Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder

In this revised and updated treatise on sociopathy, or "antisocial personality disorder", Black, a professor of psychiatry, advances the thesis that some people, from a young age "remain stuck in a rut of bad behavior.... Their resistance to authority and norms becomes the dominant force in their lives, often consigning them and their families to poverty, loneliness, addiction, and despair." According to Black, this continual rebellion is pathological, characteristic, in fact, of antisocial personality disorder. Heavy on anecdotal evidence, Black's descriptions of possible causes of ASP (nature; nurture) and possible treatments (therapy; incarceration) might seem more convincing if sociological analysis were as important to him as case history. While this book may offer those struggling with ASP (or proximity to ASP) some potential explanations, it often seems to select evidence in such a way as to suggest that character is destiny. Black allows that ASP, as he defines it, has a complex, multifactorial etiology. But any book that suggests that "[i]ncarceration may be the best way to control the most severe and persistent cases of ASP" ought, at the very least, to think harder about the dysfunctional American prison system and the society that built it. (Mar.)