PrisonWorld: How Mass Incarceration Transformed U.S. Prisons

Faculty research lecture features prison and incarceration expert Craig Haney
Psychology professor has documented the long-term psychological damage of incarceration in the United States
By Guy Lasnier

No one has documented the long-term psychological damage of incarceration in the United States more than UC Santa Cruz psychology professor Craig Haney.

Haney, who holds psychology and law degrees, has spent his entire career watching prison populations grow while probing the psychology of imprisonment and the causes of violent crime. He has interviewed thousands of prisoners, many on death row or in solitary confinement in the nation’s growing stable of “supermax” prisons.

Haney has been selected to deliver the 49th annual Faculty Research Lecture scheduled for Tuesday, April 7, 2015, at 7 p.m. at the Music Recital Hall on the UC Santa Cruz campus. The lecture is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and a reception will immediately follow.

Haney's lecture is titled "PrisonWorld: How Mass Incarceration Transformed U.S. Prisons, Impacted Prisoners, and Changed American Society.” The faculty research lecturer is selected each year by UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate.

Since the "war on drugs" in the early 1970s, U.S. prison numbers grew to account for 25 percent of all the world's prisoners even though the nation amounts to only 5 percent of the world's population. Haney has witnessed firsthand the profound transformation that has taken place in the American prison system, during a period that has been termed the “era of mass incarceration.” Since the publication of his 2006 book, Reforming Punishment, he has continued to document and assess conditions of confinement in many of the country’s harshest and most severe prisons.

[Professor Craig Haney will illustrate and analyze his findings about the transformation of U.S. prison policies and conditions, including the rise of supermax prisons. (Photo by Carolyn Lagattuta)]