Searching For Humanity

Dear Governor Newsom. Public. Craig Haney is a social psychologist and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Renowned for his work on the front lines of the criminal justice system. His groundbreaking research on capital punishment and the psychological impact of imprisonment and isolation lends great credence to the fact that proactive prevent mention is far more effective than reactive punishment when it comes to reducing criminal behavior.

In what capacity did you work on Jarvis Master's trial back in the late eighties. In Jarvis case, I was in a position that I'm often in capital cases, which is I'm the person whose job it is to try to tell the client's life story. It's come to be called a social historian in those days. I'm not sure whether that term was around. I don't do clinical assessments.

I don't I don't diagnose people. I'd rather try to understand their biographical history as a way of understanding the path or the course of their life, to put it in context for the drawers, so the drawers can understand the various experiences and events and in many instances, traumas that affected a capital defendant in the course of his or her life, so that they can appreciate it, hopefully feel some compassion, gained, some understanding or insight that they

otherwise wouldn't have without that story being told in as much detail as possible. I asked Jarvis about his early memories of Professor Haney. He was one of those people that initially I thought would not get it. You know. He was one of those people that I said earlier, who were hired to come here and describe my life story, this professor with all these plaques on the wall, and you know, I was not who I am today. So and I didn't like people with plaques on their wall

because of my childhood experience. You know, these social workers, and they really missed me up. But he did get it. And that's what surprised me about him. He did get it. You know. He wasn't writing reports to you know, show his expertise. He was writing his reports in giving testimony to what she believed was the truth about what was

going on in my life. M hmm. And of course, you know, I checked and see every word he ever wrote about me, you know, and as I kept reading things, you know, I was amazed at this white man can talk about things that I never thought he had the experience to know about. But he did. He did. My conversation with Professor Haney continues, when you first met Jarvis, how long did it take for you to garner a

clear picture of the man himself and his story? Well, his story was something that took me a very long time to fully grasp or understand, because it required me not just to spend a lot of time with Jarvis, which I did do, and which which I which I benefited from greatly and and and frankly very much enjoyed. I I guy got to know him well, although not

right away. And I'll get to that in a second part of the task of understanding the course of someone's life is certainly to talk with them as much as you can and open them up as much as possible about their life, but also to talk to as many other people as possible about them. So I traveled to Los Angeles a number of times. I met his family, I spent a lot of time with him. I went

into the neighborhoods where he grew up. We talked to teachers, neighbors, people who knew him, really to try to develop an understanding of what his life had been as he was growing up, and then also as he had increasing contacts with the criminal justice system, um what those places were like, what they were like for him. I had already known

a fair amount about the California prison system. Is part of part of how I got into doing this kind of work was that I uh, while I was still a graduate student at Stanford, I was one of the researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment, and as a young student, that experience really re oriented my entire professional life. So I began to study the prisons, real prisons, not simulated prisons, while I was still in graduate school, and so by the time I graduated from Stanford with with a PhD,

and then I went to law school. I had a lot of familiarity with the California prison system. I studied it. I'd worked on cases already, some constitutional challenges to conditions the confinement in the California prison system, and so I had expertise in how people are shaped and affected by contact with the criminal justice system. Many people who end up in death penalty trials have been in the system earlier times in their life, and they've been affected and

in some sense damaged by that system. Contrary to public opinion, the prison system does not, and has not for decades, rehabilitated people. It's not been devoted to that, sadly, but it does do other things to them, and it can make whatever problems they entered the system with worse. And in any event, whether they do that or not, whether those environments do it or not, they're very difficult places

in which to live. And I think in cases where a death penalty client has had problems in prison or jail, and certainly in any case where crime was committed in a prison or jail the crime for which they are on trial, it's important to be able to explain to the joy what it's like to live in that kind of an environment, what it does to you, what kind of survival strategies you have to adopt, and how people in prison find themselves doing things in prison that they

would not otherwise do under any other circumstances because of the contingencies that they faced on a on a daily basis. So for me in Jarvis's case, certainly, but in other cases as well, that ends up being part of the life story. A lot of times our clients lives are lived partly in families and neighborhoods, but partly also in different parts of the criminal justice system, and so that part of the story was important for me to tell.

