In fact, prisons have been radically transformed in the United States in the last 25 years to make them less humane, Haney told the Toronto symposium audience. Voters have increasingly voted for politicians who take a tough public stance in favor of prisons as places for punishment, rather than for reforming social deviants. Long, determinate sentences are part of the new trend in policy, he said, as are an increasing number of prisons, like California's Pelican Bay, that put prisoners in long-term isolation. They are as bad for the guards as the prisoners in terms of their destructive impact on self-esteem, sense of justice and human compassion. Haney listed a number of lessons from the study that he said are largely ignored in American prisons as well as in other institutions of power today.
Individual differences matter very little in the face of an extreme situation. . . .
Institutional settings develop a life of their own independent of the wishes and intentions and purposes of those who run them. Zimbardo still has mixed emotions about the ethics of his experiment. His experiment has been criticized by some social scientists, as was the obedience experiment of his high school classmate Stanley Milgram, for its treatment of human research subjects. In Milgram's 1965 experiment, the subjects were led to believe that they were delivering ever more powerful electric shocks to a stranger, on the orders of a white-coated researcher. Like some of Zimbardo's guard subjects, some of Milgram's were anguished afterward by the revelation of their dark potential.