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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM:

A Reply to Haney and Zimbardo

More than 2

5

years ago, Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo (1

9

7

3) tran&rmed the
basement hallway of Stanford University’s Psychology Department into a make-believe
prison block where a group of male student volunteers posed either as inmates or as
guards. Some of the “guards” behaved badly and some of the students “begged to be
released from the intense pains of less than a week of merely simulated imprisonment”
(Haney & Zimbardo, 199

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, pp. 709.) The experiment was therefore aborted after just six
days and nights. Apparently many who read about the Stanford Prison Experiment
(SPE), as this six day venture came to be called, agreed with the authors that it ha

d

demonstrated “the way in which social contexts can influence, alter, shape, and
transform human behavior” @p-709-

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). Based on studies of this kind, some of them
Gedanken experiments as in the following quotation from Mischel’s influential textbook,
many psychologists came to believe that social learning determines personality and that
social context determines behavior.

“Imagine the enormous differences that would be found in the
personalities of twins with identical genetic endowment ifthey were raised
apart in two different ftilies.. . . Through social learning vast differences
develop among people in their reactions to most stimuli they face in daily
life.” (Mischel, 198 1, p, 3

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.)

It was natural, therefore, to believe that crime is largely a consequence of
criminogenic contexts that could be eliminated by social engineering. It follows also that
prisons, should they be necessary at all, provide an excellent opportunity for the
rehabilitation of misdirected youth through the provision of healthy social learning and a
more beneficent behavioral context. Haney and Zimbardo (1998) devote most of their
article to a regretfhl discussion of the five-fold increase since the early 1970s in the
proportion of Americans serving time in prison, of the change in prison policy since then
from rehabilitation to mere segregation, and of what they call “the racialization of prison
pain.” The enormous recent increase in the rate of imprisonment of convicted offenders
was not in response to a corresponding increase in the proportion of citizens victimized
by violent crime, at least not according to the National Crime Victimization Survey. This
increase in numbers of inmates is therefore attributed to an apparently willful refusal by
“correctional administrators, politicians, policymakers, and judicial decision makers” to
appreciate “most of the lessons that emerged from the SPE” (p. 718).. According to
Haney and Zimbardo, these lessons are:

1. “SPE demonstrated the power of situations to overwhelm psychologically normal ,
healthy people and to elicit from them unexpectedly cruel.. .behavior” (p. 719).

2. “SPE also revealed how easily even a minimalized prison could become painful and
powerful” (p. 719).

3. ‘?f situations matter and people can be transformed by them when they go into prisons,
they matter equally, if not more, when they come out of prison” (p.720.).

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. “In prison, explanations of disciplinary infractions and violence [should] focus more
on the context in which they transpired and less on the prisoners who engaged in them”
(p.720).

5. “Good people with good intentions are not enough to create a good prison.. .the SPE
and the perspective it advanced also suggest that prison change will come about only
when those who are outside of this powerful situation are empowered to act on it.”

6. “Finally, the SPE implicitly argued for a more activist scholarship in which
psychologists engage with the important social and policy questions of the day” (p. 721).

I agree with at least some of these rather vague prescriptions, although I am
astonished by these authors’ claim that a handbook for prison reform (indeed, a basic text
in enlightened criminology) can be harvested from watching a handful of college students
role-playing guards and inmates for six days in a Stanford basement. But I disagree
strongly with some of the more specific claims or assumptions made by Haney and
Zimbardo.

Personality is more Important than Context

The situation& model still embraced by Haney and Zimbardo is wrong. The
Gedanken experiment suggested by Mischel has now been conducted by Bouchard et al
(1990) and the results were opposite to Mischel’s expectation. Identical twins separated
in infancy and reared apart are as similar in personality as identical twins reared together,
and that is very similar indeed (Tellegen, et al., 1998). About half of the variance (more
than half of the stable variance) in basic traits of temperament or personality is associated
with genetic differences between people.

Anyone familiar with the realities of prison life knows that some inmates are
predictably violent and dangerous while some are predictably passive or tractable, W e
recently obtained scores on the Multidimensional Personality Inventory (Tellegen &
Waller, 1994) from 67 inmates at Minnesota’s maximum security prison, Oak Park
Heights’, men whose mean age was 32. We collected MPQs also from more than 850
male twins aged 30-33 (Lykken, in press). The men in our inmate sample had been
convicted of serious crimes, usually murder. Because the MPQ is a self-administered
inventory and requires high school reading skills, a considerable proportion of the inmate
population could not be sampled but there is no reason to think that the participants
differed temperamentally from the non-readers.

Figure 1 shows the profiles of the 22 inmates scoring highest and the 22 scoring
lowest on the aggression scale of the MPQ, plotted using the data from the non-criminal

’ I am indebted to Dr.Kmeth Carlson at Oak Park Heights Correctional Facility for collecting these data
and sharing them with me.

