Plus the constant potential to be shanked or raped and yes, prison sounds like it would be a walk in the park.
Plus the abusive environment that the wardens and guards may create, as demonstrated by the (controversial) Stanford Prison Experiment in August, 1971.
Google Stanford Prison Experiment to find many more articles about it.
Summary: Zimbardo conducted a mock prison scenario, with some participants chosen to be “prisoners” and others chosen to be “guards”, for a 14-day mock prison. Within the first few days, the “guards” spontaneously became so sadistic and abusive, and the “inmates” became so cowed (but sometimes rebellious) that Zimbardo was forced to terminate the experiment after only 6 days.
2 questions:
What are the psychological phases prisoners usually go through?
- Do prisons tend to have a lot of cameras?
I remember Bentham coming up with the idea of a panopticon. It was a little awkward architecturally but today, you could achieve the same effect with security cameras.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a joke. All Philip Zimbardo did was prove to Philip Zimbardo that Philip Zimbardo’s opinions are correct.
Lots and lots of cameras. But a lot of them are for liability reasons not regular security. They’re being monitored by people outside of the security departments (in some cases, they’re being monitored by people hundreds of miles away). So these cameras can’t really help you to do your job if you’re the guard on the unit - you can’t use them to watch a prisoner doing something when he thinks you’re not around.
But if there’s a fight we can pull the tape to see what happened. If a prisoner throws something at a guard while his back is turned, we can go back and see who did it. Or if a guard has to pull a prisoner out of his cell, we can use the tape to refute any claims that he used excessive force (or conversely, we can use the tape as evidence he did use excessive force).
The panopticon was, quite frankly, a dumb idea. Jeremy Bentham must have been having an off day. It apparently escaped his notice that if you situate the guard’s station where he can see all the prisoners, you almost inevitably make it possible for all the prisoners to see the guard. And if the prisoners know where the guard is, they know where they can go to cause problems.
It didn’t escape his notice. He thought the guard tower should have blinds so the guards could look out little slits without being seen.
No, apparently not so. Rather, Zimbardo’s hypothesis at the start seems to be contradicted by the results. From the Wiki article linked above:
I’m not saying the experiment didn’t produce interesting results. But Zimbardo refuses to see what the results are and insists on an invalid conclusion because it’s what he wants to believe instead.
Zimbardo’s experiment was flawed from in its initial design. He was supposed to be studying prison conditions. But he made no real attempt to find out what conditions were in actual prisons. He essentially just made up a situation based on his imagination of what prison conditions were.
Suppose instead of designated a basement as a “prison” and dividing his students into two groups he called “prisoners” and “guards”, he had instead designated the basement as a “hospital” and dividing his subjects into “doctors” and “patients” - and then done everything else the same way. When the “doctors” subsequently began abusing the “patients” would you say that the Stanford Hospital Experiment had anything valid to say about conditions in the real world health care system? Of course not. His imaginary hospital would be nothing like a real hospital. And his imaginary prison was nothing like a real prison.
Next, Zimbardo biased the experiment by actively participating in it and giving directions to the subjects on how he wanted them to act. And it wasn’t even subtle. He handed out batons and told his “guards” he wanted them to use them to maintain order. He gave his “guards” mirrored sunglasses to wear (which actual prison guards don’t wear) and then later cited that the fact his “guards” were wearing mirrored sunglasses as evidence that they were acting abusive.
Read the instructions Zimbardo (in his role as the “prison” leader) gave his “guards”: “You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”
As the wikipedia article notes, Zimbardo brought his “prisoners” into the “prison” in blindfolds. He didn’t let them wear underwear. He told his “guards” not to address “prisoners” by name. He wouldn’t let his “prisoners” go outside. None of these procedures exist in actual prisons. But Zimbardo justified them by claiming that prison was dehumanizing so he invented procedures to dehumanize his “prisoners”.
Now the results of the experiment were shocking and clear. Zimbardo and his students, both “guards” and “prisoners”, quickly fell into the roles they had adopted and embraced them fully. Zimbardo and the “guards” were surprisingly willing to abuse the “prisoners” and the “prisoners” were even more surprisingly willing to accept that abuse.
The experiment showed how easily people can put aside the morality they think they have and participate in an abusive system. It shows how almost anyone has the potential to become an abuser or a victim when they are placed in a situation where they fill that role. That’s an important idea and it explains a lot of things which have happened in history.
But Zimbardo couldn’t accept it. He has been unable to accept the idea that the abuse in his experiment came from him and the students he selected. He denies this and says that these were good people. So he externalizes the situation and says it was the environment itself and not the people in it that caused the abuse. This allows Zimbardo to tell himself that it was his “prison” that abused people and not Philip Zimbardo and that once he shut down his “prison” the potential for abuse no longer existed inside himself.
