by Zoë Pollock
Romesh Ratnesar interviews the participants of the Stanford Prison Experiment 40 years later. One of the guards was Dave Eshelman:
When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, my first reaction was, this is so familiar to me. I knew exactly what was going on. I could picture myself in the middle of that and watching it spin out of control. When you have little or no supervision as to what you're doing, and no one steps in and says, "Hey, you can't do this"—things just keep escalating. You think, how can we top what we did yesterday? How do we do something even more outrageous? I felt a deep sense of familiarity with that whole situation.
In light of the growing number of incarcerated, the effect on prisoners is worth stressing. Researcher Craig Haney illuminates it:
Real prisoners learn how to mask their pain and act like it doesn't matter. The prison study showed what it feels like for people who have not learned how to wear that implacable mask. I try to talk to prisoners about what their lives are really like, and I don't think I would have come to that kind of empathy had I not seen what I saw at Stanford. If someone had said that in six days you can take 10 healthy college kids, in good health and at the peak of resilience, and break them down by subjecting them to things that are commonplace and relatively mild by the standards of real prisons —I'm not sure I would have believed it, if I hadn't seen it happen.
The Dish 