The school was an oasis, about a square mile in area, in the middle of Tucson’s Sonoran Desert, at the foot of a barren mountain range, one of five minor mountain ranges surrounding the city. A significant portion of the main campus had been designated an arboretum, and plants from around the world were labeled along a self-guided walking tour, which naturally included plenty of cacti. While it wasn’t Princeton or the University of Chicago, both of which she had been accepted to, it was highly regarded academically, especially in her field of interest, and it formed a thriving social community of forty thousand students. Yes, it was as hot as the surface of the sun in the summer, but during most of the academic year it was sunny and pleasant, and she had been assured that the school took its air-conditioning very seriously.
After touring the campus and grabbing a quick lunch, she made her way over to Dr. Apagar’s office for her scheduled meeting. He shook her hand and motioned for her to take a chair sitting in front of a desk so cluttered with stacks of scholarly papers and miscellaneous items that he had to rearrange several tall stacks so they could have an unobstructed view of one another.
“Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me, Dr. Apgar. I really appreciate it.”
“Not at all,” he replied. “And please, call me Jason.”
She acknowledged this request and he continued. “I understand we’ve accepted you into the department, but you haven’t committed yet.”
“That’s right. I wanted to meet with you in person before making any decisions.”
“So I take it you have interest in my work, then?”
“Very much so,” replied Erin. “I’ve read all of your papers with great interest. Your work with prison inmates is fascinating. More than that,” she amended. “It’s groundbreaking.”
Apgar couldn’t help but smile. “Thank you,” he said. “I would wholeheartedly agree with you on that, but my modesty prevents me.”
Erin laughed.
Apgar raised his eyebrows. “The school is very keen to get you here, Erin. They sent me your records, and I can see why. Top GRE scores, top grades, a course load that was very broad, lots of neuroscience to go along with psychology, even molecular biology. You took on a course load that would break the backs of most students, and performed extremely well. Very impressive.”
She nodded in acknowledgement.
“So what questions can I answer for you?” he said. “I can tell you about the graduate program’s course requirements, research requirements, teaching requirements—whatever you want. I can talk about the culture here. The climate. Anything I can do to help you make your decision.”
“Thank you, um … Jason,” she said awkwardly. “But what I’d really like to do is learn more about your research with prison inmates. Your methodology and conclusions were fairly straightforward—and very profound. But I had some questions about the nuts and bolts of what you did.”
“Okay.”
“So I know you conducted MRIs on prisoners. And I know what you found. But how did you do it? In practice? Did you actually go into a prison? Or were the prisoners brought to a medical facility?”
“The entire study was done on prison grounds,” he replied.
She nodded slowly. “Yeah, that makes sense for security reasons. But I never would have guessed they’re set up to do MRIs in a maximum security prison.”
Apgar smiled. “They aren’t. But it turns out there are a number of companies that have mobile MRIs for rent or lease. The rental units are quite nice. It’s like they’ve put a doctor’s office inside the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. You just order one up. A driver brings it to the prison, is screened, drives through the gates, sets up the trailer in the prison yard, and then drives off in the cab. The trailer is parked there for months or years at a time.”
“That has to be pretty expensive.”
“Not as much as you might think,” he said. “And my lab has been awarded a significant amount of grant money—more than enough to cover it.” He paused. “And I did the study in a medium security prison, by the way. Not maximum.”
Erin’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t understand. According to your paper, you studied serial rapists, murderers, and torturers. How are these people not in maximum security prisons?”
“How much do you know about psychopathy?” he asked her.
She paused as if searching her mind. She suspected she knew almost as much about the condition as he did. “A little,” she lied.
“If you know anything, I’m sure you know that psychopaths are not psychotic. It’s unfortunate these two words are so similar, because this has caused tremendous confusion in the general public. People use the abbreviation psycho to stand for both conditions, but most of the time they use the word psycho as a stand-in for crazy. With respect to psychotics, this is true. They are crazy. They kill because little green men inside their heads tell them to. Psychopaths, on the other hand, are chillingly sane. They know exactly what they’re doing at all times. And why. They just don’t care. They have zero conscience.”
Erin nodded.
“They are also the most manipulative human beings in existence. And the smoothest liars. And they don’t feel fear, or guilt, or remorse, or doubt. If you catch them in the most bald-faced of lies, this doesn’t embarrass them in the slightest—or trip them up. They just switch gears or introduce even bigger lies to cover it up.” He paused. “And they never take responsibility or blame for anything they do. John Wayne Gacy tortured and murdered thirty-three young men and boys and buried them in the basement of his house, but was quoted as saying that he saw himself more as a victim than a perpetrator.”
Erin fought to maintain a look of interest even though all of this information she knew as well as her own name. “Fascinating,” she said.
Apgar nodded. “But getting back to your question,” he said. “The decision as to what type of facility a prisoner is put into isn’t entirely dependent on the crimes they’ve committed, but also their behavior while incarcerated. The ones I was dealing with all started in a maximum security facility, of that you can be sure.”
Erin nodded. If he had but said this simple sentence to answer her question she would have grasped the situation immediately, but she knew she would have to wait patiently while he connected the dots for her.
“Psychopaths aren’t crazy and they can be the most charming and cooperative beings on the planet to get what they want. So they are brilliant at manipulating the system. They tend to be model prisoners. The kind who are eventually transferred to medium security facilities. They enroll in counseling, take classes, pretend to become born-again Christians, anything to play the system. Not all violent criminals are psychopaths. The ones left behind in the maximum security facilities are violent for a host of other reasons, but don’t have the psychopath’s gift for manipulation.”
“I see,” said Erin with a smile. “When you explain it that way, medium security makes sense.”
“But don’t get me wrong, if you’ve never been to a prison, medium security will seem like maximum security to you. Medium isn’t the same as none. You still have the high fences, nasty coils of razor wire, guards, and multiple doors you have to get through to enter the prison.”
“Was it hard to get the psychopaths to participate in your studies?”
He shook his head. “Not at all. We pay them a dollar an hour, but even if we didn’t, they’d be happy to do it. What else are they doing?”
Erin raised her eyebrows. “A dollar an hour?”
Apgar smiled. “We actually debated if this was too much. We pay students twenty-five an hour to participate in studies. But that would be a king’s ransom to prisoners, who are paid more on the order of one to three dollars a day for their work in prison. Which they can spend in the prison canteen or in other ways I’m not sure I want to contemplate. It would be unethical to pay them more, because this would be seen as coercive when we’re asking them to sign the informed consent forms.” He paused. “But boredom isn’t the only reason they’re eager to help. It gives them another chance to be manipulative and try to exploit the system. That’s why they’re so happy to undergo group therapy and any other rehabilitation programs offered by prisons. Believe me, they don’t want to get better. They’re quite happy with themselves, and never question their own behavior, seeing it as totally rational and rewarding. Group counseling just makes them worse, because they’re able to use it as a learning experience. They don’t learn the error of their ways. They learn how to make better use of psychology to manipulate and deceive others. As if they weren’t good enough at this already. Studies have shown that psychopaths who participate in this kind of counseling are more likely to commit violent crimes when released than those who don’t.”