Publications by authors named "Craig Haney"

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.

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Unlabelled: Solitary confinement is a widespread practice in US correctional facilities. Long-standing concerns about the physical and mental health effects of solitary confinement have led to litigation, legislation, and community activism resulting in many prison systems introducing policies or implementing legal mandates to reduce or eliminate its use. Yet little is known about the nature and effectiveness of policies that states have adopted to reduce their use of solitary confinement and exactly how various reforms have actually impacted the lives of people living and working in the prisons where these reforms have taken place.

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Decades after it was conducted, the Stanford Prison Experiment endures as a classic, dramatic demonstration of the potentially destructive psychological dynamics that can be created when one group of people is given nearly total power over a group of derogated others in a powerful, dehumanizing environment such as prison. The authors of the study value the intellectually engaged alternative perspectives that continue to be used to discuss its unsettling results but reject those that are ad hominem, misleading, inaccurate, and unscientific. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

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Incarcerated individuals, over 95% of whom are eventually released, experience high burdens of chronic disease and behavioral health and social risk factors. Understanding the health needs of this population is critical to ensuring that general medicine physicians in prisons and in the community are adequately prepared to meet those needs. However, people in prison are significantly underrepresented in health research.

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Article Synopsis
  • The paper examines the ongoing use of solitary confinement in jails and prisons worldwide, noting the necessity for reform, particularly in the USA.
  • It reviews existing policies and practices, recommending a multi-level approach to limit and eventually reform the use of solitary confinement, including restrictions based on violent behavior and regular reviews of isolated prisoners' conditions.
  • The authors aim to promote evidence-based alternatives to solitary confinement, emphasizing the importance of collaboration with healthcare and criminal justice experts to improve the treatment of incarcerated individuals.
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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.

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This research examined the effects of several versions of capital penalty phase instructions on juror comprehension. Study One documented the impact of California's recently implemented "plain language" instruction. It showed that although the new instruction has clear advantages over the previous version, significant comprehension problems remain.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated some important lessons about the power of social situations, settings, and structures to shape and transform behavior. At the time the study was done, the authors scrupulously addressed the issue of whether and how the dispositions or personality traits of the participants might have affected the results. Here the authors renew and reaffirm their original interpretation of the results and apply this perspective to some recent socially and politically significant events.

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This study focused on whether and how deliberations affected the comprehension of capital penalty phase jury instructions and patterns of racially 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. The participants provided their initial "straw" sentencing verdicts individually and then deliberated in simulated 4-7 person "juries.

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