Artists
Album Info
Release Date: 2023-03-17Labels: Fourth Dimension Records, opiumdenpluto, Adventures In Reality Recordings
Stanford’ sees the coming together of Puppy38 (Hiroshimabend, Opiumdenpluto) and Alan Rider (Stress, Attrition, Dance Naked, Mummies & Madmen, Adventures in Reality) as Sensestra to recreate in sound the experience of the now notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, that saw California college students transform into sadistic and brutal ‘prison guards’ or cowed and submissive ‘prisoners’ over the course of just six days in August 1971.This is the Standard Edition version of the release.
Recorded, Mixed and Produced by Alan Rider and Puppy38 in Norfolk, UK and Vienna, Austria
Mastering and design by Puppy38 at Opiumdenpluto...under an upside down cow...
Limited to 278 copies
Sleeve notes:
Sunday 14 August 1971, California. A knock comes on the door of Douglas Korpi, a 22-year-old Berkeley student. He answers to be confronted by a pair of Palo Alto police department officers who immediately arrest him, march him to their squad car, search and handcuff him before thrusting him roughly into the back seat and heading downtown to the station to book him in. Once there he is fingerprinted, photographed, and charged with burglary and armed robbery before being transferred to Stanford University where a cell awaits him. So began the now notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, designed to study the effects of incarceration on both prisoners and guards. The history and outcome of the experiment are well known, being the subject of many books, films and academic papers. Yet it still has the power to shock today, as wars, regimes, and state sanctioned genocide prove time and again the depths to which humanity and individuals will sink in the pursuit or exercise of power.
Using a newspaper advertisement to recruit local male college students for the study, Stanford Psychology Professor Phillip Zimbardo and his team hoped to use those volunteers to test the ‘Lucifer Effect’ (the ability of ordinary people to engage in evil acts if given authority to do so) over a two week period. The experiment barely lasted six days, with Douglas Korpi (now designated as Prisoner #8612) having to leave after just three days after demonstrating acute symptoms of emotional disturbance, including uncontrollable crying and rage.
Although now widely regarded as unethical, along with other contemporary psychological experiments of the time such as Milgram, it nonetheless offers chilling proof of how rapidly humans can descent into the darkest of states, both as oppressor and oppressed.
Over the course of six days, ordinary college students quickly transformed into sadistic guards, bullying, humiliating and abusing the ‘inmates’ simply because they were told that they had the authority to do so. They were given no specific instructions. That choice was theirs. Likewise other college students who were designated as ‘inmates’ could have left at any time. They weren’t actually prisoners. They had done nothing wrong. They knew that. Yet they stayed. And they not only stayed, but they endured being woken at 2.30am by a cacophony of whistles and noise from the guards, then rebelled by refusing to leave their cells, ripping off their inmate numbers, and hurling insults and obscenities at their guards, only to be sprayed with fire extinguishers, have all their clothes and mattresses removed, and be forced into a claustrophobic solitary confinement ‘hole’.
Similarly, the ‘guards’ were fellow students, not real prison guards, as they well knew. Yet they enthusiastically and sadistically abused and attacked the ‘inmates’, forcing them to do pushups, removing access to the bathrooms (forcing the inmates to answer the call of nature in a bucket in their cells), and behaving with escalating violence towards them as the experiment wore on.
Zimbardo was simply unable to see that he had lost control of the experiment almost from the start and it was only when a fellow psychologist, Christina Maslach, visited the ‘prison’ and challenged him on the morality of the study, the inhumane conditions the prisoners lived in, and the sadistic treatment by the guards, did he end the experiment after just six days.
Timeline
Day One: The Beginning
The Palo Alto police arrest nine volunteer students at their homes and charge them with burglary and armed robbery. Meanwhile, in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department's building, three students randomly assigned as prison guards don uniforms but are not given any specific instructions on how to be guards.
The inmates were brought to the makeshift prison. Each ‘prisoner’ was stripped of their clothes, received a delousing spray, and changed into a prison shift with a number sewn on it. To simulate shaving their heads, they had their hair covered with stocking caps.
Day Two: False Dawn
After being confined to their cells the whole day and enduring a noisy 2.30 am wake up call , many of the inmates rebelled only to be sprayed with fire extinguishers by the guards, forcing them to back away from their cell doors. The guards entered and subdued the prisoners, removing their clothes and mattresses, and locking the main instigators into a small cupboard dubbed ‘The Hole’.
The experiment was already entering dark waters.
Day Three: Submission
To discourage any further rebellion, the guards granted some prisoners ‘special privileges’ such as clothing, beds, and food in the ‘good’ cell, before transferring them back to empty cells and switching them over with another three prisoners on order to create an atmosphere of mistrust amongst the inmates.
The guards continued to abuse their power, humiliating the inmates, whilst Prisoner #8612 began to show real signs of a mental breakdown, screaming and crying in a fit of uncontrollable rage. His condition deteriorated further and he was removed from the experiment and released. It was, however, to get worse.
Day Four: Division
The prisoners began to turn against each other, accusing others of being informants, or upsetting the status quo, leading to loss of basic comforts such as beds or clothes. Prisoner #819 began crying in his cell and displaying symptoms of extreme distress. A priest with experience of working in prisons was brought in, but #819 refused to speak with him and asked to see a doctor. He had rapidly become so dehumanised he did not even know his true identity and was quickly removed from the experiment, leaving the prison with inmates hurling insults at him as a ‘traitor’. The downward descent continued.
Day Five: Visitation
On the fifth day, friends and family members of the inmates were brought in for visitations. Zimbardo and the guards forced visitors to sign in and wait long periods of time to see their loved ones in order to simulate a real prison. Only two visitors could see any one prisoner for ten minutes at a time while a guard watched.
Some parents even made plans to contact lawyers to gain early release for their children, unaware that they could have left at any time and were not actually incarcerated for any crime.
Rather than attempt to rescue the experiment, ‘Prison Governor’ Zimbardo and the guards spent their time reinforcing security to prevent any break outs, having become totally immersed in their roles. In the meantime, Zimbardo’s colleagues visited the prison to interview the inmates and guards for the study. Horrified by the inhumane conditions the prisoners were kept in and witnessing their brutal treatment by the guards, they confronted Zimbardo over the dubious ethics and (lack of) morality of the experiment.
Day Six: Close to the end
Responding to pressure from his colleagues and troubled by the increasing violence exhibited by the guards, Zimbardo finally came to his senses and ended the study more than a week early, gathering together the participants to tell them the experiment was over and they could go home. Traumatised prisoners and confused guards stumbled from the basement and the nightmare of the experiment was over. However, the deep psychological damage caused to its participants lasted far longer.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is now over 40 years old, yet still has the power to shock today, illustrating brutally how readily normal civilised people can descend into either calculated sadistic cruelty or total subservience, something we see played out time and again in wars and state sponsored terror the world over. The veneer of civilisation is thin indeed.