Prison methods are as bad as you've heard, and spreading

The dehumanizing conditions long deployed against incarcerated people are now used beyond prison walls

- CRAIG HANEY GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

EASTERLING, the correctional facility in Clio, Ala., that appears in "The Alabama Solution."

I WAS ONE OF THE researchers in the well-known Stanford prison experiment in 1971, demonstrating the destructive dynamics that are generated when one group of people — randomly assigned as “guards” — is given near total power over a group of “prisoners.”

In six short days, inside a simulated prison environment, authoritarian forms of mistreatment emerged and numerous emotional breakdowns ensued among otherwise psychologically healthy college student volunteers. In the decades since, I have studied these dynamics in real correctional settings: jails, prisons and immigration detention centers throughout the United States.

Among the things I have learned is that the damaging dynamics unleashed inside such places are not self-correcting. Quite the opposite. Absent transparency and accountability, dehumanization and degradation intensify. Indeed, if left unchecked, the destructive forces that are set in motion almost invariably lead to greater and greater levels of mistreatment.

Because they make up what Justice Anthony Kennedy years ago called a “hidden world of punishment,” what goes on inside these facilities largely escapes public awareness and scrutiny. Many of these sites operate outside the conventional bounds of the rule of law. Lawless institutions in particular do not merely tolerate mistreatment: They engender, normalize and amplify it.