So i’m gonna focus on the role of psychology that shaped the jail policies. One of the event that changed the way people were treated in prisons for the last 25-30 years was the stanford prison experiment.
Stanford experiment was conducted in 1973 by craig haney and Philip zimbardo. A group of healthy, normal college students were temporily but dramatically transformed in the course of six days spent in a prison like environment. Emotionally strong college students, they suffered acute psychological trauma and breakdowns. The guards too who also had been carefully chosen on the basis of their normal average scores on variety of personal measures quickly internalized their randomly assigned role. The goal in conducting the SPE was to extend that basic perspective- emphasizing the potency of social situations. The study represented an experimental demonstration of the extraordinary power of institutional environments to influence those who passed through them. The behavior of the prisoners and guards in the simulated environment had a remarkable similarity to patterns found in actual prisons.
Despite the fact that guards and prisoners were essentially free to engage in any form of interaction, the characteristic nature of their encounters tended to be negative, hostile and dehumanizing. Specifically, verbal interactions were of threats and insults. It showed that psychologically healthy individuals could become sad and depressed when placed in a prison-like environment.The experiment was conducted in the basement hallway of Stanford university and