I am personally very interested in the effects of imprisonment on mental health, the ability to re-acclimate into society, and the general concept of the U.S. prison experiment as a whole. Reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment, I felt very.. distressed. There is the whole problem of ethics, but before I talk about that: From the very beginning, I was troubled because the experiment was aimed to study the “psychological effects of prison life.” But the guards in the experiment were not trained AT ALL, and the subjects were not criminals! I would argue that 1. Untrained guards can in no way create a true-to-life prison environment to study (as we saw by the way the guards acted), and also that the psychological effects on an imprisoned person who had actually broken a law may be different than a person who didn’t. (Which is important because there are many people incarcerated wrongfully, my point is that the psychological effects will probably be different among the two groups even though we have both).

The ethics portion of this experiment was flawed beyond measure. 1. Zimbardo had NO knowledge or studies done on prisons or the prison system. According to the APA Code of Conduct, it is required that researchers conduct studies done within boundaries of competence and training. I mean could you imagine just deciding that you were going to create a fake prison and actually get volunteers and carry it out? 2. Harm… I mean the extreme emotional trauma endured does not meet the requirement of “minimizing harm where it is unavoidable.” Being stripped naked, assigned numbers, solitary confinement, the mistreatment, the effects do not just fade with time. 3. There was no informed consent to research. Participants needed to be informed of their right to decline participation and withdraw from research once it had begun.

The following quote on the last page of the article really hammered in the fact that the participants of this study will never truly “recover” from the experiment: “it was a prison to me; it still is a prison to me. I don’t regard it as an experiment or a simulation because it was a prison run by psychologists instead of run by the state. I began to feel that that identity.”