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Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
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Psychopathy is the Unified Theory of Crime

Matt DeLisi, PhD

Iowa State University, delisi{at}iastate.edu

Psychopathy is an important clinical construct that has been studied for more than 200 years and has exploded in recent years as a guiding explanatory concept for a range of antisocial behaviors across a range of populations and subgroups. In this review essay, I advance that psychopathy is the purest and the best explanation of antisocial behavior. Indeed, psychopathy is the unified theory of crime because it mirrors the elemental nature and embodies the pejorative essence of antisocial behavior, accommodates dimensional and categorical conceptualizations and examinations of antisocial behavior, facilitates the study of antisocial phenotypes over the life span, accommodates the general overlap of antisocial behaviors among diverse populations, and facilitates emerging biosocial explanations of antisocial behavior.

Key Words: psychopathy • psychopathic personality • offender • crime • criminological theory • delinquency

This version was published on July 1, 2009

Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, Vol. 7, No. 3, 256-273 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1541204009333834
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This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Criminal Justice and BehaviorHome page
M. DeLisi, Z. R. Umphress, and M. G. Vaughn
The Criminology of the Amygdala
Criminal Justice and Behavior, November 1, 2009; 36(11): 1241 - 1252.
[Abstract] [PDF]