To what extent did Philip Zimbardo change the United States prison system for prisoners?
Name: Tiffany Chan
School: The Brooklyn Latin School
Word Count: 2192
Section I:
The investigation will focus on psychologist Philip Zimbardo and attempt to answer the question, “To what extent did Philip Zimbardo change the United States prison system?”. In order to answer the question, the following will be analyzed: Zimbardo’s contributions to psychology, the conditions of prison systems before-and-after Zimbardo’s experiment (the Stanford prison experiment), and other psychological experiments. Two of the sources for analysis are Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment research paper and March 2011 diary entries of Joseph Dole.
Zimbardo, Honey, Banks, Jaffe. “The Stanford Prison Experiment” 1971. Stanford.edu.
Dole, Joseph. March 2011 Diary Entries. Pub. Pen.org
The first source for analysis is “The Stanford Prison Experiment” 1971 research paper by Zimbardo, an American psychologist, and his team. The research paper was written by Zimbardo and his team in order to publish their data for psychologists and government officials. Its message is that one’s behavior is shaped by the quality of one’s environment. This source is relevant to the investigation because Zimbardo’s contribution to psychology was the Stanford prison experiment and analyzing a source from his own findings is crucial in understanding the experiment’s significance in changing the prison system.
The second source is March 2011 Joseph Dole’s diary entries submitted to Pen.org. Joseph Dole is incarcerated for life and his purpose for publishing his diary is to tell the general public his message that life in prison is prejudiced against prisoners. This source is relevant to the investigation because the best way to examine progress and changes is by comparing then and now.
The research paper, “The Stanford Prison Experiment”, is valuable to historians studying the mass incarceration system of the United States through its informative content and unique perspective. It gives scientific data that would help historians understand how people are shaped by their environment. It is further valuable as it’s written by a team of psychologists who are well-educated in psychology and have been taught to minimize uncertainties in their studies. However, this source is limited as only the information from an outsider’s perspective is recorded and not how the test subjects felt in the experiment; meaning that regardless of the minimal uncertainties, the scientists’ observation on human emotions may not be accurate. Thus the research paper, although its results are important, should be read with caution that not all the qualitative data is completely accurate.
The second primary source, the March 2011 diary entries of Joseph Dole, is useful to historians studying the mass incarceration system of the United states through its content and perspective. It comes from the perspective of an incarcerated-for-life man from a social group of prisoners that society often marginalizes. It also is valuable because it gives a first-hand account of events that occur in Dole’s prison that would otherwise go undocumented. However, this source is limited because it fails to provide concrete evidence that these events occurred, making his diary entries possibly false. Thus the diary entries should be held with some skepticism that they may be, to a certain extent, inaccurate.
Section II: Investigation
In reference to my original research question, I predict that Zimbardo was significant in changing the prison system for prisoners to a minimal extent.
One of the most important experiments Zimbardo has conducted is the Stanford prison experiment which advanced psychology and had merit in the prison system. He gathered 24 college students to be either a prison guard or a prisoner. During the experiment the prison guards severely abused the prisoners; in one instance out of many, the guards put bags on the prisoners, chained them up, and yelled at them inhumanely. As a result of the study, he found that environments shape the way people behave. The findings of this experiment qualified Zimbardo to testify about the causes of prison riots to a hearing focused on crime and prison of minors. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Birch Baych, “prepared a new law for federal prisons requiring juveniles in pre-trial detention to be housed separately from adult inmates based on the abuse reported in the SPE”. This changes the Stanford prison experiment to be a psychological study that has merit in real prison systems as his testimony changed the way that minors and adults are held. Thus, Zimbardo was crucial in changing the separation of minors and adults in prison after his findings from the Stanford prison experiment found that environment shapes people.
The prison system before the Stanford prison experiment in 1971 was run with less restrictions and guidelines. This came in many ways such as the advantage that the rich had over the poor due to the fee system, which required prisoners to practically pay for everything; physical punishment like whippings; and the use of prisoners as a source of labor. This unfair system created harsh forms of punishment and treatment biased for the rich. Despite having numerous ways to exploit money from people, like the fee system, jails were still largely underfunded – creating overcrowding. This problem is highlighted in James Moyhohan’s and Earle Stewart’s book “The American Jail”, in which they describe how the prison guards are at risk of getting jumped by prisoners. The issue of overcrowding indicates the struggle that the prison guards are also in danger along with prisoners and demonstrates that before 1971, prisons were essentially just large holding cells for criminals, not places for reform. As crime rose in the 1960s, crowdedness worsened and growth opportunities for prisoners minimized. This demonstrates that despite the large number of prisoners, there was no wide scale program to improve United States prisoners. Overall, prior to the Stanford prison experiment, prison life was meant to be punitive and there was little opportunity for self-improvement for prisoners because there was no attempt to.