In jo Barvis's case, also the cradle to death throw pipeline exactly exactly his case was a perfect example of that. And Jarvis speaks to the fact that back in the eighties as opposed to now, that the prison San Quentin was such a such a healthscape back and much more violent than it is now, and and that kind of did that play into your evaluation of him? It did.

I had been involved in lawsuits about conditions of confinement in San Quentin, about the over crowding in San Quentin, the use of what in those days were called lock up units or UH management control units. In those days, san Quentin had an enormous one. There was a tremendous amount of violence. I've been in the adjustment center many times, and I mean San Quentin today, with the exception of death Row, there's no relationship to San Quentin. In those days.

It was a justifiably notorious maximum security prison in the California system did and fulsome were as notorious as any prisons in the United States at the time. And so part of my job was to try to explain that to Jarvis's jury and he he of course, helped me do that. But you me earlier. How quickly did I come to know him? And and and I understand him? And it was eventually I got to know him very well, and I felt very close to him, and I think we had a good relationship and good report. But it

didn't start off that way. Uh. Jarvis, in the initial stages of my involvement in the case, did not want anything to do with psychologists at all. And Michael Satris, his attorney, had sent us, Uh, how should I put it, a conventional psychologist into evaluate Jarvis before I went to see him, and I don't even remember who it was he went in to see him, but that person did a very kind of conventional work up, and it was

a kind of superficial analysis of who Jarvis was. He looked at his record, he made a lot of assumptions of that record meant about Jarvis as a person. He reached a number of i questionable conclusions about Jarvis as a person. It was obvious that he didn't that he didn't understand at all who job Jarvis was was obviously

even to me and I hadn't yet met Jarvis. So Michael gave me a copy of this report before I went to see Jervis, and I read it and I said to him, Michael, you want me to follow this. I mean, this is gonna this is gonna be a very difficult second act, because you know, he's not gonna be happy to see another person who's coming in with the label of psychologists. And Michael said, well, you just, you know, explain to him that you're different, you know,

you're a different kind of psychologist. And I said, well, yeah, of course, but it's gonna be it's gonna be awkward in the beginning anyway, marched over to San Quentin and went went in to see Jarvis, and Jarvis came out and sat down across from me with a scowl on his face and sized me up and and and I'm and I launched into my I'm um, this is the kind of psycholog just I am. I'm not here to diagnose you. I'm not here to put you in a cubby hole. I want to understand you. I want to

get to know you. And as I was talking to him, as I had in the middle of my spiel about how he should talk to me because I was different from this other person, he very methodically began to tear that report little pieces, and he made a very neat, fairly good sized little pile of these little pieces of that report. And then he pushed the pile across the table to me until it was sitting in front of me. And I'm still not quite finished with my explanation to

him about why I'm different from these other folks. And he looked at me and he said, stop stop. That that he pointed to the pile is what I think of you people. And that's how our relationship began. So it was. Yeah, it's one of a more dramatic opening moments in my relationship with the client. And I laughed. I started laughing, and I said, I just want to

tell you that was the best. I said, I've got a lot of clients up to this point, but that right, that move right there was the best one I've ever seen. We both started laughing, I mean, you know, and I said, I don't blame you. If somebody had written that about me, I would rip it up like that too. Yeah, that's not what I'm gonna do. So I just pushed the stuff off and said, hey, well, I said, let's start from scratch. Okay, it's not going to end with that.

It's going to end with something different. And I want to get to know you the way this person didn't. Jarvis Masters on his impression of Professor Craig Haney, he did say, so, I don't think you might here, but you knew I was in it. Yeah, you know, And you know, when someone's in trouble like I was, you look for someone to distrust, used to be too in their own way, not in my way, but in their own way, recognized me being in and he did, you know, he did and he wrote in a way that he

was describing an innocent person. So he became, you know, my champion, you know, someone who I knew and understood to know the truth. And I gave him major props for that, major props. You know, did you sit with him a lot? Did you tell him your story from your point of view? Yes, what he did was it was stack the stuff that he had to investigate and read to define who I was to a court room, to a jury. And I did trust him when he

did take you know, when he did testify. But what he did was he did he took all that chunk and he made me a human being. He made me out of a human being that I never had. That. Oh that that that person who can do that on their own terms? You know, uh what everything make? You know, most people, you know, they would come to like me because of who I was and blah blah blah. But for someone to read all that junk, you know, in