Twenty-five years after his experiment, Zimbardo was still claiming - explicitly and literally - that he found out the ugly truth about what’s inside prisons. But he didn’t. What he found was the ugly truth about what’s inside ordinary people, including himself.
Another famous psychological experiment was the Milgram experiment. There’s obvious parallels to the Stanford experiment. People in a study were willing to abuse people because they had been placed in a situation that told them to do it.
And Stanley Milgrim figured out the right conclusion (maybe because he remained outside of his experiment). He didn’t claim that the result of his experiment was that it proved that being near electricity made people abusive.
Those are interesting posts Little Nemo, thank you. And yes it does sound like Zimbardo took the wrong lesson from the experiment, though I would suggest environment and outside influences also have a strong impact on whether a person does or does not act on their own internal proclivities.
I recall a discussion regarding the Milgram experiment at school, the teacher asked if we (the students) would act in a similar manner to those who followed the ‘authorities’ in the experiment, most of the class had to admit they probably would, it would be how far they would be willing to go that was in question. However one person stated flatly that in no circumstances would he follow anothers authority or inflict pain on another person if ordered to do so, and he was the biggest self-centred emotionally and pyschologically abusive jerk in the class, along with his coterie of nodding-dog followers.
The thing I found disturbing was that I don’t think he was just saying that, he really believed it, which I found interesting in itself.
My understanding is Zimbardo’s program was designed to test POW treatment and funded by the military, not a take on US prisons.
I am assuming most everyone in the experiment was a college student, so not at the peak of emotional maturity. I do not know if you can extrapolate the behavior of 19-21 year olds to what you would see 40 year olds do in the same situation.
However the Milgram experiment and Zimbardo experiment do have a lot to teach us. In the Milgram experiment he didn’t use one test, he used about 20 of various kinds of tests to see how people would react.
If Milgram had 3 teachers who all pulled a switch, and 2 backed out (they were actors) the real test subject would back out too. If those 2 teachers complied to 450 volts, generally so did the actual test subject. If he had 2 experimenters (people running the experiment) and one said to stop and another said continue, the test subjects were far more likely to resist.
If he had a division of labor among the teachers compliance went up.
Zimbardo claims in warlike cultures, when soldiers can hide and be anonymous (by face painting or wearing masks) their rates of crimes against humanity goes up.
So there are a lot of valuable things to learn from the experiments. Peer pressure, contradictory authority figures, a lack of anonymity, surveillance and accountability can all affect how willing people are to engage in destructive behavior. We are social animals, people will kill themselves to avoid social rejection and our personalities are heavily formed by our social selves. So we should be learning from these experiments to design societies that are constructive and pro-social.
Having said that, I don’t think a 6 day long experiment with 19-22 year olds designed to replicate a POW situation can compare to a prison with middle aged guards and middle aged prisoners being side by side for years, where the guards have some accountability for their behavior and know it.
Fate didn’t have a damn thing in store for him. The guy did it to himself.
This is the opposite of my personal experience, although you’re probably talking state or federal and the people I know mostly went to county. They’d come out looking better than they went in, by benefit of regular meals, a lack of drugs and alcohol (or at least less than they went in-- county jail doesn’t even allow smoking where I came from), and time and motivation for exercise.
There is no evidence of this, according to WebMD: Premature Graying: Reasons, Options:
[QUOTE=WebMD]
Contrary to popular belief, stress has not been shown to cause gray hair. Scientists don’t know exactly why some people go gray early, but genes play a large role.
[/QUOTE]
Means nothing, other than that Obama is right on schedule for going grey. Again, according to WebMD:
I believe the two pictures linked are President Obama’s official portraits in 2009 and 2013, correct?
If so, he was 48 for the first one, and 52 for the second one, in other words, just the time when a person normally develops significant amounts of grey hair.
You may be right. My experience was in prisons, where everyone was serving a sentence of at least a year and most were in for longer. That’s a different experience from jails. So it’s very possible that a short sharp shock of imprisonment might benefit some people while a long dragged out imprisonment wears people down.
This post reminded me of the old O Henry short story about the NYC bum that went to jail every November for the winter-it was his “Florida vacation”. Short (less than 12 month) stays in prison are probably not bad;especially if yo are a street person.
“It might be better than living on the street in freezing weather” is not saying much.
Merely a way of saying, ‘that was an unexpected outcome’, if you object to the use of the word fate.
For one thing, it makes it hard to search all of the golf courses for the real killer.