Prison Reform (or not?)

     (full disclosure : I am biased against criminals)

     Although you will be unable to view his original post (because he caved to pressure ) Talisein was the one I picked this up from. He linked to this experiment conducted by Stanford. While I found the entire affair to be quite interesting I did see a strange sort of anti-prison bias in the whole thing.

     From the very first the experiment was skewed by the fact that you knew up front that the "prisoners" had in fact committed no crime. This immediately makes you feel sympathy for them even before their "prison experience" got started. As the experiment prgresses this feeling grows and is encouraged by the accompanying narrative. An example?

Even when prisoners were asleep, they could not escape the atmosphere of oppression. When a prisoner turned over, the chain would hit his other foot, waking him up and reminding him that he was still in prison, unable to escape even in his dreams.

     Note the use of words like "oppression". Never is there given any consideration to the fact that real prisoners are there because they victimized someone else. Often several someones. I think that a rapist, drug dealer, murdered, child abuser, or career thief should be reminded that he is a prisoner and is being punished every goddammned second of their sentence.

     Really..... do you think that you should feel the "poor prisoner's" woe over his chained leg? I can feel woe for his victims no problem. Woe for the prisoner? I think not. Imagine, "Alas for poor John Wayne Gacy... sleeping under such harsh conditions... unable to escape even in his dreams!". Are you fucking kidding me?

Another line of drivel :

The stocking cap on his head was a substitute for having the prisoner's hair shaved off. The process of having one's head shaved, which takes place in most prisons as well as in the military, is designed in part to minimize each person's individuality, since some people express their individuality through hair style or length. It is also a way of getting people to begin complying with the arbitrary, coercive rules of the institution.

     The horror of not allowing someone who has thoroughly and often violently fucked over the rest of society to express their individuality! Shocking! (This is why ultra-liberal positions are regarded with nothing less than scorn)

     It was not all bad mind you I liked this part especially in light of Abu Ghraib :

The guards were given no specific training on how to be guards. Instead 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.

     I think this bit highlights problems with making prison's out of whole cloth with a staff that has no experience. (The Abu G guards shoudl be executed in my opinion but maybe not for the reasons you might think)

     There was also a lack of context of the part of Stanford :

The cells were so small that there was room for only three cots on which the prisoners slept or sat, with room for little else.

     This in neither cruel or unusual folks. The military lives like this routinely. It ain't the Hilton but it ain't cruel either. Fuck people, have you been to the 3rd world?

     The military paralells continued as the experiment used push-ups as punishment. Of course the folks at Stanford also has a lack of perspective here :

However, we later learned that push-ups were often used as a form of punishment in Nazi concentration camps

     The difference here is that the Nazis were able to motivate their prisoners to really torture themselves with push-ups as the prisoners knew that failure to do so would result in far more heinous punishments. Not exactly the mindset here guys...

     The military also has a Code of Conduct for prisoners to help them deal with situations like this :

One of the three cells was designated as a "privilege cell." The three prisoners least involved in the rebellion were given special privileges. They got their uniforms back, got their beds back, and were allowed to wash and brush their teeth. The others were not.

     The Code forbids prisoners from accepting this sort of treatment to prevent breaks between prisoner groups.

     Further rhetoric against "The Man" from the guys at Standford :

Our ex-convict consultants later informed us that a similar tactic is used by real guards in real prisons to break prisoner alliances. For example, racism is used to pit Blacks, Chicanos, and Anglos against each other.

     This of course implies that without guards "formenting" rascism there would be none betweeen these groups? Are you shitting me? Tens of thousands of inter-tribals wars between all races say differently.

Indeed, after the nightly 10:00 P.M. lights out "lock-up," prisoners were often forced to urinate or defecate in a bucket that was left in their cell.

     So was the world being collectively abused prior to the invention of the shitter? This might not be pleasant but it hardly constitutes cruelty either.

     While I found the whole experiment to be an interesting view of how easily people can become subsumed by role-play I was also a bit appalled by the fact that this experiment was carried out by folks who already had a pre-conception of how the results of the thing would (or should be) but seemed to be completely unaware of their own bias. I beleive that this heavily figured into the way they were "sucked into" their roles in this. They were participating in an interpretive drama of how they thought prsioners and guards were supposed to be rather than experiencing the thing for real. All in all I think it was pretty cool though.

     Throughout the whole of the experiment and the accompanying narrative the sympathy with the prisoner is apparent while the guards are sympathized with not at all let alone the victims of these "criminals". It was as though these people were prisoners in a vacuum (which of course they were) and had never done anything to warrant such harshness as push-ups and shitting in a bucket. Here's a clue folks... There are bad, evil, sadistic people out there and they aren't all (or even mostly) the prison guards.