Corporate Psychopaths. Criminological Assessment and Treatments

The authors, after a thorough historical analysis of the concept of psychopathy, highlight that in the most recent research this personological dimension expresses itself in different and varied faces. In particular, the seminal work of Hare shows that the main clusters of psychopathy are the interpersonal dimension, the affective dimension, the relative dimensions of lifestyle, the antisocial dimension (linked to loss of control and physical aggression, preponderantly represented in the media and in common sense), and that these clusters are not necessarily always inter-related. Therefore, psychopaths with reduced anti-sociality can find ecological niches that give them a good, if not great, adaptation and less risk to run into legal problems than those characterized by high anti-sociality. This allows us to understand how distinct and severe psychopathic traits can be found in white-collar criminals, often studied only by analyzing the crimes and not those who have not committed them. Approaching white-collar crime from the personological perspective enables us to understand how certain individual traits (arrogance, love of risk, disregard for the damage inflicted to the next, manipulative tendencies, narcissism and others) can be ecological both for the subject and - on the short term - specific business contexts. This pernicious synergy however, inevitably leads to socio-economic disaster, that corporate psychopaths - this is the definition recently minted - leave behind without any kind of involvement. This analysis has led some authors to speculate even a key role of corporate psychopathy in the global financial crisis. Recent neurotechnological evidences has shown that some peculiarities in brain functioning of psychopaths may give rise, together with data suggesting the presence both of atypical genetic structures and of often traumatic childhood experiences, the doubt that some forms of psychopathy could be an illness. Apart from the structural complexity of the classification process of a way of personological functioning as psychiatric disorder, in such a case a very high complexity, the problem, in the light of "judgment 9163/2005 of the United Sections of the Supreme Court," is to state whether that – if any - disease can be severe enough to be forensically considerable or not and characterizing the crimes committed by corporate psychopaths as signs of insanity. According to their analysis the authors state that the criteria required by this judgment to diagnose a total or partial insanity can not be satisfied at all. In addition, the stigma of a mental illness, severe to the point of being forensically relevant, for a corporate psychopath is a cost, in overall terms, much higher than that of a "normal" trial.