Walnut Street Jail Janice Tighe Harrison College History of Criminal Justice Mr. Royer 10/17/11 As a Criminal Justice student it is important to know and understand some of the history of our Criminal Justice system. One aspect to know would be the history of our correctional system, in particular the Walnut Street Jail. Before the creation of the Walnut Street Jail life for prisoners was cruel and inhumane. As our text states “By the late eighteenth century, men, women, and children were till mixed together in many American jails. Before the birth of the modern penitentiary at Walnut Street (Philadelphia) in 1790, prisoners endured unimaginable squalor” (Roth, 2011, p. 86).
Together these factors have dramatically altered the nature of day-today prison life and inmate culture. Today’s prison life is much better than past times. I think it’s barbaric that prisons used to torture their prisoners, and they had no say in anything. Although today’s prisoners still don’t have much of a say in what occurs inside prison, they know they won’t get tortured like prisoners in the past. I’ve always heard that during the Industrial Revolution, many prisoners were used as free labor, but I never realized how much money the prisons actually made from this kind of labor.
The guards were assigned uniforms and offices, somewhat similar to the prisoners except they were equipped with billy clubs, whistles, handcuffs, and keys, and had freedom. These conditions allowed a setting similar to prisons; this also allowed everyone to be stripped of identifying characteristics, therefore “equal.” In the mock prison, inverse psychological relationships developed between prisoners and guards. There was only one riot in the beginning, but the guards quickly regained control. Afterwards, prisoners began to feel that there was no way to beat the system. They felt that it is better to do nothing, except what the guards told them.
“How People Turn Monstrous” reveals the incident of eight soldiers and Staff [Sgt.] Ivan Frederick II mistreating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison with humiliating sexual behavior and physical abuse such as stripping them naked with bags over their heads and stomping on their hands and feet. Mark Buchanan believes they “only did what many of us would have done if placed in the same situation”(384). Buchanan provides us with a great resource such as the experiment at Stanford University by Philip Zimbardo. Few college students were put in a real life situation similar to Abu Ghraib.
The only impression they may have had was that it was a horrible experience knowing it was a prison 4) If you were the experimenter in charge, would you have done this study? Would you have terminated it earlier? Would you have conducted a follow-up study? If I wanted to investigate on how people’s behavior would change, if they had to play
Max Gillies Psychology 103 Ms. Andrews 5/1/10 The Stanford Prison Experiment In 1971 one of the most prestigious schools in the country, a well accomplished professor and selected group of local students began one of the most controversial and thought inspiring case studies in history. Setting out to see how people react when they have either authoritarian positions or submissive ones. The thesis being that the prison, in this case the modified Stanford basement, controls the situation rather than the people inside of it. What the experiment reveled was a disturbing glimpse at the human psyche. The experiment quickly took on a very serious tone.
Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: A Lesson in the Power of Situation In Philip Zimbardo’s article “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment” he deals with change during a certain situations. In the article he goes into why he does the experiment and what inspired it. He does this experiment to prove that good people change when in authority. The exigence in the article is the power of anonymity that unleashes violent behavior. Zimbardo notes “In my own work, I wanted to explore the fictional notation from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies about the power of anonymity to unleash violent behavior” (302).
Zimbardo-Stanford Prison Experiment The Stanford Prison Experiment was made because Zimbardo was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards or had more to do with the prison environment. Since Zimbardo wanted the experiment to feel real, he had the students, who were assigned as prisoners, to be arrested at their own homes, without any warnings. They were first taken to a real jail where they were fingerprinted, photographed and “booked” before being blindfolded and taken to the “prison” where the experiment would take place. Each prisoner had their personal possessions removed and locked away; they were given prison clothes and were referred to by their number on their uniform. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a mock prison experiment where they had chosen 24 Male Students selected from the 75 who volunteered to join the experiment.
The experiment is related closely to the Stanford Prison and Milgram Experiments, in that it tries to show how perfectly normal human beings can be pressured into unusual behavior by authority figures, or by the consensus of opinion around them. For the experiment, eight subjects were seated around a table, with the seating plan carefully constructed to prevent any suspicion. Only one participant was actually a genuine subject for the experiment, the rest being confederates, carefully tutored to give certain pre-selected responses. Careful experimental construction placed a varying amount of peer pressure on the individual test subject. Asch Experiment - Figure 1 The experiment was simple in its construction; each participant, in turn,
Those who victimize are able to do so because the process of dehumanization elevates their self concept and desensitizes them to the evil they inflict. In the Stanford prison experiment, they took 21 college students and created a fake prison. In this prison they assigned the roles of prisoners and guards. The prisoners were given symbols of weakness like smocks with stocking caps, ball and chain and numbers instead of names. Where as the guards were given symbols of power like sunglasses,batons and whistles.