There are many subjects in the book “The Essentials of Criminal Justice.” Through the fourteen chapters, the chapter I will be discussing is chapter eleven. Chapter eleven talks about the history of correctional institutions, jails, prisons, and alternate correctional institutions. In this paper, I will be discussing only part of chapter eleven. It will be discussing the history of the correctional Institutions which includes the following: the history of the correctional institutions, the origin of corrections in the United States, the development of prisons, the New York and Pennsylvania systems, and the comparisons of the 19th and 20th century correction systems.
By providing the officers with almost unlimited authority to establish their own rules and do what they desired, except for being physically aggressive with the prisoners, the guards felt entitled to their power and believed that none of the participants, especially the prisoners, could intervene with their new status. Not only did the uniform and rules allow the officers to genuinely believe the high authority and influence they had, but the prisoners as well. By providing the guards with a similar uniform as an officer including a whistle, a club, and sunglasses, it allowed both groups to match their descriptions of their representative heuristics, or the idea of categorizing an individual based on our mental representations of that group, permitting both groups of participants to fulfill their roles more correspondingly. If the officers had not been provided with this drastic change of mannerism, it would have been harder for both groups to take the experiment as seriously. Additionally, cohesiveness allowed the officers to come together and form a larger force compared to working independently.
In 1971, Philip Zimbardo set out to conduct an experiment to observe behavior as well as obedience. In Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment, many dispute whether it was obedience or merely conforming to their predesigned social roles of guards and prisoners that transpired throughout the experiment. Initially, the experiment was meant to test the roles people play in prison environment; Zimbardo was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards, disposition, or had more to do with the prison environment. This phenomenon has been arguably known to possibly influencing the catastrophic similarities which occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.The
Back in 1971 there was a prison experiment that took place in Stanford University and it explains clearly why these cases happen in the prison and jail environment. Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist did this study to show what kind of behavior happens when they people are given authority and it also shows how they use their power affecting the situation they are put into. In this research paper we are going to visit the case of Los Angeles Men’s central jail and find out what went wrong. We will also take a look into what happened in Abu Gharib prison and see if this is an ongoing trend in the correction facilities. We will then look back on the Stanford Prison study conducted by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1971 to see if this experiment truly proves that behavior does change resulting in the abuse of the inmates by the officers.
Some of these temporary officers were not interested in making corrections as a career that resulted in high turnover rates. These guards were paid at the lower end of the salary scale and a lack of advancement opportunities that brought dissatisfactions. In order to correct this structural defect, prison officials should offer higher salaries, clear and concise advancement opportunities. Using these techniques, prison official would influence guards to remain longer and have pride in their
In this prison, inmates were subject to psychological abuses and absolute isolation. This “…demonstrated that the state’s power was in fact growing rather than shrinking, at least with regard to punishment” (Berger,
Since the beginning of the human existence, man has always dominated and ruled over one another be it empires, corporations, or small groups. Authority and obedience has always been a factor of who we are. This natural occurrence can be seen clearly through the psychological experiments known as The Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Both of these studies are based on how human beings react to authority figures and what their obedience is when faced with conflict.
This connects to the idea of guards having the capability of turning evil through an atmosphere of the prison environment where they can turn evil and have no remorse feelings towards the prisoners. From the article, "Stanford Prison Experiment," by Saul McLeod, he explained that the evil tactics that were made by the guards were from the atmosphere of the prison environment because the norm for a prison guard is to act tough and have no remorse feelings towards the prisoners when assigning punishments. He also added that guards acted this way because they lost their sense of personal identity when they dressed up as a guard, which can show they may have believed that they were actual guards and the experiment was real, which might’ve triggered their dark side with harsh punishments. Therefore, losing their personal identity in a prison environment may have been the factor where they triggered their evil side during the prison
Even though there are people willing to risk it all to go back to the life they had, there are some that become submissive and stop fighting. In Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Stanford phycology department. They recruited college students to run a mock prison so they could study the effect of becoming a prisoner and a prison guard. In this experiment that was supposed to run for two weeks ended up being stopped by the researchers on the six day because it was getting out of control. This is stated by the heads of the experiment Philip Zimbardo, Craig Haney, W. Curtis Banks, and David Jaffe in their report of the experiment.
Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo questioned, “What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” (Zimbardo, 1971) In 1971 a psychologist named Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment on the effects prison has on young males with the help of his colleague Stanley Milgram. They wanted to find out if the reports of brutality from guards was due to the way guards treated prisoners or the prison environment.
Another thing that makes this experiment beautiful is that it can help the police and military offices to train their people in coping the stress of being imprisoned among the prisoners. It would help them to know how that prison environment has a great factor in creating brutal behavior among the
The thorough analysis of text leaves no doubt that a prison is a model of a whole society, containing its own relations of subjugation and leadership. As well as in real life, the leadership can be either formal or informal. Prison guards and wardens represent the first one. They have formal legal appointment and
While arguably one of the defining psychological studies of the 20th Century, the research was not without flaws. Almost immediately the study became a subject for debate amongst psychologists who argued that the research was both ethically flawed and its lack of diversity meant it could not be generalized. Ethically, a significant critique of the experiment is that the participants actually believed they were administering serious harm to a real person, completely unaware that the learner was in fact acting. Although Milgram argued that the illusion was a necessary part of the experiment to study the participants’ reaction, they were exposed to a highly stressful situation. Many were visibly distraught throughout the duration of the test
Few remember that not just the indicted are changed in the prison system-the authority figures become different, too. Thousands of people go to detention facilities and stay there from minutes to decades, but the authority figures stay there with every influx of new prisoners. The wardens, in particular, are a monumental part of the system. They regulate the prisoners causing them to adapt to situations, whether positive or negative. Samuel Norton, the warden in the adaptation of Stephen King’s Shawshank Redemption, is embodied by the atmosphere of the prison.
Authority gives a person the chance to feel superior, and as seen throughout this film, those within the position of authority will only then abuse this opportunity. Given the chance for people to gain authority or rather the sense of authority is enough to awaken the evil within. Within the movie, The Stanford Prison Experiment the guards were enabled to set a line of difference between the prisoners and themselves. They were able to make the prisoners feel weak or emasculated, forcing the students to strip and wear the assigned prison clothes that barely covered their genitals (Alvarez). Forcing the prisoners to wear these feminine articles of clothing and assigning them a number, gives the opportunity to strip away their personality and