a lot of the junkless truth. You know, my mother was this if my father was that he cave such a a a a narrative to that. That really really gave me the idea that I know the truth that I can trust this man up next. With over four decades devoted to the study and enhancement of the criminal justice system, having worked tirelessly for the defense of countless imprisoned clients, Professor Craig Haney explains why Jarvis case continues

to haunt him to this day. Since the nineteen seventies, social psychologist Craig Haney has worked on cases of countless criminal defendants, constructing the fullness of their life stories in order to provide juries with more than just a simple snapshot into the violence of their alleged crimes. I asked him why, after thirty years, Jarvis Master's case continues to haunt him to this day. It haunts me because you know, I've worked on many of these cases over the years.

I've worked on many of them before Jarvis this case, and I've worked on many many of them since then.

And you know, in some cases, no matter what you do, the case is overwhelming, and for various reasons, you can't come the amount of aggravation that's been presented, and you can't quite get through to the jury about the humanity of the defendant and how and why the things that happened to him in his life changed and affected him in ways that helped to account for the things that he did, events and experiences, none of none of which he chose, but which happened to him, and which he

reacted to and and reacted to in understandable ways, maybe ways that you or I or the jury might not have reacted to, but nonetheless that are understandable. You can understand why a person in his position and the defendant's position would act the way he did, not just in the crime for which trial, but in other things that

they've done in their life. And I really thought that in Jarvis's case, there was a really a compelling story that needed to be told, and that that if your jury heard that story, that they that they would understand his life in the same way that I did, and and show compassion and reach her life rather than a death verdict. We you know, we faced a number of

obstacles in the case. There was I thought an extraordinarily aggressive prosecutor who I frankly thought did things that bordered on unethical, threatened at one point in the case to arrest me because she said I was practicing psychology without a license, and which was a bizarre So the first time I've ever heard this, and she sprung with saw me when I was on the witness stand in front of the judge and so on, not in front of the jury, but told the judge that she felt duty

bound to form the court that if I testified the way she thought I was going to testify, that she was prepared to arrest me, and then I should get legal counsel um because I was going to be in custody by the end of the day. In Michael Statris's closing statements, he comes to your defense in that regard that that you your experiences above and beyond what is necessary. Yeah. So it was the first time I had ever heard, as I recall, and so it was a little unsettling.

But she, you know, she should have pulled it out of her hat, and knowing, I think, in her heart of hearts, knowing full well that she could not arrest me for this, and I was not violating the law. It professors don't have a license anymore than a police officer needs a license to make observations about human behavior. Was that you know you have wasn't providing treatment for jarvis. I wasn't providing a diagnosis. I wasn't doing anything that was beyond my area of even by that point fairly

significant expertise. But that was the kind of that was that that's the tenor of that case. I mean that just that kind of trick for example, And you know, I think it unsettled the judge. Judge Sabbath didn't really know what to do with that. Shavisly wasn't gonna let me be arrested, but she she wasn't sure what this was all about, and so she, you know, frankly handicapped

my testimony. Um, she she put limits on what it was I was allowed to say, limits that I never that I had not been subjected to before and that I frankly have never been subjected to since. And and you know, just really overreached, I thought, in a I thought ethically questionable way. And so we were we couldn't tell the story the way we wanted, and I think it was it haunts me because of the outcome, of course, because of the kind of person that I knew that

I had come to know Jarvis. To be explain that person that you came to know. Even in those days, there was a stability and a solid center to to Jarvis Masters the sheer amount of trauma to which he was exposed both outside and inside the prison system. Trauma that he experienced even before he got to prison, certainly, trauma that he experienced once inside was profound. And most people who have been subjected to that manifest kind of

inner instability around it is perfectly understandable. It's the consequence of trauma. Jarvis had had struggled really and managed to make coherence out of his life and out of his self. You know, in a way that that was just extraordinarily impressive, and he was even in those days and obviously very unusual, impressive in terms of how he carried himself, Impressive in terms of how he dealt with the things that were

happening to him. There was a kind of inner balance and spicism to just a kind of a sense of character from him, and had by the end of that case, a lot of genuine personal affection for him, you know, one human being to another, not just as a as a client in a case I mean obviously formed relationships with all your clients, but in his case, I mean, knowing what he had been through in his life, I mean, it's my job to understand those things, and to study it really and then to be able to see him

act with such dignity and equanimity in our day to day interactions, and watching how he dealt with the way that, you know, the things that were happening in the case and the gyrations of the prosecutor and so on. I left it with a lot of the case, with a lot of respect for him, and was devastated when when when the Jewelry returned to death verd and was equally devastated when Judge Sabbat refused to set it aside um, which I don't you know, I didn't know Beverly Sabbath.

