Craig Haney is an American social psychologist and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, noted for his work on the study of capital punishment and the psychological impact of imprisonment and prison isolation since the 1970s.
It ingrained in Haney that “context matters, prisoners are people, mistreatment has consequences”, and perpetuated his passion about the psychological impact of incarceration, and his advocacy for humanization and reform.
[4][5] Haney is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and the UCSC Presidential Chair (for a three-year term which runs from 2015 until 2018) at the University of California Santa Cruz[6] where he has been a member the faculty for some 39 years.
[12] Haney has served as an expert witness in several influential United States Federal Court cases related to the prison environment and punishment, including: Toussaint v. McCarthy (1984), Madrid v. Gomez (1995), Coleman v. Brown (1995), and Ruiz v. Johnson (1999).
[15] In 2014, he spoke on the National Public Radio program, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, about the impacts of solitary confinement.