Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
The second I looked over the syllabus and read the title of this book, several questions raced through my mind. First and Foremost, I had no doubts that this was going to be a page turner. I was briefly exposed to the Standard Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiment in my social psychology class early in my college career. I was excited to find out the nitty gritty details of both experiments throughout the book. I also could not help but wonder how unfortunate it was that society has come to a point where we actually have to begin to “understand” how a good person turned “evil.” Of course, I do not lead my life thinking that everyone I come in contact with is an outstanding citizen of society, but the fact that a need has come up to write a book about how to better understand that process and the several factors that play
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Another thought that crossed my mind, is how this book would relate to the course of ethical issues in criminal justice. After diving into the reading, I shortly came to recognize how relevant it was to the course. Phillip Zimbardo made it clear that while individuals should be held responsible for his or her behavior, we must not ignore other outside factors that shape that individuals conduct. Zimbardo discusses that people must accept that, “… there aren’t just bad apples, but bad barrels, and in turn bad barrel makers.” Throughout my reading I started to notice a common theme, Zimbardo was considering three important factors when examining a person’s conduct, the person, the situation, and the system. Chapter after chapter these three categories surfaced and made me realize the importance of each one when evaluating a
... show that criminality and “evil” are not that different, as we tend to define them, but normal human responses that merely become amplified and find a destructive outlet.
As I was completing this assignment, I was watching the infamous Netflix documentary entitled Making a Murderer. The documentary follows the story of Steven Avery, who is currently in prison for the death of a woman, Teresa Halbach, in 2005. Steven Avery has been denying any involvement in the murder of Teresa Halbach for the past eleven years. In the middle of the reading, the documentary was exploring and analyzing Steven Avery’s deviant behavior as a young man (Making). As I observed what was being discussed about Steven Avery, I was able to build the connection between how society, and the community from which he came from, perceived Steven Avery and what Kai Erikson discussed in the first couple pages of the book with regards to deviance and its relation with regards to society.
Israel Keyes was a very organized conventional criminal that was always thinking ahead of how he could benefit himself for future crimes. According to many posts in discussion week 6, students seemed to agree that conventional criminals are much more hands on and appear more threatening. Keyes fits this description ve...
He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority figures. Milgram is well aware of his audience and organization throughout his article, uses quotes directly from his experiment and connects his research with real world examples to make his article as effective as possible. Stanley Milgram selected 40 college participants, aged 20-50, to take part in the experiment at Yale University. Milgram says, “The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measureable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim” (632). Although the 40 men or women thought that they were in a drawing to see who would be the “teacher” and the “learner,” the drawing was fixed.
Twenty-four average men were entered into a fake prison setting, twelve of which who had been given the role of prisoner and twelve with the role of guard. Throughout the course of the experiment we see the environment effect negatively on the actions of the group of guards, clearly demonstrating that situational forces can force a person to cross the line between good and evil. We see this heavily embodied in the guard Dave Eshelman AKA ‘John Wayne’ – nicknamed by the prisoners in the study – the most brutal guard of them all, the one who demonstrated all the findings on the influence of power and authority and human behaviour. “I was kind of running my own experiment in there, by saying, “How far can I push these things and how much abuse will these people take before they say, ‘knock it off?'” But the other guards didn’t stop me.
Pollock, J. M. (2010). Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions in Criminal Justice Sixth Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
During the course of our class we have encountered plenty of important topics and vital information that is essential to the field of the Criminal Justice system. Such as; Crime and justice including laws, Victimization and Criminal behavior, Laws, Police officers and Law enforcement and the criminal justice system in itself. These topics are daily situations yet individuals are oblivious to what's going on and that in it can be a major problem to the community. On that note this paper will express the ignorance and selfish values of twelve individuals by fully explaining the movie "Twelve Angry Men"
213) His belief is that instead of controlling crime, we should be more interested in the value system and the fairness of justice. I think that modern society favors the crime control model because law enforcement tries to maintain order in society while trying to incorporate finding out the truth and solving a crime. They treat the arrested as if they were already guilty and emphasize on arrest, prosecution and conviction of those who have broken the law. Police are allowed to interrogate a suspect, however they must make sure that they do not coerce a false confession because “it may result in the conviction of an innocent man . . . It is a factual question in each case whether the accused’s confession is unreliable.” (Roach, 1999, p. 678) Crime control is favored in society because law enforcement emphasizes the importance of repressing crime and keeping the rest of society safe from criminals as oppose to protecting the rights of the
To begin the experiment the Stanford Psychology department interviewed middle class, white males that were both physically and mentally healthy to pick 18 participants. It was decided who would play guards and who would be prisoners by the flip of a coin making nine guards and nine prisoners. The guards were taken in first to be told of what they could and could not do to the prisoners. The rules were guards weren’t allowed t o physically harm the prisoners and could only keep prisoners in “the hole” for a hour at a time. Given military like uniforms, whistles, and billy clubs the guards looked almost as if they worked in a real prison. As for the prisoners, real police surprised them at their homes and arrested them outside where others could see as if they were really criminals. They were then blindfolded and taken to the mock prison in the basement of a Stanford Psychology building that had been decorated to look like a prison where guards fingerprinted, deloused, and gave prisoners a number which they would be calle...
Pollock, J. (2014). Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions in Criminal Justice (8 ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
This example of Lucifer turning into Satan digresses into a less dramatic investigation of ordinary people converting into miscreant of evil. The book provides a detailed chronology of the transformations in human character that took place during an experiment designed by Zimbardo himself, which called for randomly selected healthy, normal, and intelligent college students to play roles of prisoner or guard in a monitored and projected study called the Stanford Prison Experiment. This experiment helps make sense of corporate malfeasance of “administrative evil”, or authoritative figures abusing their power to accentuate and express evil by means of egocentrism. This two week-long study was terminated after only six days because of the extreme stress and emotional breakdowns several of the prisoners experienced. These guards were abusing their power by forcing the prisoners to do humiliating tasks, stripping them naked, and sexually degrading them. People are not born evil; good and bad behaviors are either engaged or disengaged depending on the situation people find themselves
Williams, Frank P. and Marilyn D. McShane, Criminal Theory: Selected Classic Readings. 2nd ed. Cincinnati, Ohio: Anderson Publishing Company, 1998.
Within this essay, I will explain the three principles linked to the standards in the area of criminal justice. I'll explain the "slippery slope" and its connection and effects on the police department using some examples of each. There are three main principles that are concerning public crime: society-at-large hypothesis, structural or affiliation hypothesis, and rotten apple hypothesis.
...g factors such as fear of consequences for not obeying, human nature’s willingness to conform, perceived stature of authority and geographical locations. I also believe that due to most individual’s upbringings they will trust and obey anyone in an authoritative position even at the expense of their own moral judgment. I strongly believe that Stanley Milgram’s experiments were a turning point for the field of social psychology and they remind us that “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process”. Despite these findings it is important to point out it is human nature to be empathetic, kind and good to our fellow human beings. The shock experiments reveal not blind obedience but rather contradictory ethical inclinations that lie deep inside human beings.
Factors that affect good people developing bad behavior is too much power and generalizing a group. In the Stanford Experiment the guards had the power to do what was necessary to maintain order in the prison. The psychologist never told them what they could and couldn’t do to the prisoners. This reminds me of when I was younger and my parents would put me in charge of my sister when they had to leave the house. I thought that I could tell her what to do and she had to listen to me because i’m in charge. This is the same for the guards in the experiment, no one was telling them how to discipline the prisoners so they thought they could make them do whatever they wanted them to do and they would get away with it. Another factor that affects