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Fallenness on Display
Power Corrupts
Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison
Fellowship President
The more we read and learn about the mistreatment
of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in
But one person who wasn’t surprised by what
he learned is Dr. Philip Zimbardo of
In 1971, Zimbardo and his colleagues conducted an experiment in the basement of Stanford’s psychology building. After creating a simulated prison, they randomly assigned twenty-four Stanford students to be either guards or prisoners.
Within a few days, the students playing guards had become sadistic. They placed bags over the “prisoners’” heads. They forced them to strip naked and subjected them to humiliating sexual pranks.
Students from one of
The results at Stanford, while dramatic, weren’t unique. An earlier experiment at Yale tested people’s willingness to inflict pain on others. They were told to push a switch that supposedly delivered an electric shock every time another subject answered a question incorrectly. With only the researcher’s insistence for motivation, two-thirds of the participants were willing to deliver potentially lethal shocks to the victim—even though they could hear his screams.
Although the set-up was fake, the willingness of
one person to inflict suffering on another was all too real, just as at
Stanford. Seeing ordinary college students become sadistic thugs caused
Zimbardo to tell the New York Times recently that he wasn’t
at all surprised at what happened in
According to Zimbardo, it wasn’t a case of simply putting “bad apples in a good barrel,” but the opposite. Prisons, “where the balance of power [between guards and prisoners] is so unequal,” are, almost by definition, brutal places. This makes it vital for authorities to rein in the guard’s worst impulses. Otherwise, as the nineteenth-century Christian statesman Lord Acton famously put it, power will corrupt.
This corruption is the product of our fallenness. We are certainly capable of generosity and kindness, but because we are, as C. S. Lewis called it, “bent,” we are also capable of cruelty and even savagery. And our backgrounds don’t make a difference; because of our sinful nature, given the right circumstances, the potential for what happened at Abu Ghraib lies within all of us.
The founders understood this. This is why we have the separation of powers to guard against the temptation and corruption that comes with power. The correctional system knows this. That’s why they carefully train and monitor corrections officers.
The actions at Abu Ghraib that, as columnist Peggy Noonan put it, “humiliated [our] country” are timely reminders that, whenever and wherever humans are incarcerated or institutionalized, those in positions of responsibility must be vigilant.
That’s why Americans, especially Christians, should not settle for responses that treat what happened as the actions of just a few “bad apples.” Going forward, wise leadership must take into account human sin and depravity—a truth that is not only demonstrable, but is central to a Christian worldview.
For further reading and information:
John Schwartz, “ Simulated Prison in ’71 Showed a Fine Line between
‘Normal’ and ‘Monster’ ,” New York Times,
Kathleen O’Toole, “ The Stanford Experiment: Still Powerful after All These
Years ,”
Jerry Large, “ The sickening predictability of our capacity for
evil ,” Seattle Times,
“Abuse and the Army ,”
Wall Street Journal,
Peggy Noonan, “ A Humiliation for America ,” Wall Street Journal,
Charles Krauthammer, “ This war is also about sex ,” Townhall.com,
Bradley Graham and David Von Drehle,
“ Bush Apologizes for Abuse of Prisoners ,”
David Stout, “ Rumsfeld Offers Apology for Abuse of Iraqi
Prisoners ,” New York
Times,
Nicholas Kristof, “ Those Friendly Iranians ,” New York Times,
Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, The Problem of Evil (Tyndale, 1999).
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Touchstone, 1996 version).