She you know, she had a decent reputation as a judge. She had acted I thought, responsibly in the case that had been brought about conditions at San Quentins. She was not naive about about that environment. And I really did think that she would see as I did, the joyous Verdick as a mistake and set it aside. And you know, I wrote a letter to her, you know, before the actual final sentencing, to try to persuade her, but she um she was unmovable or unmoved. I don't know if

she was unmovable. But she was unmoved in this case, and I don't to this day, I don't know why. And that was the second really profoundly disappointing outcome in the case. I mean, the first one was the joy verdict, and then the second one was Judge Sabbath's unwillingness to overturn that verdict, which I thought was clearly wrong. When the jury came back with the verdict, did you have

any inclination that it would be death? I was feeling positive, guardedly positive, because I thought that even though we had been handicapped in terms of what we were able to present, that we had presented enough that that that the story we had presented was compelling enough that the jury would appreciate Jarvis's life and they would weigh it decisively in

the balance. So I was guardedly optimistic. I mean, I you know, I certainly knew how hard the prosecutor was pressing for death and the lens to what she went in order to achieve that verdict, But I thought, nonetheless, we had done enough. I hoped anyway, that we had done enough. And then, as I said, I hoped, after the jury's verdict that we that the judge saw what what we what we saw and what we knew about Jarvis, she saw enough of it to know that the jury

had made a mistake. I was very hopeful, you know, again, maybe naively so, but I was hopeful that she would do the right thing, and was in I was in the courtroom that attended the sentence and hearing, hoping that she would rule from the bench that she looked at the facts of the case. She was president, of course for the entire trial, and that she considered all the evidence, who decided that that life was the appropriate sense. Then,

of course she didn't do that. Do You have a new book that's out this year called Criminality in Context Psychological Foundations of Criminal Justice Reform and analyzes forty years of research um into the root causes of criminal behavior. You make the argument that meaningful criminal justice reform depends on changing the public narrative about who commits the crimes. How do you change a public narrative That seems like

a big job. Yeah, it is a big job, you know, I think you know, I'm a professor, So we write books and we accumulate evidence, and so that book is h I view it as a kind of a building block in the process of changing this narrative. So what I try to do in that book is to pull together all of the evidence about the issues a lot of the issues that we've been talking about. That people are changed and affected in early stages in their lives.

That people who experience trauma, who experience abuse and deprivation, who are acted upon negatively by the institutions in our society, schools, foster care system, juvenile justice institutions, jails, prisons, all of which oftentimes inflict trauma rather than treatment or rehabilitation. That people's lives are profoundly changed and affected by those experiences in the course of their life. And that and that people commit crimes for reasons, and those are the reasons.

They don't commit crimes because they're inherently defective. They commit crimes because their lives have been defective and certain respects, they've been mistreated. Oftentimes they've been mistreated by parents who themselves are dealing with trauma. So you know much trauma in the childhood use literature is intergenerational. Um, you know, the parents who mistreat their children have typically themselves been mistreated.

This doesn't you know this doesn't. This doesn't come out in the vacuum, and they live, as Jarvish did, in communities that are uncaring, um, where they're exposed to violence at very early ages. Um. You know, many of my clients are dodging bullets, you know, at the time other kids are selling Girl Scout cookies. We tend in the legal system to take a kind of simplistic view of nature of crime, and we view it as a simple choice that people may prosecutors are fond of this this

particular narrative I call it in in the book. I call it the crime master narrative, that people simply make a choice, and that all of us are equally autonomous and free, and we're all encumbered by our past, and we're all therefore equally capable of making one choice or another. And if somebody commits a crime, then they're just freely choosing to do that, the same way anybody else would freely choose to go to the grocery store or get a PhD. In psychology. It's just a choice, and it's

nowhere near that simple. And we know what the science knows it. So I filled that book with all the science to the contrary that basically lays out in careful detail exactly what we know about exactly why people engage in crime. There is actually no mystery to it. It has to do with the with their life stories. It has to do with the lives that they lived, the experiences that they've had, many, if not most, of which

they had no choice over. And we're not giving the tools to overcome and and instead we're subjected to institute as that made the issues worse, not better, um and ultimately including prisons. Uh. And so that's you know, that's the story that we that we need to come to understand so much better in the society. You have to stop demonizing people who engage in crime, and the average citizen has to realize that somebody who engages in the crime is just like them, except for the life they've lived.

