“The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism” by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak

Put in the right circumstances, every human being has the potential to be a sadist. In “The Stanford Prison Experiment”, Phillip G. Zimbardo examines how easily people can slip into roles and become sadistic to the people around them, even going so far as to develop a sense of supremacy. He does this by explaining the results of his experiment that he created to understand more about the effects that imprisonment has on prisoners, and how a prison environment affects the guards who work there. In her article “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism”, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak looks at the Abu Ghraib atrocities and the possible reasons why “normal” people turned into sadists who committed unfathomable acts of torture. Although Szegedy-Maszak and Zimbardo both suggest that every person has the potential to be a torturer, Zimbardo’s experiment adds specificity to Szegedy-Maszak’s claims. Szegedy-Maszak speaks generally about dehumanization, whereas Zimbardo uses his experiment to delve deeper into despotism and the role it plays in prisons; the evidence of dehumanization in prison environments is further complicated by the notion of internal and external attitudes.

Szegedy-Maszak and Zimbardo recognize that every human being can become someone who delights in the pain of others. Dehumanization is a key element in this change from a caring person to a sadist. According to Robert Okin, a professor of psychiatry, dehumanization allows people to “sever any empathetic human connection” (Szegedy-Maszak 304) they may have felt towards a person. Through interviews and studies, Zimbardo discovered that prisoners often report feeling dehumanized; his goal was to incorporate this feeling into his prison if possible. While conducting his experiment, he saw a degree of dehumanization occur that was astounding for the short period of time that the study was carried out. Szegedy-Maszak says that authorization leads to routinization, which ultimately leads to dehumanization. She claims that these three traits were present at Abu Ghraib.

In Zimbardo’s experiment, a group of twenty-one college-age males were put into a mock prison located in the basement of the Stanford University psychology building. The people chosen to participate were evaluated to make sure they were “normal” men. Participants were then divided into two groups, guards and prisoners, by the flip of a coin. The prisoners were assigned three to a cell and hidden microphones recorded their conversations. The guards were informed that they were responsible for maintaining order in the prison. The first day of the experiment was relatively uneventful; however, by the second day tensions had arisen due to a rebellion and relations between the prisoners and guards progressively worsened. Everyone involved in the experiment became so engrossed in their roles and their behavior became so disturbing that the two week study had to be concluded after only six days.

Szegedy-Maszak states, “In Vietnam the enemy became ‘slopes’, and in Iraq they’re ‘towel heads’ (Szegedy-Maszak 304). In other words, belittling slang terms for a race of people become instituted and widely used, especially during times of war. Iraqis, and Middle Easterners in general, have come to be derogatorily referred to as “towel heads”. Zimbardo says the guards “referred to them [prisoners] in impersonal, anonymous, deprecating ways: ‘Hey, you’ or ‘You [obscenity], 5401, come here’ (Zimbardo 350). These two statements by Szegedy-Maszak and Zimbardo together illustrate how words can be used to dehumanize someone. By using deprecating monikers, the name-caller can group together an entire race of people into one anonymous mass where one person of the race is no different than the next. Deindividualization in the form of degrading names is prevalent in almost all prisons, and it was also present in Zimbardo’s experiment.

Dehumanization is present in all prisons. For example, in many prisons inmates are required to wear the same clothing, making them all blend in. Zimbardo states, “We promoted anonymity by seeking to minimize each prisoner’s sense of uniqueness and prior identity” (Zimbardo 346). All of the prisoners in Zimbardo’s mock prison were required to wear the same clothing ensemble, which consisted of a smock and nylon cap. All of their personal items were removed and they had to address each other not by their names, but by their identification numbers. Zimbardo wanted his prison environment to come as close to an actual prison as possible, but he never envisioned how realistic it would become. Dehumanization played a significant role in the guards’ actions. It is probable that by removing any distinguishable markings or effects, the prisoners became more like objects than people to the guards. The guards became desensitized to the prisoners’ feelings because they could not readily relate to them as human beings. This desensitization also occurred at Abu Ghraib on a much grander scale.

The role that dehumanization played at the Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, was much more devastating than in Zimbardo’s experiment. It is probable that the prisoners rarely bathed; the stench that resulted would have been rancid. The guards were in a foreign country and the people they were guarding were part of an unfamiliar culture. These conditions caused most Abu Ghraib guards to not see the inmates as people, but instead to see them as animals. These sentiments were also visible in Zimbardo’s experiment. One guard stated, “I practically considered the prisoners cattle” (Zimbardo 348). It is difficult to fathom how a person could see other human beings this way. Szegedy-Maszak claims, “Abu Ghraib also has three traits that psychologist Herbert Kelman has described as necessary for torture: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization” (Szegedy-Maszak 304). It is because of the combination of internal and external attitudes that these three traits become prevalent.

What are internal and external attitudes and how do they affect a prison environment? Zimbardo’s experiment is an example of a situation where external attitudes came into play. Everyone came into the experiment under the same circumstances and initially no one had any problems with one another. One subject stated, “I don’t feel like I am the type of person that would be a guard, just constantly giving out [orders] and forcing people to do things” (Zimbardo 351). The attitudes, and more importantly, the actions, of the guards soon changed. Just days later a guard said, “I was surprised at myself…I made them call each other names and clean the toilets out with their bare hands (Zimbardo 348). This radical transformation had to come from somewhere. In a matter of days the subjects went from being cordial to one another, to inflicting or enduring acts of torture. The guards did not go into the experiment hating the prisoners; it was the atmosphere and the tension-filled environment that was the catalyst. However, imagine if both internal and external attitudes are at play. The situation changes dramatically, for the worse.

Abu Ghraib was a special situation that is typically only found during times of war. There, both internal and external attitudes came into play. War is a unique situation; in order to survive war, dehumanization must occur. When someone is killing people they can’t allow themselves to care. This probably carries over into the prisons. It is necessary for them to detach themselves from the reality that is actually there in order to survive. The purpose of Abu Ghraib prison was to incarcerate and question Iraqi prisoners of war. The guards that came to work there already had a preconceived notion of what it would be like. They knew they were going to be guarding the enemy and they had already formulated an opinion about the people that would be there. The prisoners there were from an entirely different culture and didn’t speak English. Things at Abu Ghraib were very systematic and impersonal. As with Zimbardo’s experiment, the prisoners at Abu Ghraib had no identity.

Abu Ghraib was not the only place where heinous war crimes were committed. One of the best-known events is the Jewish holocaust that took place in the 1940s. In the country of Germany, and in the numerous concentration camps, there was an unprecedented degree of dehumanization. Millions of people, mostly Jews, were systematically tortured and exterminated. How does this compare to Abu Ghraib? It is extremely similar. Szegedy-Maszak states, “The protected walls of Abu Ghraib made it an island where conventional morality no longer applied” (Szegedy-Maszak 304). The isolated location of the prison helped to separate the guards from reality, as well as create a breeding ground for deindividualization. It is easier to lose sight of actuality when there isn’t constant interference from the “outside world”. The same thing applies to the concentration camps during the Holocaust; they were isolated as well. As with Abu Ghraib, both internal and external attitudes were present in Nazi concentration camps. When both internal and external attitudes are combined, the results are explosive. The stresses of a prison-like atmosphere coupled with authorization, dehumanization, and routinization creates a recipe for unimaginable torture.

Works Cited:

Szegedy-Maszak, Marianne. “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. 9th Edition. Eds. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005. 302-304.

Zimbardo, Philip G. “The Stanford Prison Experiment.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. 9th Edition. Eds. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005. 344-355.