Among the dozen investigations of the Abu Ghraib abuses, one found that the landmark Stanford study provided a cautionary tale for all military detention operations. In differentiating the comparatively benign environment of the Stanford prison experiment, this report makes obvious that in military detention operations, soldiers work under demanding combat conditions that are far from benign. The insinuation is that those combat conditions might be anticipated to produce even more severe abuses of power than were observed in the mock prison experiment (Zimbardo, 2007).
Discussion
The Stanford prison experiment is but one of a host of studies in psychology that reveal the extent to which peoples behavior can be transformed from its usual set point to deviate in unimaginable ways. If the goals of the criminal system are simply to blame and punish individual perpetrators then focusing almost exclusively on the individual defendant...
if, however, the goal is actually to reduce the behavior that is now called criminal and to assign punishments that correspond with culpability, then the criminal-justice system is obligated to confront the circumstances and the role in creating and perpetuating it.
Conclusion
The significant message then is to be sensitive about our susceptibility to subtle but influential situational forces and, by such consciousness, be more able to conquer those forces. Group pressures, power symbols, dehumanization of others, forced anonymity, leading ideologies that facilitate unauthentic ends to validate immoral means, lack of observation, and other situational forces can work to alter even some of the best of us into something that we are not.
References
Zimbardo, P.G. (2007). Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: a Lesson in the Power of Situation. Chronicle of Higher Education, B6-B7.
