Can people who have committed horrific crimes be rehabilitated? Many religious traditions say the answer is yes. And America itself has always been the land of second chances. But there is a difference between believing that people can change and betting your life on it — or someone else’s.
I was in California few weeks ago when Emmanuel Haro’s disappearance was first reported on the local news. The mother of the 7-month-old told a story about how she was in the parking lot of a local sporting goods store, changing her son’s diaper, when someone knocked her over the head and kidnapped her child.
For better or worse, I have read enough stories about violence against children in recent years that the story sounded odd to me immediately. Kidnapping by strangers is exceedingly rare, for one thing.
The truth came out quickly. Not only has Emmanuel’s father, Jake Haro, been charged with torturing and murdering the baby, but this is not the first time he has been accused of unspeakable violence against a young child. (His wife has also been charged in the crime, but it’s not clear what her role was; both have pled not guilty, and Emmanuel has yet to be found.)
In 2018, according to the district attorney, Jake Haro savagely beat his 10-week-old daughter (by another woman) to the point where that child now has cerebral palsy and is permanently bedridden. He pleaded guilty to willful child neglect in 2023.
(In a similar case last year, 4-year-old Rykelan Brown from upstate New York was beaten to death by his biological father after being removed from a loving foster home he had lived in for 2½ years. It’s not clear whether the agency realized his father actually served time for previously beating his girlfriend’s son so badly that the child’s liver was permanently damaged.)
How Jake Haro was free to strike again has been the subject of much reporting. It turns out, first, that he wasn’t imprisoned after his guilty plea. The judge suspended his six-year prison sentence and ordered him to serve six months in a work-release program and four years of probation.
In addition, he was ordered to attend a child abuse prevention class where, according to facilitators, he was “attentive, polite and appropriately interactive in class with other members and facilitators.” Also, they reported, “He appears to have gained self-insight and awareness into his parenting style.”
Finally, one wrote that “Mr. Haro shared that his children are motivated by positive reinforcement and that his limits are stable and only increase with the maturity of his children.”
Wait, what?
When the story of Haro’s suspended sentence was first reported, I had assumed that authorities were not aware he had fathered another child. This is actually not unheard of. As my colleague Marie Cohen wrote in a paper for the American Enterprise Institute in 2022, a number of states adopted a program called Birth Match to combat the problem of parents who have previously killed or severely abused children and then struck again when subsequent children were born. The program matched new births with records on abuse and neglect by the parents — and alerted authorities about a potentially unsafe situation.
But child welfare authorities actually knew that Jake Haro was having continued contact with children after his crime and his guilty plea. Who thought this was a good idea? So much of our child welfare system is geared toward the care and rehabilitation of parents that we have lost sight of the best interests of children.
There are certain kinds of child maltreatment that we can reasonably try to fix. Maybe a stressed-out young mother could learn to put her 5-year-old in time out instead of spanking him with a belt when he misbehaves. Maybe this mother could benefit from a parenting class to learn some different disciplinary strategies or a little something about child development. Maybe she could manage her own stress or anxiety more effectively or learn about where to find more support.
But the idea that we can fix what ails Jake Haro — and be so sure of our success that we would trust him to be around other children — is pure fantasy.
Just like we think sexual abuse of young children requires offenders to maintain a long-term classification as sex offenders, we should assume that there is something seriously (and maybe permanently) wrong with someone who physically attacks an infant. Maybe it’s too much to expect that child welfare leaders would understand something about how to recognize a psychopath when they see one, but most ordinary Americans wouldn’t have trouble with this.
Can Jake Haro ever change? That is a question between him and his creator. Child welfare agencies, though, are in the business of risk management. And this was a bet no reasonable person should have made.