In 1971, as a young psychologist at California’s Stanford University [Professor Philip Zimbardo] had conducted an experiment into the psychology of imprisonment, dividing a group of undergraduate students into ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’. That August he witnessed levels of cruelty that he would never have predicted or imagined. Within no time, liberal undergraduates became sadists, tormenting prisoners, even forcing them, in an uncanny premonition of George W. Bush’s Iraq, to simulate sodomy with one another….After six days Zimbardo called a halt to the experiment….
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The story of Abu Ghraib, the focus of this book, is told with precision, in detail and with narrative skill. After the publication of the photographs, seven guards were charged with ‘maltreating detainees’. Among them was Ivan ‘Chip’ Frederic, 37, at whose trial Zimbardo appeared as an expert witness. Frederick was the archetypal ordinary American Joe: god-fearing, basket-ball playing, a disciplined soldier, super-patriotic. At Abu Ghraib he became ground down and dehumanized. He worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, 40 days without rest, and slept in a prison cell when off duty. In his words: “shit was backed up in the porta-potties. There were human body parts in the facility…there was a pack of wild dogs running around.’ Prisoners regularly attacked guards; on one occasion a gun was smuggled in and a shoot-out with guards followed.
Such an environment, Zimbardo writes, “was as extreme a setting for creating deindividuation as I can imagine’. Cruelty became sexualized: one guard sodomised a prisoner with a chemical light; another raped a female detainee. Bush vowed that “wrong-doers will be brought to justice”. But to date only the lowly guards have been tried. Frederick, who pleaded guilty, was given eight years.
‘Evil at the centre of the human heart’. Review of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by P. Zimbardo, Rider Books. In The Guardian Weekly 11.05.07 p.36.
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The story of Abu Ghraib, the focus of this book, is told with precision, in detail and with narrative skill. After the publication of the photographs, seven guards were charged with ‘maltreating detainees’. Among them was Ivan ‘Chip’ Frederic, 37, at whose trial Zimbardo appeared as an expert witness. Frederick was the archetypal ordinary American Joe: god-fearing, basket-ball playing, a disciplined soldier, super-patriotic. At Abu Ghraib he became ground down and dehumanized. He worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, 40 days without rest, and slept in a prison cell when off duty. In his words: “shit was backed up in the porta-potties. There were human body parts in the facility…there was a pack of wild dogs running around.’ Prisoners regularly attacked guards; on one occasion a gun was smuggled in and a shoot-out with guards followed.
Such an environment, Zimbardo writes, “was as extreme a setting for creating deindividuation as I can imagine’. Cruelty became sexualized: one guard sodomised a prisoner with a chemical light; another raped a female detainee. Bush vowed that “wrong-doers will be brought to justice”. But to date only the lowly guards have been tried. Frederick, who pleaded guilty, was given eight years.
‘Evil at the centre of the human heart’. Review of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by P. Zimbardo, Rider Books. In The Guardian Weekly 11.05.07 p.36.
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