Warning: Triggers
How did we get to the abuses at Abu Ghraib? Or to torturing prisoners in the US, whether by waterboarding at Guantanamo, or years of aggravated solitary confinement, or horrific executions? Let's try it and see.
Put some bright but otherwise ordinary college students to playing guards and prisoners in a basement fixed up with makeshift cells at Stanford for a few days, choosing randomly who will be which. What could go wrong? Well, it's so horrific you have to cancel the experiment in the middle. Now what happens to real warders and prisoners who do it for years at a time, even for decades? What happens to a society that routinely does that to people?
It's called being tough on crime, or on terrorism. It is a major mental health epidemic in the US, not only among guards and prisoners, but in our religion and politics.
This week we get to look at horrors much worse than the Yale electric shock experiments that I Diaried a month ago, where there were no shocks. In the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) there were no physical assaults, but real people broke down as a result of psychological assaults. More than thirty years later, in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Philip Zimbardo explained what went wrong, what should have happened, what was learned, and what good came out of it.
Here is another question. How did the advocates for evil, even torture, in our prisons, get that way? Is it something about how they were treated as children? Obviously so, in ways we have only partial knowledge of, but that is only part of the answer. What else is there, and what can we do about that?
I'm glad you asked.