July 22, 2021 • 34 mins
Craig Haney, who represented Jarvis Masters at his capital trial, is a social psychologist and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, renown for is work on the front lines of the criminal justice system. Professor Haney explains why, ‘Jarvis’s case continues to haunt him to this day.’
Professor Haney’s groundbreaking book is, CRIMINALITY IN CONTEXT (THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM.)
If you’d like to support Jarvis Masters’s cause, please considering signing a petition on his behalf at www.freejarvis.org
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Dear Governor is a production of I Heart Media and
three Months Media. If you are moved by Jarvis Masters
and his thirty years struggle on San Quentin's death throw,
and you'd like to support his cause, please consider signing
a petition on his behalf. Visit Free Jarvis dot org
slash podcast to sign your name to an open letter
(00:20):
to California Governor Gavin Newsom, Dear Governor Newsom, Dear Mr
Governor Newsom. This is an open letter to Governor Gavin Newsom,
Dear Governor Newsom. Public. Craig Haney is a social psychologist
(00:43):
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.
(01:06):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:49):
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
(02:11):
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
(02:33):
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
(02:57):
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,
(03:22):
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,
(03:42):
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,
(04:02):
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
(04:24):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:08):
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,
(05:32):
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
(05:53):
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,
(06:16):
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
(06:38):
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
(06:59):
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
(07:21):
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
(07:43):
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
(08:04):
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,
(08:24):
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
(08:47):
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,
(09:10):
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,
(09:32):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:17):
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
(10:39):
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
(10:59):
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
(11:20):
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
(11:40):
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
(12:01):
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.
(12:21):
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.
(12:41):
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
(13:03):
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
(13:26):
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
(13:46):
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
(14:08):
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
(14:31):
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
(14:51):
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,
(15:17):
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,
(15:40):
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
(16:04):
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
(16:28):
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
(16:52):
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
(17:15):
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
(17:37):
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
(17:58):
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
(18:20):
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
(18:42):
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
(19:03):
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
(19:27):
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
(19:48):
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
(20:14):
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,
(20:36):
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,
(21:00):
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
(21:22):
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,
(21:45):
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
(22:05):
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.
(22:26):
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,
(22:49):
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
(23:11):
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
(23:32):
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
(23:57):
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
(24:22):
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.
(24:43):
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
(25:04):
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,
(25:30):
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.
(25:53):
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,
(26:14):
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
(26:36):
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
(26:58):
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
(27:19):
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
(27:39):
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
(28:00):
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
(28:21):
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
(28:42):
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,
(29:03):
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,
(29:24):
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
(29:44):
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
(30:09):
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
(30:31):
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
(30:52):
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
(31:13):
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
(31:35):
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
(31:56):
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
(32:16):
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,
(32:39):
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
(33:01):
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,
(33:22):
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
(33:45):
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
(34:06):
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. H
Dear Governor is a production of I Heart Media and
three Months Media. If you are moved by Jarvis Masters
and his thirty years struggle on San Quentin's death throw,
and you'd like to support his cause, please consider signing
a petition on his behalf. Visit Free Jarvis dot org
slash podcast to sign your name to an open letter
(00:20):
to California Governor Gavin Newsom, Dear Governor Newsom, Dear Mr
Governor Newsom. This is an open letter to Governor Gavin Newsom,
Dear Governor Newsom. Public. Craig Haney is a social psychologist
(00:43):
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.
(01:06):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:49):
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
(02:11):
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
(02:33):
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
(02:57):
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,
(03:22):
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,
(03:42):
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,
(04:02):
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
(04:24):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:08):
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,
(05:32):
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
(05:53):
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,
(06:16):
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
(06:38):
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
(06:59):
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
(07:21):
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
(07:43):
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
(08:04):
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,
(08:24):
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
(08:47):
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,
(09:10):
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,
(09:32):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:17):
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
(10:39):
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
(10:59):
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
(11:20):
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
(11:40):
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
(12:01):
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.
(12:21):
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.
(12:41):
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
(13:03):
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
(13:26):
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
(13:46):
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
(14:08):
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
(14:31):
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
(14:51):
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,
(15:17):
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,
(15:40):
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
(16:04):
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
(16:28):
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
(16:52):
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
(17:15):
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
(17:37):
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
(17:58):
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
(18:20):
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
(18:42):
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
(19:03):
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
(19:27):
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
(19:48):
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
(20:14):
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,
(20:36):
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,
(21:00):
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
(21:22):
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,
(21:45):
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
(22:05):
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.
(22:26):
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,
(22:49):
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
(23:11):
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
(23:32):
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
(23:57):
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
(24:22):
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.
(24:43):
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
(25:04):
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,
(25:30):
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.
(25:53):
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,
(26:14):
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
(26:36):
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
(26:58):
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
(27:19):
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
(27:39):
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
(28:00):
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
(28:21):
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
(28:42):
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,
(29:03):
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,
(29:24):
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
(29:44):
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
(30:09):
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
(30:31):
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
(30:52):
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
(31:13):
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
(31:35):
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
(31:56):
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
(32:16):
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,
(32:39):
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
(33:01):
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,
(33:22):
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
(33:45):
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
(34:06):
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. H
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