PD Editorial: What lessons are lasting from prison study?

On an August evening 44 years ago, Palo Alto police “arrested” and blindfolded nine male Stanford students and transported them to the basement of Stanford University’s Jordan Hall, which had been converted into a prison with three cells.

There, the prisoners became subjects of a psychological experiment that remains the source of debate about how quickly everyday people can become abusive when placed in positions of authority. It’s a study that continues to both fascinate and horrify.

It became known simply as the Zimbardo experiment, named for Stanford’s Philip Zimbardo, who at the age of 38, directed the study in which 24 male students were randomly assigned to play the role of prisoners or guards. What resulted was alarming with the guards subjecting the prisoners to psychological abuse, degradation and sleep deprivation to the point some left the experiment crying. One guard, nicknamed “John Wayne,” took on the persona of the Southern prison guard from the movie “Cool Hand Luke,” forced prisoners out of bed in the middle of the night, ordered them to perform degrading tasks and, toward the end, even ordered the prisoners to pretend sexual contact.

The university-approved experiment originally was scheduled to last 14 days, but it had to be stopped after just six due to the abuse and signs of extreme stress by the prisoners. But it has remained in the public consciousness for more than four decades and is now the subject of a new film “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” which opened Friday at theaters in Palo Alto, Berkeley and San Francisco.

The study has been used in discussions ranging from school bullying to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But today it seems most relevant to the debate about officer-involved shootings and abuse of authority.

The latest case to stir public debate is the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old black woman who was pulled over in Texas for allegedly failing to signal before changing lanes. The ensuing testy exchange with the officer - as captured by a dashboard camera - includes him demanding that she extinguish a cigarette. When she became irritated, she inexplicably ended up being arrested. Bland later died in a Waller County jail cell. County officials say she committed suicide by “self-inflicted asphyxiation,” but her family disputes that she would take her own life.

What’s clear is that Bland should not have died because she never should have been arrested in the first place. At most, she should have been given a traffic citation. The recording suggests the officer resorted to abusive extremes primarily for one reason - he lost his temper.

Zimbardo said his reason for conducting the experiment was to explore the power of roles, rules and group identity in situations where one group has control and individuals can exert control through relative anonymity. It’s still worth exploring. Although critics question the study’s validity, there’s no disputing that this experiment has instructional value as we explore the root causes of abuse by those in uniform and search for ways to de-escalate these kind of confrontations. There’s no reason that they should end up being deadly ones.