Sick Justice by Ivan G. Goldman

Author:Ivan G. Goldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Published: 2013-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

THE STANFORD EXPERIMENT

Clearly the Mongo and Squeaky farce had wider implications. After all, these prison workers had authority over people’s lives. Although their jobs called for an even temperament, the woman was vicious and the captain was a standard bully bereft of diplomatic skills. Almost certainly their behavior had caused problems for others before us and would do so again. When I was a newspaper reporter, I visited numerous lockups—local, state, and federal. Never had I run into guards or administrators anything like Mongo and Squeaky. Prison and jail staff might not always be particularly kind, but in my experience they were always polite enough and never clearly crazy. Nor had inmates ever told me stories resembling what we’d witnessed in Taft. But I hadn’t dealt with a for-profit prison before. Had this made the difference? In a word, yes.

In 1971 Stanford psychologists hired male students to play roles in a mock prison for two weeks, twenty-four as inmates, twelve as guards. It all seemed harmless enough, an intriguing experience for everybody. The idea was to study the psychological effects of their roles on the volunteers, both guards and prisoners. But in almost no time at all the guards turned abusive, and although instructed not to harm prisoners, they resorted to torture to secure obedience. Prisoners reacted in various degrees of shock, distress, anger, and depression. Five showed such acute symptoms that the researchers let them out early. Others staged a rebellion. There was madness in the air, a sinister, almost supernatural force akin to whatever seized Stephen King’s Jack Torrance in The Shining. The project director, also feeling the lure of sadistic authoritarianism, shoved the malevolent genie back in its bottle by shutting down the experiment after six days.2

The events at Stanford provide disturbing clues about the darkness that, under absolute conditions, can overwhelm our humanistic tendencies. The experiment, no doubt still providing thesis material for grad students, appeared to be pretty strong evidence in favor of careful selection when staffing jails and prisons. But if you pay only nine or ten bucks an hour, you can’t always find perfection. The presence of Mongo and Squeaky and their bullying behavior was a logical result of the inefficiency and indifference that are part of the for-profit prison dynamic. Like them, the “guards” at Stanford were trained in a hurry and not paid handsome wages.

Hiring mercenaries to keep prisoners locked up, obedient, and dependent on profit-making companies is a giant step away from morality and good sense. Bear in mind that private prison firms can boost profits by cutting corners or even filing new charges against inmates. It’s one thing to hire rent-a-cops to protect property, but quite another to substitute them for sworn officers and place them in charge of captive humans. The American Friends Service Committee isn’t alone in its view that private prisons are “inherently unethical.” These prisons are part of the same outsourcing mania that seized Chicago when it leased all its parking meters to a private firm.

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