In determining whether to waive a juvenile to adult court, judges typically consider the youth's potential for future violence and "amenability to treatment" in the juvenile system. The caseload of adolescents who are formally processed by the juvenile courts has increased by 75% over the past decade, and, as a consequence, there is now a great demand for assessments of juveniles' "treatability" and risk for future violence. Because wavier decisions can affect a youth's development and have long-term, serious consequences for the young person's life, it is imperative that amenability and risk assessments be based on accurate and valid indicators.

Recently, a number of researchers have implied or asserted that clinicians should use measures of psychopathy to assess these issues and guide consequential decisions about serious juvenile offenders. Psychopathy is a personality disorder defined chiefly by callousness and emotional detachment. Psychopaths are typically charismatic individuals who readily manipulate others and engage in risky behaviors designed to satisfy their own personal needs. They are undeterred by pangs of conscience and have little or no concern for the welfare of others. Studies of adult offenders indicate that psychopathic individuals are four times as likely as non-psychopathic offenders to commit a future violent crime.

The predictive power of measures of psychopathy in studies of adult offenders, in conjunction with increasing pressure to identify juvenile delinquents who are likely to commit future violence, has sparked considerable interest in juvenile psychopathy. Indeed, diagnoses of psychopathy are now being used in North America to justify decisions that juvenile offenders be tried in adult court and serve longer sentences. Adolescents who are diagnosed as "budding psychopaths" are assumed to be more dangerous and less amenable to treatment.

Ideally, measures of psychopathy would reliably identify the subgroup of adolescents who will continue with antisocial behavior and go on to be adult psychopaths. To date, however, no research has examined whether psychopathy is a stable trait across adolescence and adulthood. Questions about the stability of psychopathy over time should be investigated directly before measures of juvenile psychopathy are applied to make legal decisions about adolescents that have long-term consequences. Knowing whether we can reliably assess psychopathy during adolescence, and whether such assessments predict adult psychopathy, is especially important, because normative, but transient, characteristics of adolescence (e.g., impulsivity, risk-taking, egocentrism) easily may be mistaken for what are presumed to be permanent traits of psychopathy. If this is so, applying adult markers of psychopathy to adolescents may result in invalid diagnoses of psychopathy and inappropriate waiver decisions.

Because adolescence is a time of enormous developmental change, it is imperative that we learn more about the stability, nature, and manifestations of psychopathy during the adolescent years before embracing the use of this construct as a valid component in the evaluation of juvenile offenders. In this cross-sequential study, we plan to follow approximately 320 juvenile and adult offenders over a one-year period. After conducting an initial interview with these offenders, we conduct one-month and then one-year follow-up interviews. We do so in order to achieve three primary goals:

· To compare adolescents and adults on measures of psychopathy in light of their developmental maturity.
· To compare adolescents and adults on the relation between psychopathy and particular types of violence.
· To describe the stability of psychopathy over time in adolescents and adults.

This study is currently in the field. Preliminary findings will be presented at the American Psychology - Law Society and the Society for Research on Adolescence, both in March, 2004. In addition, the first empirical article regarding this study will appear in Behavioral Sciences & the Law in 2004.
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