Navalny and the Stanford Prison Experiment
Could you be a prison guard?
Penal colony No. 3. FKU IK-3. Polar Wolf. These are a few of the names by which the arctic prison where Aleksei A. Navalny spent his final days is known. It is located near Kharp, a town which was built by Gulag prisoners during the Stalin era.
One wouldn’t expect humane conditions in any Russian prison, but this one is notorious for being the worst. Unbearable cold, repulsive food, unsanitary conditions and beatings are normal. Temperatures can go as low as -26 F – that is MINUS 26 degrees Fahrenheit. For punishment, prisoners have to stand outside in the cold without a coat. If they don’t stand still, they’ll be doused with cold water. At night they get threadbare prison blankets that are useless against the bitter cold. The bed where they sleep is a plank which gets locked to the wall during the day, forcing the prisoners to sit on a rickety chair or stand.
But the worst part apparently is the mental torture: isolation and a system designed to break the human spirit. Nobody trusts anybody. The guards demand total, unconditional obedience. They would encourage an extensive system of informants, constant surveillance. Not surprisingly, this fosters paranoia and anxiety. There’s absolutely no sense of community; prisoners are deliberately kept separate. Solitary confinement, to which Navalny was subjected for at least 300 days since 2022, is the last step in this brutal system.
None of this would be possible without willing prison guards and prison authorities. That reminded me of the Stanford Prison Experiment which was conducted in 1971 by Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo and his research team. I had to refresh my memory a little.
The experiment set up a simulated prison on the grounds of Stanford University. Participants were recruited with a newspaper ad:
Male college students needed for
Psychological study of prison
life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks
beginning Aug.14. For further
information & applications,
come to Room 248, Jordan
Hall, Stanford U.
The over 70 applicants were carefully interviewed and tested, and 24 young men who seemed the most mentally and physically stable were selected. A flip of a coin decided who would be the 12 prisoners and who the 12 guards. The basement of Stanford’s Psychology Department building was transformed into a realistic jail with prison cells, a narrow solitary confinement room, and a small yard for outdoor activity. There were no windows or clocks inside the prison.
The “prisoners” were completely unexpectedly arrested by real police officers, blindfolded, and driven to the jail where they were processed, searched, stripped naked and deloused with a spray. And they each received an ID number, names were forbidden.
The “guards'' were told to do whatever was necessary to maintain law and order, and to make sure the prisoners respected them sufficiently. They also wore special sunglasses to make eye contact impossible, and they carried billy clubs.
The experiment was supposed to last two weeks but had to be broken off on the sixth day because some prisoners experienced acute emotional breakdown, and because of excessively aggressive behavior by some of the guards.
Here are Professor Zimbardo’s conclusions:
At this point it became clear that we had to end the study. We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation – a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically…
We had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was "off." Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners…
After observing our simulated prison for only six days, we could understand how prisons dehumanize people, turning them into objects and instilling in them feelings of hopelessness. And as for guards, we realized how ordinary people could be readily transformed from the good Dr. Jekyll to the evil Mr. Hyde.1
Actually, the professor wasn’t immune to the influence of the prison environment. From his role as a research psychologist who oversaw and guided an experiment he gradually slipped into the role of the prison superintendent, and he didn’t even notice it at the time. The scientific conclusion at the time was that even well-adjusted people would develop sadistic tendencies when given authority and power over others (guards) or become submissive and obedient under pressure (prisoners). Each individual conformed to the situation, they had no choice.
Later evaluations of the experiment were more critical. They noticed, for example, that the “guards” had been encouraged to be tough, that the ad itself would attract people with a predilection to violence, and that at least one of the prisoners later declared he had faked his nervous breakdown so that he would be released. That most of the students in the experiment were simply play-acting; they wanted to please the experimenters by playing their respective roles. So, in professional psychology circles the scientific validity of the experiment has been questioned, it’s seen as an anecdote.
It’s certainly not a black-or-white issue. Can circumstances drive a non-violent, peaceful person to commit brutal acts, can a decent individual turn into a monster? I don’t think so. But we all know Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”, a term she coined when she covered the Eichmann trial in 1961 for The New Yorker. She saw an ordinary, unassuming man who was responsible for the deportation, imprisonment, and death of millions of Jews – not because he hated them, but because he followed orders. He simply did what he was told to do.
The phrase “No one has the right to obey” has become one of her iconic images.
What kind of people would become prison guards or administrators at Penal colony No. 3? And to return to my question on top: could YOU be a prison guard? Not at a hellhole in Siberia, I’m sure. One would have to be a sadistic psychopath, emotionally absolutely numb, utterly indifferent to others’ pain and suffering. If I was born in Kharp, I’d try to get away as soon as possible. The thought of the long, icy winters alone makes me want to scream.
However, a federal prison in the United States is a different story, one would think, right? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t a simple yes or no. Look at Supermax facilities such as ADX Florence in Colorado (the strictest Supermax prison in the US), or Pelican Bay in California. They are notorious for their solitary confinement cells, known as Special Housing Units (SHUs). Prolonged solitary confinement is considered torture and is in violation of international law, according to Amnesty International. There ARE exceptions, or at least one: the Spring Creek prison, Alaska’s only maximum-security facility, has made reforms to treat people humanely and prepare them for release.
Still, my answer is no: I could never work as a correctional officer in a prison. Even if I was a single mother with six children, I’d find some other way to support us. But that’s just me. (I wholeheartedly admire people who introduce special programs to prisoners: teaching gardening skills, or learning to train and take care of dogs for example. I had to add this).
The human mind can very easily devolve into an inhuman one.
I've given thought to what jobs I simply could not do, no matter my circumstances. I never considered prison guard, but I'm with you--don't think I could do it. I already know I could never work in a slaughterhouse. Yes, I would rather starve.
I'd like to see that experiment repeated with women. I suspect the outcome would be different, but again, you have to consider the kind of people who would volunteer for an experiment like that in the first place.