Contributor: Prison methods are as bad as you've heard and they extend to the streets

I was one of the researchers of the well-known Stanford prison experiment in 1971, which demonstrated the destructive dynamics that are generated when a group of people (randomly assigned as “guards”) are given almost total power over a group of “prisoners.” In six short days, within a simulated prison environment, authoritarian forms of mistreatment emerged and numerous emotional crises occurred 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 across the United States.

One of the things I have learned is that the harmful dynamics that rage within those places do not correct themselves. Quite the opposite. Without transparency and accountability, dehumanization and degradation intensify. In fact, if left unchecked, the destructive forces set in motion almost invariably lead to increasing levels of abuse.

Because they constitute what Justice Anthony Kennedy years ago called a “hidden world of punishment,” what happens inside these facilities largely escapes public awareness and scrutiny. Many of these sites operate outside the conventional boundaries of the rule of law. Lawless institutions in particular don't just tolerate abuse: they engender it, normalize it, and amplify it.

A recent HBO documentary, “The Alabama Solution,” dramatically illustrates many of these forces at work. Based on a six-year investigation and footage of cell phone smuggling that brave incarcerated men provided from inside one of America's most dangerous and dysfunctional prison systems, filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman offer their audiences a harrowing glimpse into something few outsiders see: that hidden world of punishment laid bare, vividly depicting the depth of institutional cruelty and indifference to suffering that characterizes many of our nation's correctional facilities.

I am well aware of the Alabama prison system that the film focuses on. I was an expert witness in a federal lawsuit in which Judge Myron Thompson found the entire system unconstitutional. I spent many days in that role documenting the atrocious living conditions inside the state's prisons and interviewing prisoners about the neglect and mistreatment to which they were subjected. Surprisingly, the system was so dangerously out of control that there were several days when my scheduled research missions had to be canceled because, as prison officials told me, “they could not guarantee my safety.” If they couldn't guarantee the safety of an expert with a warrant to enter, we should all ask ourselves if and how they could guarantee the safety of the 30,000 prisoners under their control. The new documentary offers chilling answers to that question.

The film also debunks a common stereotype that prisoners cannot be believed about the terrible realities they face in their daily lives and regularly exaggerate the suffering and indignities they endure. In my experience, the opposite is true. If anything—perhaps because they don't want to fully relive the trauma or because they worry that outside skeptics won't believe them—they tend to underestimate what's really going on inside. As viewers of “The Alabama Solution” will see, the brutal reality is actually much worse than most people can imagine. And it is infinitely worse than the optimistic accounts of many officials and politicians, who are themselves responsible for creating and maintaining these horrible places.

I wish I could say that the atrocious conditions and shocking treatment depicted in the film were limited to a single prison or prison system. The truth is, while Alabama may be an outlier in some ways, scenes like those depicted in the film all too often play out in jails, prisons, and detention centers across the country. There are currently almost 2 million people confined within the country's bloated prison system, which costs to taxpayers More than 180 billion dollars annually to maintain. However, in too many of these places, operating far from public view and meaningful legal regulation, callousness, cruelty, and mistreatment prevail instead of rehabilitation, programming, and treatment. Too many people come out of them traumatized by the experience, if they are lucky enough to get out at all.

Instead of reforming these institutions and minimizing their reach, federal and state governments are expanding their dehumanizing penal practices beyond prison walls. We daily witness the metastasis of an increasingly lawless system of state-sanctioned oppression into society at large, in which anonymous government actors operate unfettered by due process safeguards, subjugating and terrorizing people with impunity, as has long been common within prisons and jails. Only the restoration of transparency and the rule of law can reverse the dangerous direction in which our country has been moving and turn back the tide towards justice and humanity.

Craig Haney, professor of psychology at UC Santa Cruz, is the author of “Crime in context: A psychological framework for criminal justice reform.”