How do we change the narrative though? Across the country it just just engage in conversations like this, is it just relative or inch by inch? I'm afraid, I mean I had you know you work in whatever, or mean you're you're you know, you're privileged enough to work in So you have a podcast, I have a classroom. We try to write, We try to try to talk to

as many people as we can. We try to nudge the media to tell this story better, um to to to try to humanize everybody who goes through the system, because they are we all start off in the same place, and why we end up in different places because of the things that have happened to us along the way. We all intuitively understand that about our children, right, so we we know that we need to protect our our own children from these bad events and traumas because we

know it can shape their lives in negative ways. Somehow, there's a disconnect when we look at other people's children and then or other people's children grown up and don't understand that those same consequences that we worried might have affected our own children, so we protect them from the traumas that might lead in that direction. Um have had that impact on on on other people who weren't protected.

Um And I mean, that's just that's a story that I think has to be told again and again and again. In that book, I wanted to lay out partly for the public, but also partly for the legal system, which

systematically ignores this. It's the you know, it's the legal system that acts as though we're all equally autonomous and free and are going to judge are going to judge jarvis Is life the same way they're going to judge my life, when the two lives were fundamentally different through no fault or doing of our own right, I mean, and that system steadfastly refuses to take into account what we know about why people do what they do and why they end up in the positions they end up in.

And so that's another reason why I tried to amass as much information and as much data as I could about what we know about all aspects of people's lives and how all of our lives are. The accumulation of the things that have happened to us in these various sectors of our life is such a fascinating and wonderful story of success. Just that he's maintained that core and so he's kind of an ideal archetype and that respect, you know, I mean, the fact that he's been able

to publish books and and tell his personal story. And did you read David Cheff's book The Buddhist on Death row Um just such a beautiful way too show that these are real people in there with depths of heart and soul and and and in many respects as extraordinary as Jarvis is. And he is, he's extraordinary, and I recognize him as extraordinary even many years ago. As I told you when I when I first got to know him. There are wonderful human qualities to all of the people

in prison, we just don't get to know them. And you know, Jarvis is unique gifts. I mean, he is, he is extraordinary, and they don't want to suggest that there anything at all average about him. But his unique gifts is that he's legible. He's so extraordinary that he's his uniqueness and his wonderful human traits are legible to other people because he as these other talents. But the other people in prison have these traits and qualities as well.

They're just not as legible. They're just not visible to other people. But it doesn't mean they're not there, and it doesn't mean if given the opportunity to demonstrate them or exercise them, they would not be to be able to do so, of course, of course. Well, Craig, Professor Haney, thank you, thank you, thank you so very much. Um. I've been talking with Jarvis. He's doing well, you know, he had COVID do. But he's he's on the men, and he's in very good spirits and he's really really

excited about the Kirkland and Lys team. There's seven or eight of them, and they've been very vigilant, and he feels well represented, and I think he's optimistic about what's going to happen in the next year or so. Great, great, well by all means given my regards, I will I absolutely will. Dave untacted me about the case in and I've agreed to work with them. Good, okay, okay, okay,

all right, I appreciate it next week. The practice of solitary confinement goes by many names, including disciplinary confinement, security housing, and restricted housing, all our euphemisms to soften the harsh and torturous reality of solitary Jarvis shares how he was able to survive for twenty two years locked away at a nine by four cell twenty three to twenty four hours a day. This episode was written and produced by

Donna Fazzari and myself, Corny Cole. Our theme song sentenced is compliments of the band Stick Figure from their album Set in Stone. Stu Sternbach composed the original music. Nate Defort did the sound design. For more information on Jarvis and to find out how you can follow his case and support his cause, please visit free Jarvis dot org. For more podcasts. For my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H