Empathy and reoffending in a UK probation sample

Abstract

A total of 299 men on probation were administered the Basic Empathy Scale and this measure of empathy was compared to measure of their previous offending and their reoffending 12 months later. The results suggested that low affective and cognitive empathy were associated with greater and more serious current and past offending, such as having an index offence of serious theft, having previous convictions and having previous convictions for serious violence. Interestingly, those with previous and current sex offenders did not appear to have low empathy. Low affective and cognitive empathy were also related to a validated actuarial risk assessment tool in the expected direction. However, with a few exceptions (e.g. serious theft) low empathy was not found to be related to reoffending, but this might be because the follow-up period for this study was too short to capture serious reoffending. Future prospective longitudinal studies with multiple measures of empathy and multiple measure of offending are needed to better understand the relationship between low empathy and offending.