The Direct and Indirect Costs of Psychopaths on Society

The cost of psychopathic damage is exorbitant and largely incalculable. There are direct costs that society incurs that can be estimated, but also incalculable indirect costs and consequential damages attributable to the victimization psychopaths cause.

Indirect and intangible costs of psychopathic victimization

Psychopaths are sensation seekers who do not respect the laws, manners, or mores of society.¹ Psychopathic destruction impacts the victims and extends to their families, friends, and community. Psychopathy researcher J. Reid Meloy characterizes psychopaths as “destroyers of goodness.”² Those victimized by psychopaths are often traumatized for the rest of their lives, impacting countless others. Psychopaths cause physical, mental, and emotional distress. The intangible costs coupled with indirect costs cannot be quantified.

The emotional ruin of psychopathic victimization is incalculable

By shattering the lives of their victims, psychopaths ruin happiness and spoil joy. They diminish hope, causing people to lose faith in others as well as in themselves. The costs of this type of harm in the wake of psychopathic destruction will never be known. The confusion and misery they create take an enormous toll on their victims’ health and well-being. The personal cost to each of those victimized is incalculable. The consequential financial impact on families and communities is inestimable.

Who can calculate the costs of the many treatments and protocols it takes to heal from the suffering and misery that one psychopath can cause? Consider the many trips to doctors, the cost of medication, the absence from work, countless trips to counselors, and the many remedies sought from gurus and health advisors to calm mind—body—soul. In many cases, the suffering they have caused will never be ameliorated.

Source: John Guccione advergroup/Pexels

Direct costs are huge and difficult to determine

There have been attempts to quantify the direct costs associated with some high-profile criminal cases. One such effort involved the direct costs associated with the prosecution of David Berkowitz, a serial killer psychopath who referred to himself as the “Son of Sam.”

Berkowitz terrorized New York City in the mid-1970s, killing six people and wounding seven others. His arrest in August 1977 and subsequent conviction produced measurable cost statistics. The cost of the Son of Sam investigation and trial was upwards of $15 million. This was just the cost of one trial for one psychopath, measured in 1977 dollars.

The direct costs of trials of psychopaths are prohibitive. The litigation can go on for years. For example, Ted Bundy, another serial killer psychopath, was first arrested in 1975. He murdered dozens of young women and girls in the 1970s and was executed in January 1989 at the Florida State Prison in Raiford. Costs associated with his trial and litigation were between $6 to $7 million.³ The costs included two trials, salaries, expenses for police investigations, eight years of appeals, and other related costs.

Statistical approximations of direct costs

Some have attempted to quantify the direct costs of incarcerated psychopaths using statistical analysis. Psychopathy researcher Kent Kiehl and former Colorado district court judge Morris Hoffman have said that such direct costs related to “trials, prison sentences, recidivism and damage to property and victims [constitute] an annual economic burden of approximately $460 billion in the United States alone.”⁴ That estimation was from 2009.

More recently, psychology professor Dylan Gatner of Simon Fraser University authored a report examining the economic costs of crime in North America attributable to people with psychopathic personality disorder (PPD). His estimate of PPD-related costs of crime in the United States is nearly $1.6 trillion annually.⁵ This staggering number is particularly problematic, assuming the validity of psychopathy expert J. Reid Meloy’s observation some years ago that “psychopathy, and psychopathic disturbance, is a growing clinical and, therefore, sociocultural phenomenon.”⁶

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The Kiehl and Gatner statistics cover only the direct costs of incarcerated psychopaths. We can only imagine the size of the direct costs caused by nonincarcerated psychopaths and their cumulative impact on society. "Huge" does not even come close to an approximation.