The Study

Little is known about high-IQ criminals because they are statistically rare. Only 2 percent of the general population has an IQ score of over 130 and only one in two thousand possesses an IQ of over 150. Another reason little is known is that few are caught. The differential detection hypothesis suggests that people with high IQs are less likely to be detected, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated than others. Prison studies, therefore, are of limited utility, and to study elite crime, self-report is essential. There is, however, little advantage for high-IQ individuals to participate in self-report research—and potentially much to lose. High-IQ individuals often possess the means to block research inquiries. This chapter describes the methodology of the study, including ethical and legal challenges associated with adult self-report research. It describes the study’s sampling, the design of the self-report questionnaire, the rationale and logistics of the follow-up interviews, and the structure of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-R).

Discussion and Conclusion

This chapter reviews the core findings of the study, describes some of its key limitations, and identifies some of its strengths. The chapter also discusses the wider implications of the work. The link between IQ and crime is contentious, because it has fundamental implications for criminal justice and public policy. If IQ is unrelated to crime and everyone has the same propensity to follow or defy the law, crime is a choice and punishment operates as a price for antisocial behavior. But if IQ differences mean that it is harder for some people to follow the law than others, then claims of “equal justice under law” are harder to sustain. And if social interventions cannot change IQ, difficult questions of when and how to absolve defendants of criminal culpability must be confronted.

Crime, Genius, and Criminal Genius

This chapter describes the idea of “genius,” which has evolved since its origins as a Roman tutelary spirit to include conceptions of eminence, creativity, and intelligence. In the Renaissance, genius became associated with madness (an association that endures today). Francis Galton linked genius to eminence and noted that eminent parents gave birth to eminent offspring. Genius became associated with intelligence during the early twentieth century, prompted by the rise of IQ testing. Criminologists who have studied intelligence and crime have generally adopted one of three approaches: (1) most researchers have argued that delinquency and crime are associated with below-average IQ; (2) some researchers have suggested that IQ is distributed equally across criminal and noncriminal populations; and (3) a few researchers have suggested that criminals possess higher IQs than noncriminals.

Explanations for High-IQ Crime

This chapter describes the qualitative analyses derived from the forty-four follow-up interviews. It relays the life history of “Faulkner,” a drug trafficker with a 162 IQ who claims to have killed fifteen people. The chapter also describes the analysis of qualitative materials in light of Travis Hirschi’s theory of social bonds, noting that the interviews were consistent with explanations of crime based upon weakened social bonds (including elements of attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief). The chapter asks whether high IQ is always a protective factor or whether, at some levels and under some circumstances, it might operate as a criminogenic risk factor.

The Offenses

This chapter describes the self-reports for seventy-two different offenses. Rates of prevalence (the percentage of the sample reporting an offense), incidence (the number of offenses reported by the sample), and recency (the number of offenses committed within the previous year) are described, and are organized into nine crime types, ranging from minor infractions to capital felonies: (1) violent crimes; (2) sex crimes; (3) white-collar crimes; (4) drug crimes; (5) property crimes; (6) professional misconduct; (7) vehicular offenses; (8) justice-system offenses; and (9) a handful of miscellaneous offenses. Contrary to prevailing theories of IQ and crime, high-IQ index respondents reported higher prevalence rates than controls for fifty of the seventy-two offenses and, overall, reported higher incidence rates than controls.

Prosecution and Punishment

This chapter describes the arrest and conviction rates of the index and control groups. The data are consistent with the differential detection and differential reaction hypotheses: index respondents reported more successful offenses (i.e., offenses that did not end in arrest or conviction) than controls. Then, building upon the US Supreme Court’s logic in Atkins v. Virginia (prohibiting the execution of mentally retarded defendants), it explores the culpability of high-IQ offenders. Noting that people with genius-level IQ scores are as statistically abnormal as the mentally handicapped defendants protected under Atkins, it asks whether criminal geniuses, vis-à-vis normal offenders, are equally, less, or more culpable. If it is true that people separated by thirty IQ points cannot communicate meaningfully, gifted defendants might be functionally insane because of social isolation. The chapter also describes several challenges associated with punishing high-IQ offenders.

The Participants

This chapter describes the index and control group respondents. It describes their demographics: IQ, sex, age, ethnicity/race, nationality, religion, education, occupation, income, marital status, and sexual orientation. It relates these variables to self-reported offending. The characteristics of the most criminal 20 percent (using measures that include crime frequency and crime seriousness) are compared with those of the least criminal 20 percent (including abstainers, who claim to have committed no offenses). The chapter also describes respondents’ personality traits (as measured by the revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire) and their experiences with mental illness and mental health treatment, as well as the books, movies, and famous figures that shaped the respondents’ thinking and influenced their behavior.

Introduction

Criminologists estimate the true volume of crime—the “dark figure”—to be approximately four times the size of crime reported in official statistics. Most crime goes unrecorded, and criminologists know far more about the criminal behavior of the poor, uneducated, and young than they do about the crimes of the wealthy, educated, and powerful. Although the criminal genius is a cherished villain in history (e.g., Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, Theodore Kaczynski, and Caryl Chessman), literature (e.g., Raskolnikov, Professor Moriarty, and John Galt), and film (e.g., Hannibal Lecter, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Dr. Mabuse, and Ozymandias), little is actually known about the crimes of those possessing above-average IQ.