Although there was social pressure for jails to improve the standards of living for prisoners, prisons remain largely unchanged after the Stanford prison experiment as only some regulations were implemented and there is still a low quality of life for prisoners today. There were now far-reaching programs with focused goals of helping prisoners like the 1982 literacy program mandated by the Bureau, a federal agency responsible for the incarceration of criminals- where prisoners learned to read and write. This is momentous because it attempted to elevate prisoners’ intelligence and was a start to advancing prisoners. Another way that the Bureau has improved prison life is by recognizing 31 religions as opposed to before when it only recognized Christianity. This religious tolerance is vital in welcoming prisoners into society and re-introducing them to societal norms since they have a group to associate with. These improvements focused on intelligence and belief made living in prison less dreary and became essential for rehabilitation for prisoners. However, the Bureau does not prevent or compensate the abuse prisoners get from other people. For example, according to Mary Bosworth, prisoners experience neglect and unfair treatment in prisons like sexual, financial, physical abuse and health check rejections. In other words, on the surface level prisons have improved, but the stigma against prisoners hasn’t. Prisoners feel often insignificant in prison, the place where they are supposed to rehabilitate and improve themselves. This can occur through physical beatings, sexual assault, and psychological abuse from both prison guards and fellow prisoners. Most of the time these incidents go unreported, especially rape which is the most unreported assault. These forms of abuse are a blatant form of oppression, yet nothing substantial was implemented to prevent harassment for prisoners. Their inability to protect themselves in prison makes their own lives of poorer quality. Moreover, prisoners are isolated from their family and not given enough resources to stay close with them. A prisoner in Illinois, Joseph Dole, writes in his March 21, 2011 diary, “You’re forced to view every family tragedy as a spectator, but with all the emotions of being personally effected which are compounded because you also know you can’t do anything for your family.” In his other entries, Dole accounts how he was denied health care, the dirty conditions in the prison, the risk for Hepatitis, and other unsafe prison living conditions. This is significant because it demonstrates how prisoners were largely ignored. However, this is where the controversy comes in; prisoners are undoubtedly in prison for a crime, so giving them full rights is largely condemned. The current debate is between punishing criminals or rehabilitating them. If the focus is the latter, the United States has a deteriorating prison system as it is the only large nation with a proliferating incarceration rate. It has a high relapse rate for released prisoners to be charged with another crime as around 71% are convicted for another crime. The growing rate of incarceration and the large percentage of criminals returning to prison demonstrate that the prison system still does not effectively prevent crime or encourage prisoners to ameliorate. In fact, United States prison system appears as a holding cell for punishment, similar to its original punitive purpose. Thus, although there have been efforts to improve the quality of life of prisons, prisons are still largely oppressive and not helpful in rehabilitating prisoners.
However much the Stanford prison experiment demonstrated the unstable psychological tension between prisoners and prison guards, it was not the only notable psychology study at the time and was one contributor to the legislative change in the prison system. Just 7 years earlier was Stanley Milgram, who examined the influence of authority with a shock experiment. Subjects drew sticks to be either a learner or a teacher. When a learner made a mistake with a task, the teacher would shock him with increasing voltages under the pressure of the head lab researcher. Every teacher went up to 300 volts, some up to 450 volts – potentially killing the learner. Milgram demonstrated that “citizens could be led to blindly obey an unjust authority in delivering extreme levels of shock to an innocent ‘victim’”, applicable to the guards who, under pressure by peers or supervisors, can severely mistreat prisoners. This is essential in highlighting the potential abuse in prisons and how easily a guard or prisoner can be influenced to hurt another person, changing the way that the jurisdiction of guards is viewed. In order to prevent that abuse, the Farmer VS Brennan case in 1994 outlawed purposeful neglect of prisoners by prison guards. This led to neglect being punishable for guards and made this a violation of the eighth amendment which outlawed cruel and unusual punishment. This is imperative in changing the prison system because although prison guards undergo the same systematic training, their own prejudices against prisoners will inhibit safety. Zimbardo was not the only contributor in changing the way that prison guards should behave as the Milgram shock experiment and the supreme court case made prison guards responsible for the well-being of prisoners.
Section III: Reflection
I found researching sources that explicitly talk about a link between Zimbardo and changes in the prison system to be difficult because there was barely a change in the prison system, which was my misconception going into the project. I believed that the US prison system improved drastically, but there was actually very little change. For a large portion of the project, my traditionalist view of progress affected how I researched sources because I genuinely believed that the quality of prisons improved and primarily looked at a small selection of traditionalist sources. Another difficulty was finding a link between Zimbardo and changes in the prison system because Zimbardo is undervalued. Although his most famous experiment found results which would otherwise go unresearched, they were not appreciated because the methodology was critiqued as its test subjects were put under psychological and physical danger. In order to counter the difficulty in researching a direct link, I researched the prison system before and after the Stanford prison experiment and I found significant events which contributed to improving the prison system. If I were to do the project again I would choose a question after doing more research on the topic to avoid wasting time with my judgement clouded by my misconceptions.
In order to ensure a balanced perspective, my sources came from traditionalist and revisionist perspectives. However, I ineffectively provided the balanced perspective because I mainly wrote about how prison life for prisoners and barely wrote for prison guards, so I changed my question to focus on prisoners so I don’t lose points on the rubric for a biased perspective. To determine reliability of the sources, I did background research on the authors of the sources and how many other articles cited the sources I used. For example, one of the authors I cited often was criminologist Mary Bosworth who studied at the Universities of Western Australia and Cambridge. Another author I cited was Joseph Dole, whom I was skeptical at first. It was difficult to find information on Dole because he is incarcerated so he isn’t publishing things on his own. Rather, he is communicating with people who publish information for him like his biography and diaries. I think my variety of sources was the most successful part of my investigation because I had scholarly papers, diaries, blogs, research papers, articles, and books all from incarcerated prisoners, sociologists, and researchers.
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