The film, Quiet Rage: The Standard Prison Experiment, shows a real life example of how a person’s thoughts, attitudes, and behavior can be easily altered according to environmental changes. When exposed to changes in social situations, our mindsets and behaviors are easily influenced. In this experiment, male college students were randomly assigned roles as either a prison guard or a prisoner. Although the participants were fully aware that these were only roles and not their true identities, the participants were already experiencing changes in their own behavior by day two. The prisoners began adopting prisoner-like behavior such as rebelling and swearing at the guards as they walked by.
For the prisoners, they became depressed, psychologically distraught, dehumanized, and powerless. On the other hand, the guards made the most of their power to maintain prison standards by way of harassment, pornographic behaviors, and mind-bending tactics. In both situations, there was a incident of a rumor of a prison riot with didn’t occurred but aggravated the guards, which lead to more humiliation. The reality of these particular events is the simple fact that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was real, as for the Stanford Prison Experiment was nothing more than a research study on human behavior. When the Stanford Prison Experiment came to it’s end, the guards didn’t receive any form of punishment for their actions.
However, the situation and the circumstances in the environment were so powerful that it slowly distorted their personalities. After a few days of the experiment, the guards were too caught up in the events that were taking place and transformed from ordinary, normal young men into sadistic guards. They were incapable to make judgments based on their moral and intellectual knowledge. Same with the prisoners, the overwhelmingly powerful situation they were placed in caused the prisoners to behave sadistically and depressing which later caused signs of extreme stress and emotional breakdowns. All in all, the Stanford Prison Experiment illustrates how authority, unequal balance of power, and the situation that one is placed can all lead to converting ordinary people into committing unconventional acts.
3) After the study, how do you think the prisoners and guards felt when they saw each other in the same civilian clothes again and saw their prison reconverted to a basement laboratory hallway? After the experiment, the experimenter must have felt a lot of guilt, hate and embarrassment towards each other. Even though it was an experiment and they knew it wasn’t real, they had actual real emotions towards each other such as dictatorship and anxiety. They mot have felt any better, knowing that the basement was made into a prison facility and reconverted to a lab hallway. 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?
Special agent Paul Smecker is assigned to the case. He knows that the death of the two mobsters is not a professional hit. As the police start looking for the people who are responsible, the brothers show in the police station to clear their names. The media and the public pronounce them as heroes. They spend the night in the police cell when they got the message from god telling them to kill every bad man.
The Zimbardo Prison Study A person actually going insane from participating in a mock prison study! Wow, who would have thought that. In the beginning I think Zimbardo accomplished exactly what he sat out to do; He created a functional prison setting. These boys really had no idea what they had gotten themselves into. In an effort to make this experiment as real as possible, the college students were picked up by a police officer, read their rights and formally arrested, while neighbors watched in disbelief.
When the 24 boys arrived, there were no differences between the college boys. After a flip of a coin, they were assigned to be guards or prisoners. Each “prisoner” was greeted by the warden and told the significance of their crime. The warden told them they were now prisoners, and they were stripped naked and sprayed to make them think the guards believed they were dirty and could infect the prison. They were then put in their uniforms, which was a dress with their prison ID number on it.
The prison contained prison cells, a toilet room, an eating and exercise area, a solitary confinement room and an intercom used to make announcements to the prisoners. Researchers observed the guards and prisoners through secretly placed video cameras and microphones. Researchers randomly divided the 24 volunteers into two separate groups. One group was assigned to be guards while the other group was assigned to be prisoners. Volunteers that were assigned as prisoners found out about their acceptance into the experiment when they were arrested in their home or on campus by real police.
Now most would not think this would be a form of torture, but it brings about great results. After being left alone in a cell for a number of days, prisoners become increasingly stressed and agitated about their situation, making them ready to cry out their confession. The next forms of interrogation that are used are the slap and grab techniques. These do not seem like very effective methods, but they scare prisoners and bring about the desired results. Under these slap and grab techniques extreme physical violence against prisoners and ‘torture’ are deemed illegal under national and international law, including the Geneva Convention, less physical techniques are often used by interrogators.
Men are constantly being persuaded and forced into sexual contact with not only former inmates, but correctional officers as well. One recollection by Garrett Cunningham, an inmate at the Luther Unit in Navasota, states that he was handcuffed on his way to the shower facilities, raped by an officer, and then forced to shower afterwards. He was then told that if we was to tell anyone of the incident, he would be placed in a “rougher unit where he would be raped all the time”. Whenever an inmate pleas and cries about being sexually assaulted, they get ignored and laughed at. Women are also subject to sexual abuse by the correctional officers and surprisingly, the former women inmates as well.