The Rotten Barrel Spoils the Apples: How Situational Factors Contribute to Detention Officer Abuse Toward Inmates

Abstract

This article reviews The Lucifer Effect, a fascinating and incisive book by Phillip Zimbardo, a professor emeritus at Stanford University. The book is a multilayered and compelling treatise about the malleability of human nature and the utter rapidity with which it can change from civility to malevolence. Lying at the heart of the volume is a painstaking chronology of the Stanford Prison Experiment, a case study that illustrates the overriding “power of the situation” to transform “good citizens” into “evil doers.” The book's most valuable contributions are the parallels Zimbardo draws between the experiment and the Abu Ghraib atrocities. This underscore the timelessness of the insights generated in his laboratory that went unheeded in Iraq because of systemic and situational forces that compelled young men and women of the military to engage in wanton acts of abuse and torture. The author extracts from The Lucifer Effect seven enduring lessons for America's prison administrators.