Unlearned prison lessons

Humanist, July-August, 2004 by Ralph R. Reiland

WHEN THEY THOUGHT no one was watching,"The guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night.... Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuses of power."These words aren't from a report on the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. They're the words of Stanford University psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, past-president of the American Psychological Association, describing what happened during his classic experiment in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.

By placing a newspaper ad in a local paper, Zimbardo enlisted seventy college students in a study on the psychology of prison life. After eliminating candidates with crime records, drug use, or psychological problems, the researchers were left with twenty-four volunteers who were, according to testing and observation," an average group of healthy, intelligent, middle-class males."

With a flip of a coin, half the group was assigned to be guards, the other half to be prisoners. The situation ran out of control so quickly that Zimbardo prematurely ended his planned two-week study after only six days.

The guards were outfitted with mirrored sunglasses, khaki uniforms, cop whistles, and nightsticks--and given no specific training." They were free, within limits, to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in the prison and to command the respect of the prisoners,"explains Zimbardo. "The guards made up their own set of rules."

The uniform of each prisoner was a stocking cap made from a woman's nylon, a foot chain, and a smock-like dress with a prison ID number on the front and back--and no underpants. "As soon as some of our prisoners were put into these uniforms," reports Zimbardo,"they began to walk and sit differently and to hold themselves differently--more like a woman than a man."

On the first day, each prisoner was systematically searched, stripped naked, and sprayed with an anti-lice disinfectant. On the morning of the second day, a rebellion broke out, with prisoners tearing off their ID numbers and stocking caps, cursing the guards, and barricading their cell doors with their beds. The guards responded by shooting the prisoners with carbon dioxide from a fire extinguisher, breaking into the cells, and again stripping the prisoners naked.

With each passing day, the guards stepped up their surveillance, harassment, and intimidation, restricting prisoners to solitary confinement, forcing them to urinate and defecate in buckets, and, responding to a rumor of an escape plot, chaining the prisoners together and putting bags over their heads."After just four or five days," reports Zimbardo,"the guards are doing homophobic things to the prisoners."

In less than a week, the guards had become so abusive that the experiment had to be stopped--and this was all a simulation, just a study on Stanford's campus, just a matter of play acting in the psychology department. There were no incoming mortars to put the guards on edge. No guard had a buddy on the outside who'd been killed in the previous days or weeks by someone who looked a lot like the people he was now guarding. None of the guards suspected any of the college prisoners of being part of a gang of international evildoers.

The photos we're now seeing from the Abu Ghraib prison are mirror images of what happened during the Stanford exercise some three decades ago. In the campus experiment, the guards "made up their own set of rules." No checks and balances existed until Zimbardo pulled the plug.

Antonio Taguba, the army general who first investigated the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in his May testimony that the mistreatment resulted from defective leadership, a "lack of discipline, no training whatsoever and no supervision."

The lesson from Stanford is that things run out of control when no one is in charge. The lesson from Abu Ghraib is that no one was in charge.

George W. Bush says the mistreatment was the result of "the wrongdoing of a few"--just a few bad apples in the barrel who need some good court-martialing. Wrong. It's the barrel that's wrong--the top, the big picture guys who tossed an inadequate number of troops into a hell-hole with no training and no supervision.

Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University and a columnist at the Pittsurgh Tribune-Review