or more extreme ones. A normal adolescent may score high on one or two traits, but those who fall into the psychopathy range score high on several traits at once. The leading measure of adult psychopathy is the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), developed by Robert Hare (2003), and a version of this test for youths, the PCL-YV, has also been developed. While normally developing youths typically score less than 5 on the PCL-YV, the average score of a young offender is at least 20 (Forth, Kosson, & Hare, 2003). In fact, the PCL-YV has been shown to be good at predicting general and violent recidivism in the short term, and a 10-year retrospective study showed that high scores were associated with an increased likelihood of violent offenses and a shorter time between testing and the first violent offense (Gretton, Hare, & Catchpole, 2004).

Do all children with psychopathic traits turn into adult psychopaths? How stable are these traits over time? A study that examined the link between childhood psychopathy and adult psychopathy found that boys who were high in psychopathy at age 13 tended to remain high at age 24, and no moderating factors the researchers investigated appeared to reduce future psychopathy among those at high risk. However, boys who were low in psychopathy at age 13 were influenced by environmental factors: Those who had grown up in wealthier families, had fewer antisocial peers, and had less physical punishment remained low in psychopathy, while those who had grown up poorer, had antisocial friends, and had more physical punishment became more psychopathic over time (Lynam, Loeber, & Stouthamer-Loeber, 2008). A three-year study of moderately aggressive 9-year-olds also found a relatively stable pattern, except that the children with better social functioning had decreased psychopathic characteristics over time. Apparently, some children have stable psychopathic traits that carry on into adulthood, but others do not, and further research may improve psychologists’ ability to distinguish the two types of children.

If we can identify psychopathic adolescents, can they be prevented from committing crimes? One study has shown modest success over a two-year period in an intensive treatment program of repeat offenders, which resulted in relatively slower and lower rates of repeated crimes, although the level was still high (Caldwell, Skeem, Salekin, & Van Rybroek, 2006).

For this Discussion, answer one of the following questions and your thoughts about it.

Is it ethical to screen children with conduct disorders for psychopathy, given that they may be receptive to treatment and that certain environmental factors can improve or worsen the disorder? Should children with psychopathic tendencies be watched more closely? If so, by whom? Should their parents receive special counseling and training? Finally, should scores on the PCL-YV be used to determine the sentences for adolescents who commit violent crimes, such that those with high scores would be tried through the adult rather than the juvenile criminal justice system?