Abstract

Serious and violent offenders often display psychopathic features. The purpose of the present chapter is to review the key empirical findings from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study (ISVYOS) as they relate to issues of reliability, structural validity, convergent validity, and predictive validity of this controversial theoretical construct in explaining serious and violent young offending patterns offenders. As well, inspired by Schubert et al. (2004), we discuss operational lessons that have emerged from the administration of measures of PPD over the course of the ISVYOS, including challenges with scoring these measures within an adolescent offender group.