AUTHOR'S RESPONSE The American Crime Factory

I am grateful to the authors of foregoing reviews of my The Antisocial Personalities for their generous, interesting, and provocative comments~omments that suggest that at least the last of these adjectives applies also to the book. The reviews also suggest that there are several issues on which the book was not as clear as I had hoped. One of these is the vexed question of traits versus types, raised by Rowe, but fortunately Patrick has already explicated my views on this as well as I could do myself. In what follows, I first try to clarify some other matters raised in the reviews before turning to an issue discussed especially by Rowe, the relative importance of parenting and peer groups for the socialization of children. This question is at the heart of what I believe to be the most important social problem of our time, the prevention of sociopathy.