Among the dozen investigations of the Abu Ghraib abuses, one found that the landmark Stanford study provided a cautionary tale for all military detention operations. In differentiating the comparatively benign environment of the Stanford prison experiment, this report makes obvious that in military detention operations, soldiers work under demanding combat conditions that are far from benign. The insinuation is that those combat conditions might be anticipated to produce even more severe abuses of power than were observed in the mock prison experiment (Zimbardo, 2007).

Discussion

The Stanford prison experiment is but one of a host of studies in psychology that reveal the extent to which peoples behavior can be transformed from its usual set point to deviate in unimaginable ways. If the goals of the criminal system are simply to blame and punish individual perpetrators then focusing almost exclusively on the individual defendant makes sense. if, however, the goal is...
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