Based on his comprehensive review and analysis of the research, Haney offers a carefully framed and psychologically based blueprint for making the criminal justice system fairer, with strategies to reduce crime through proactive prevention instead of reactive punishment.

Haney meticulously reviews evidence documenting the ways in which a person’s social history, institutional experiences, and present circumstances powerfully shape their life, with a special focus on the role of social, economic, and racial injustice in crime causation. Haney debunks the “crime master narrative” — the widespread myth that criminality is a product of free and autonomous “bad” choices — an increasingly anachronistic view that cannot bear the weight of contemporary psychological data and theory.

This is a must-read for understanding what truly influences criminal behavior, and the strategies for prevention and rehabilitation that follow.

Since his early work on the Stanford Prison Experiment, Craig Haney has become one of the nation’s most highly regarded scholars whose research, writing, and testimony have helped to transform the criminal justice system.

He served on a National Academy of Sciences committee studying mass incarceration, and his front-line observations and analyses have been cited by the United States Supreme Court.

He has seen firsthand how social and economic injustice operate to produce crime in our society and how often the criminal justice system acts to worsen rather than alleviate these problems.

He lives in Santa Cruz, California.