About

Craig W Haney is a Distinguished Professor in the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with affiliations in Latin American & Latino Studies, Community Studies Program, Legal Studies, and the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas. His academic background includes a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and M.A., Ph.D., and J.D. degrees from Stanford University. His research focuses on the application of social psychological principles to legal and civil rights issues, particularly examining the psychological effects of incarceration, the social histories of individuals accused or convicted of serious violent crimes, and the influence of legal procedures on attitudes and beliefs about crime and punishment. Professor Haney's work is highly applied and policy-oriented, involving a variety of research methods such as experimentation, survey research, and participant observation, often conducted in actual legal settings. His contributions include exploring the social and psychological dynamics of institutional environments, the mechanisms underlying discriminatory legal decision-making, and the social histories that influence criminal justice outcomes.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• History
• Medicine
• Public administration
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Criminology
• Psychiatry
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Making the Boys “All Right”? Good Boys, Bad Hombres: The Racial Politics of Mentoring Latino Boys in Schools, by SinghMichael V.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024. 272 pp. $29.00 paper. ISBN: 9781517912970.

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2025-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Understanding Attitudes Toward Police Surveillance: The Role of Authoritarianism, Fear of Crime, and Private-Sector Surveillance Attitudes

  Surveillance & Society · 2024-12-06 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Public attitudes toward domestic police surveillance have important implications for its political salience and regulation. An increasing number of jurisdictions have sought to regulate law enforcement surveillance, in part due to growing concerns over issues related to privacy, civil liberties, and the potential for bias (Beyea and Kebde 2021; Chivukula and Takemoto 2021; Smyth 2021). This study explores what factors help to predict and shape public attitudes toward police surveillance. Two groups of participants (n = 131 and n = 299) completed measures of authoritarianism, fear of crime, consumer surveillance technology use, and attitudes toward private-sector surveillance (such as surveillance by private companies, employers, or citizens) and police surveillance. Demographic factors (age, race/ethnicity, education level, gender, and political leaning) were also examined. Of these factors, legal authoritarianism, level of interaction with surveillance-related consumer technology, and attitudes toward private-sector surveillance were positively associated with the acceptance of police surveillance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Choosing Between Life and Death

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-02-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter addresses the various legal and psychological factors that affect the decision-making process by which capital jurors reach penalty phase verdicts. Capital jury trials are unique in a number of respects, including the fact that jurors are selected through a special process of "death qualification," consider a wide range of evidence that would otherwise be excluded in the typical criminal case, and, in the final analysis, must make the morally daunting decision of whether someone lives or dies. Social science research has documented the way that the very process of selecting a jury can affect capital jury decision-making processes, whether and how jurors consider the full range of evidence that is presented to them, the various ways that stereotypes, heuristics, and attributions might bias the sentencing verdicts ultimately rendered, and the "morally disengaging" aspects of the capital trial itself. Future research and policy implications are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• The resource team: A case study of a solitary confinement reform in Oregon

  PLoS ONE · 2023-07-26 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  The continued use of solitary confinement has sparked international public health and human rights criticisms and concerns. This carceral practice has been linked repeatedly to a range of serious psychological harms among incarcerated persons. Vulnerabilities to harm are especially dire for persons with preexisting serious mental illness ("SMI"), a group that is overrepresented in solitary confinement units. Although there have been numerous calls for the practice to be significantly reformed, curtailed, and ended altogether, few strategies exist to minimize its use for people with SMI and histories of violence against themselves or others. This case study describes the "Oregon Resource Team" (ORT), a pilot project adapted from a Norwegian officer-led, interdisciplinary team-based approach to reduce isolation and improve outcomes for incarcerated persons with SMI and histories of trauma, self-injury, and violence against others. We describe the ORT's innovative approach, the characteristics and experiences of incarcerated people who participated in it, its reported impact on the behavior, health, and well-being of incarcerated persons and correctional staff, and ways to optimize its effectiveness and expand its use.

  PublisherDOI

• The continuing unfairness of death qualification: Changing death penalty attitudes and capital jury selection.

  Psychology Public Policy and Law · 2022-01-24 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The impact of isolation on brain health

  Elsevier eBooks · 2022-05-21

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  PublisherDOI

• Sykes’s Prison in Context

  2022-04-22 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter places the prison that Gresham Sykes’s classic book made famous in a larger historical and political context. It both acknowledges the timeless insights Sykes offered about the pains of imprisonment but argues that, by ignoring the prison’s history and avoiding any focus on the prison’s harshest realities (present at the time he studied it), he rendered his account of prison life more palatable than it actually was. Despite having outwardly changed from its brutal 19th-century origins, Sykes’s mid-1950s maximum-security prison had much more in common with them than he recognized. It retained a fundamental cruelty at its core that he unwittingly seemed to sanitize.

  PublisherDOI

• Roper and race: The nature and effects of death penalty exclusions for juveniles and the “late adolescent class”.

  Journal of Pediatric Neuropsychology · 2022-12-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In Roper v. Simmons (2005), the US Supreme Court raised the minimum age at which someone could be subjected to capital punishment, ruling that no one under the age of 18 at the time of their crime could be sentenced to death. The present article discusses the legal context and rationale by which the Court established the current age-based limit on death penalty eligibility as well as the scientific basis for a recent American Psychological Association Resolution that recommended extending that limit to include members of the “late adolescent class” (i.e., persons from 18 to 20 years old). In addition, we present new data that address the little-discussed but important racial/ethnic implications of these age-based limits to capital punishment, both for the already established Roper exclusion and the APA-proposed exclusion for the late adolescent class. In fact, a much higher percentage of persons in the late adolescent class who were sentenced to death in the post-Roper era were non-White, suggesting that their age-based exclusion would help to remedy this problematic pattern.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Contributors

  Elsevier eBooks · 2022-05-21

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Correction to: “We just needed to open the door”: a case study of the quest to end solitary confinement in North Dakota

  Health & Justice · 2021-11-09 · 1 citations

  erratumOpen access

  The article (Cloud et al., 2021), Cloud, D. H., Augustine, D., Ahalt, C., et al. (2021). “We just needed to open the door”: a case study of the quest to end solitary confinement in North Dakota. Health & Justice, 9(1), 1–25, was published on October 18th, 2021, before authors had received or approved a finalized proof. As a result, the original version had multiple typographical and formatting errors throughout the paper that have since been corrected. The original article (Cloud et al., 2021) has been updated.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mona Lynch

  University of California, Irvine

  13 shared

• Philip G. Zimbardo

  10 shared

• Aída Hurtado

  7 shared

• Brie Williams

  University of California, San Francisco

  6 shared

• Joanna M. Weill

  5 shared

• Cyrus Ahalt

  University of California, San Francisco

  4 shared

• Phoebe C. Ellsworth

  4 shared

• Norman J. Finkel

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Latin American Studies

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  1993

• M.A., Latin American Studies

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  1989

• B.A., Spanish

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  1986