In 1960s America there were many concerns about the treatment of prisoners by prison guards. Many complaints were made by prisoners of violent and brutal attacks by the guards that were meant to be protecting and caring for them. Zimbardo wanted to find out exactly what made prison guards behave in this way, and in particular was it the situation they found themselves in (referred to as situational factors) or the personalities of the guards (referred to as dispositional factors). In other words, did the guards behave violently because the rigid power-based social structure within the prison made them behave that way (situational), or because they had aggressive and sadistic personalities that led them to choose to become prison guards (dispositional)? Zimbardo aimed to investigate the difference between situational and dispositional factors in social roles by creating a mock prison in the basement of Stanford University.
Stanford Prison Experiment In 1971, Psychologists Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues created The Stanford Prison experiment. The purpose of the experiment was to study the psychological behaviors of individuals and how easily they would conform to the roles of guards or prisoners. Zimbardo and his colleagues were interested whether brutality reports from guards in American prisons were associated with their ruthless personalities towards prisoners or whether it was associated with the prison environment. Zimbardo used an experimental lab to measure levels of conformity and assimilation to a prison environment. Zimbardo and his colleagues constructed the basement of Stanford University into an imitated prison.
These early prisons were designed to hold inmates in large open rooms, which made it difficult to keep control of the inmates. The prisons faced uprisings and attempted escapes. Concern for public safety was the main reason these prisons were closed. The new prisons designers were to ensure separation of inmates and offer reformation opportunities. Auburn state prison and Eastern penitentiary were built.
According to Foster (2006) one of the biggest changes to the penitentiary system was the demise of the industrial prison system and the realization and importance of rehabilitation as a main purpose of sending someone to prison. Rehabilitation is the restoration of someone to a useful place in society. Rehabilitation and medical model offered an unprecedented number of programs designed to change the behavior of men and women in prison, turning lawbreaking behavior into law-abiding behavior. Another significant change in prisons is the fact that prisons are no longer just a penitentiary where they lock people up until they serve their time, but we are now looking and utilizing rehabilitation more. Rehabilitation is a good deterrence in having prisons become a revolving
It depicts unflinchingly the battle between freedom and constraint plus society’s use of drastic means to set the deviant straight in the place of a rehabilitative program in conjunction with punishment. Humans are oranges more so than clocks, our automaticity is located in our body but who we are is the fruit that is the life-force within us. Much of the incarcerated population is guided by internal impulsivity and sensation-seeking behaviors. The goals of the corrections system are to punish and rehabilitate offenders and protect the population but with overcrowding and a lack of resources effective rehabilitation for offenders is minimized. The corrections system addresses offenders as clocks while it is the orange or human aspect that drove them to be in the criminal justice system in the first place.
America's prisons have been called "graduate schools for crime." It stands to reason: Take a group of people, strip them of possessions and privacy, expose them to constant threats of violence, overcrowd their cell-block, deprive them of meaningful work, and the result is an embittered underclass more intent on getting even with society than contributing to it. Prisons take the nonviolent offender and make him live side by side with violent offender. They take the nonviolent offender and make him a hardened criminal. America has to wake up and realize that the current structure of our penal system is failing terribly.
Institutional aggression is thought to be caused by situational forces which are factors present in social situations which can collectively encourage aggressive and anti-social behaviour that would otherwise not be seen. Zimbardo applied this theory to the Iraq prison atrocities in Abu Gharib where prisoners of war were subjected to degrading and dehumanising treatments from US prison guards. He claimed that three main situational forces caused the guards to behave in such a way: status and power; revenge; and deindividuation. As the soldiers were the ‘bottom of the barrel’ army reserves on a night shift, they had little power and even had to take orders from civilians so their aggressive behaviour may have been an attempt to demonstrate some control over inferior people. This explains why not all guards behaved in such a manner.
Much of the research into the situational model has been carried out in prisons and this model has many supports. Sykes 1958 stated that the IA within prisons was due to the deprivations that prisoners were subjected to, he said that deprivations such as loss of autonomy lead to stress and that this stress caused the prisoners to act aggressively. For Sykes, aggression was seen as a way of gaining some sense of control over the social order imposed upon them in prisons. This deprivation model could also explain aggression in schools and hospitals where patients and pupils see aggression as a means of exerting some level of autonomy in situations where they feel they have no control e.g. lengthy waiting lists and unfair rules.
People can obey morally conflicting orders if they vicariously carry out these commands as the will of their authoritarian. Ordinary people can, and have, been known to act completely out of their self-defined character under stressful situations. We’ve seen documented cases of this; in particular I’m referring to “The Stanford Prison Experiment” conducted by Philip Zimbardo (389). Here was an experiment where 21 Stanford students were selected to become role players in a prison environment. To eliminate any preference for the students, they were randomly assigned their roles, half of them would become the guards of the prison and the other half would be prisoners.
Conclusion: Poverty Does Not Fosters Crime Many people believe that poverty is the main cause of crimes in a city or country. They believe that the only thing poor people do is steal, mug, or even assassin to get things instead of working like a normal people do. For example, I have seen very rich people claiming that poor people are a problem to society because they do not give anything good to it; how poor people are thrown away from certain places only because they “scare normal people”, now society excludes them because of fear. We have become so judgmental that when we see a black guy or some other man with not so good clothes or with a not so good appearance (or in any way that poor people look) walking down the street coming right at us, we immediately though that he is going to assault us and maybe kill us; but if we see a man in a business suit, well shaved, with a clean hair cut, and a nice smile we might think it is even a friends of ours that is coming to say hi. There is something society should know, the rate of crimes is increasing in wealthy countries; the man in the suit could have done a scam or he might me a hit man.