#Sought say. against tormentor. they shot full
After weeks of negotiations with prisoners who held guards hostage while demanding basic human rights, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the National Guard to take back the prison by full force. Less than one month later, prisons made more news when a riot erupted at Attica Prison in New York. Several guards and some informant prisoners were tortured and murdered during the attempt, but the escape was prevented after the leader was allegedly gunned down while trying to scale the 30-foot high prison walls. Prisoners in the Maximum Adjustment Center were released from their cells by Soledad brother George Jackson, who had smuggled a gun into the prison. The next day, there was an alleged escape attempt at San Quentin. Our study was terminated on August 20, 1971. (We intervened later and returned #416 to his cell.) What do you think they chose? Most elected to keep their blanket and let their fellow prisoner suffer in solitary all night. They could have #416 come out of solitary if they were willing to give up their blanket, or they could leave #416 in solitary all night. The head guard then exploited this feeling by giving prisoners a choice. But instead, the others saw him as a troublemaker. Still, #416 refused.Īt this point #416 should have been a hero to the other prisoners. After several unsuccessful attempts to get #416 to eat, the guards threw him into solitary confinement for three hours, even though their own rules stated that one hour was the limit. Prisoner #416 coped by going on a hunger strike to force his release. The "old timer" prisoners told him that quitting was impossible, that it was a real prison. Unlike the other prisoners, who had experienced a gradual escalation of harassment, this prisoner's horror was full-blown when he arrived.
Prisoner #416 was newly admitted as one of our stand-by prisoners. He literally became the most hated authoritarian official imaginable, so much so that when it was over he felt sick at who he had become – his own tormentor who had previously rejected his annual parole requests for 16 years when he was a prisoner. In the psychological prison we had created, only the correctional staff had the power to grant paroles.ĭuring the parole hearings we also witnessed an unexpected metamorphosis of our prison consultant as he adopted the role of head of the Parole Board. Their sense of reality had shifted, and they no longer perceived their imprisonment as an experiment. Why did they obey? Because they felt powerless to resist. Then, when we ended the hearings by telling prisoners to go back to their cells while we considered their requests, every prisoner obeyed, even though they could have obtained the same result by simply quitting the experiment. First, when we asked prisoners whether they would forfeit the money they had earned up to that time if we were to parole them, most said yes. Several remarkable things occurred during these parole hearings. He stopped crying suddenly, looked up at me like a small child awakened from a nightmare, and replied, "Okay, let's go." This is just an experiment, and those are students, not prisoners, just like you. I am a psychologist, not a prison superintendent, and this is not a real prison. Even though he was feeling sick, he wanted to go back and prove he was not a bad prisoner.Īt that point I said, "Listen, you are not #819. Through his tears, he said he could not leave because the others had labeled him a bad prisoner. Now it was marked by utter conformity and compliance, as if a single voice was saying, "#819 is bad." No longer was the chanting disorganized and full of fun, as it had been on the first day. As soon as I realized that #819 could hear the chanting, I raced back to the room where I had left him, and what I found was a boy sobbing uncontrollably while in the background his fellow prisoners were yelling that he was a bad prisoner.
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