Craig Haney

Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and “Supermax” Confinement

This article discusses the recent increase in the use of solitary-like confinement, especially the rise of so-called supermax prisons and the special mental health issues and challenges they pose. After briefly discussing the nature of these specialized and increasingly widespread units and the forces that have given rise to them, the article reviews some of the unique mental-health-related issues they present, including the large literature that exists on the negative psychological effects of isolation and the unusually high percentage of mentally ill prisoners who are confined there. It ends with a brief discussion of recent caselaw that addresses some of these mental health issues and suggests that the courts, though in some ways appropriately solicitous of the plight of mentally ill supermax prisoners, have overlooked some of the broader psychological problems these units create.

The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy Twenty-Five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment

In this article, the authors reflect on the lessons of their Stanford Prison Experiment, some 25 years after conducting it. They review the quarter century of change in criminal justice and correctional policies that has transpired since the Stanford Prison Experiment and then develop a series of reform-oriented proposals drawn from this and related studies on the power of social situations and institutional settings that can be applied to the current crisis in American corrections.

Cycles of Pain: Risk Factors in the Lives of Incarcerated Mothers and Their Children

This study extends the risk factors model of background or social history analysis to the lives of incarcerated mothers. Interviews were conducted with a sample of incarcerated mothers. The presence of a number of criminogenic influences such as poverty, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and witnessing violence in the lives of women incarcerated for primarily nonviolent—largely drug-related—offenses and in the lives of their children were identified. The implications of these findings for understanding female criminality and breaking the so-called cycle of crime are discussed.

Discrimination and Instructional Comprehension: Guided Discretion, Racial Bias, and the Death Penalty

This study links two previously unrelated lines of research: the lack of comprehension of capital penalty-phase jury instructions and discriminatory death sentencing. Jury-eligible subjects were randomly assigned to view one of four versions of a simulated capital penalty trial in which the race of defendant (Black or White) and the race of victim (Black or White) were varied orthogonally. Dependent measures included a sentencing verdict (life without the possibility of parole or the death penalty), ratings of penalty phase evidence, and a test of instructional comprehension. Results indicated that instructional comprehension was poor overall and that, although Black defendants were treated only slightly more punitively than White defendants in general, discriminatory effects were concentrated among participants whose comprehension was poorest. In addition, the use of penalty phase evidence differed as a function of race of defendant and whether the participant sentenced the defendant to life or death. The study suggest that racially biased and capricious death sentencing may be in part caused or exacerbated by the inability to comprehend penalty phase instructions.

On the selection of capital juries

Death qualification may bias capital juries not only because it alters the composition of the group “qualified” to sit, but also because it exposes them to an unusual and suggestive legal process. This study examined some of the effects of that process. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which they were exposed to standard criminalvoir dire that either included death qualification or did not. Subjects who were exposed to death qualification were significantly more conviction prone, more likely to believe that other trial participants thought the defendant was guilty, were more likely to sentence him to death, and believed that the law disapproves of death penalty opposition. Several psychological features of the death-qualification process are suggested to account for the biasing effects.

“Modern” death qualification

We report on the results of a comprehensive statewide survey of death penalty attitudes in which respondents were categorized in terms of their death-qualified or excludable status under several different Supreme Court doctrines governing the death-qualification process. We found that although changes in public opinion with respect to the death penalty in general have altered the relative sizes of the death-qualified and excludable groups, significant differences remain between them on a number of attitudinal dimensions, no matter which doctrines are employed to define these groups. We discuss the implications of these recent data, especially with respect to the Supreme Courts continued reference to the death-qualified jury as an index of community standards with respect to the death penalty itself.

A culture of harm: taming the dynamics of cruelty in supermax prisons

This article examines the heightened risk of prisoner abuse that is created in supermax prison settings. It suggests that a combination of powerful contextual forces to which correctional officers are exposed can influence and affect them in ways that may engender a culture of mistreatment or harm. Those forces include a problematic set of ideological beliefs, a surrounding environment or ecology that is structured in such a way as to encourage cruelty, and a particularly intense—even desperate—set of interpersonal dynamics created between prisoners and guards. The importance of taking this heightened potential for abuse into account when discussing the negative effects of supermax and proposals for its reform is discussed.

How Health Care Reform Can Transform The Health Of Criminal Justice–Involved Individuals

Provisions of the Affordable Care Act offer new opportunities to apply a public health and medical perspective to the complex relationship between involvement in the criminal justice system and the existence of fundamental health disparities. Incarceration can cause harm to individual and community health, but prisons and jails also hold enormous potential to play an active and beneficial role in the health care system and, ultimately, to improving health. Traditionally, incarcerated populations have been incorrectly viewed as isolated and self-contained communities with only peripheral importance to the public health at large. This misconception has resulted in missed opportunities to positively affect the health of both the individuals and the imprisoned community as a whole and potentially to mitigate risk behaviors that may contribute to incarceration. Both community and correctional health care professionals can capitalize on these opportunities by working together to advocate for the health of the criminal justice-involved population and their communities. We present a set of recommendations for the improvement of both correctional health care, such as improving systems of external oversight and quality management, and access to community-based care, including establishing strategies for postrelease care and medical record transfers.

The Fourteenth Amendment and symbolic legality

This article examines several key tensions in thesymbolic legality or social representation of our societys core legal values. It argues that present Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence ignores the realities of contemporary social life and serves up ineffective due process protections as poor substitutes for genuine or meaningful equal protection remedies. By documenting the importance situation and context and verifying the limits of due process, social science data underscore the rift between social reality and equal protection rhetoric and thereby increase existing tensions in the symbolic legality.

Psychology and legal change: The impact of a decade.

This article takes stock of one aspect of psychologically based empirical jurisprudence-its role in legal change over the last decade. It assesses the ways in which the increased involvement of psychology in the legal process has influenced and affected the nature and direction of legal change. While acknowledging very real and tangible successes, it also identifies several problem areas, ones whose significance may grow in light of an increasingly unsympathetic, conservative judiciary. The direction of psychology and law, as an applied academic discipline, and the future of empirically based legal change are also examined.