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Dr. Kent Kiehl, M.R.I., and psychopathic brains : The New Yorker

This is the story Molly referred to today when analyzing the Supreme Court’s ruling on the constitutionality of jailing minors for life without parole. Important research here:

Fledgling psychopaths are particularly interesting to researchers, because their brains are thought to be more malleable than those of adults. In a landmark 2006 study of a specialized talk-therapy treatment program, conducted at a juvenile detention center in Wisconsin, involving a hundred and forty-one young offenders who scored high on the youth version of the checklist, Michael Caldwell, a psychologist at the treatment center and a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reported that the youths that were treated were much more likely to stay out of trouble, once they were paroled, than the ones in the control group. “In other words,” Kiehl told me, “psychopathy is treatable after all, if you can catch it young enough.”