Last night Jeff and I watched Das Experiment, a German film about the Stanford Prison Experiment gone horribly wrong. (Okay, the SPE gone even more horribly wrong.) Twenty men volunteer to participate in a two-week simulated prison experiment. Eight of them are randomly selected to be guards; the remaining twelve are prisoners. At first it's all a game, and everyone laughs and jokes. On the second day, tension appears and begins to escalate.
I had seen the film before, about a year and a half ago, but Jeff had not. Watching it again, I picked up on signs of tension, the first hints of the feminization, humiliation, and eventually outright violence that were to follow. The movie is sick, but the sickest thing is that it's quite realistic.
See the movie. (Check it out from your local public library!) Then visit the SPE website and go through the slide show. Then let me ask you this: What is the purpose of imprisonment? What is the purpose of being tough
?