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male twins as norms. The most aggressive inmates are deviant also on most of the other
MPQ scales; they are more than one SD below the normal mean on well being,
achievement, and social closeness, the traits that comprise the Positive Emotionality
super-factor of the MPQ. The aggressive inmates are more than one SD above the mean
on stress reaction and on alienation which, with aggression, comprise the Negative
Emotionality super-factor. And they are more than one SD below the normal mean on
control (vs. impulsiveness), and on traditionalism, two of the traits that comprise the
Constraint super-factor. The non-aggressive inmates, on the other hand, yield essentially
normal profiles except for that low score on aggression and an elevation on harm
avoidance. In spite of their confinement in the same ‘Painful and powerful” prison
environment, these men show great variability, one from another, not only in personality
but also in their tendencies to make or to stay out of trouble in that environment.

INMATE PERSONALITY PROFILES

90

High vetw~s Low on MPQ Aggression

WB SP ACH SC SR AL AGG CO H A TRAD

I + High -e-* Low I
Figure 1. Mean MPQ profiles of inmates in a maximum security prison
who scored highest or lowest on aggression. A T-score of 50 represents
the mean for some 850 non-criminal males aged 30-33; a T-score of 70 is
two SDS above the normal mean etc..

Modern Prisons are not Places of Unremitting Pain

Because the six day SPE “had painful, even traumatic consequences for the prisoners
[Stanford students pretending to be inmates] against whom it was directed” (p. 719),
Haney and Zimbardo concluded that real prisons must have devastating psychological

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effects upon real inmates serving long sentences. Perhaps because they are situationists,
rather than trait psychologists, they neglected our extraordinary human capacity to adapt
to circumstances, good or bad. Suh, Diener, & Fujita (1966) have shown that both
positive and negative life experiences have usually lost their effect on subjective well
being after six months. A year after either winning the lottery or being permanently
crippled in an accident, most people experience about the same average level of
happiness that they felt before that event. In a study I did long ago in another Minnesota
prison (Lykken, 1957), one inmate, the pitcher on the prison baseball team, had been
paroled the previous fall. He made it back in time for the spring baseball season by the
expedient of breaking the display window of a jewelry store and then leisurely collecting
rings and watches until arrested on the spot.. He admitted he was happier back in prison
than he’d been on the outside.

INMATE PERSONALITY PROFILES
High versus Low on MPQ Well Being

70–
pl*.____.__._________….*_-._______.._.____.__..___._._.__..——

.’
,p_____*. . ____..___._._.._..–_-_—–..-..–..

v– –s,

d

20 I I I I I I I I I 1 ’
WE3 SP ACH SC SR AL AGG CO H A TRAD

+ High -Ed Low

Figure 2. MPQ profiles of the 22 men who scored highest on Well Being,
and the 22 who scored lowest, among 67 inmates of a maximum security
prison.

The mean expected release date for our sample of Oak Park Heights inmates is the
year 2030 yet, after having been there for an average period of 37 months, many of them
appear to have become well-adjusted to prison life and many are surpisingly happy.
Figure 2 shows that, while the lowest-scoring third professed considerable pain and
alienation, the upper-third scored higher on well being than three-fourths of our 850 non-
criminal young men. Oak Park Heights is a modern prison, well run and reasonably safe

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because the staff, rather than the inmates, are in control. The well adjusted inmates can
take classes, learn skills, find peaceful ways to pass the time. I would not wish to be
incarcerated at Oak Park Heights, not even if1 was made pitcher of the baseball team, but
at least I could get a lot of reading done.

NCVS vs. UCR DATA
Violent Crimes

“V

-_._..__..__.___–._-_….-.

I
1905

Year

– UCR Data -*- NCVS Data

Figure 3. Trends since 1973 in violent crime as revealed by the National Crime
Victimization Survey versus the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.

The Epidemic of Imprisonment is due to an Epidemic of Crime.

The National Crime Victimization Survey, on which Haney and Zimbardo rely, has
summarized annually since 1973 the reports of more than 90,000 Americans over age

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concerning whether they have been the victims of specified crimes during the past year.
These reports are from members of a stratified sample of families interviewed either in
person or by telephone by (mostly female) employees of the U.S. Census Bureau. The
Uniform Crime Reports, compiled by the FBI since 1929, summa&e crimes actually
reported to the police. As Figure 3 reveals, these two methods of measuring violent
crime tell very different stories. The FBI data indicate an increase since 1973 of 54% (a
peak increase of 73%) while the NCVS data indicate an actual decrease in violent crime
of 15%. NCVS interviewers do not contact transients, people who are in hospital or in
jail, nor do they venture into the more dangerous regions of the inner city. The NCVS
tells us about middle-class crime while the UCR includes the rapid rise that ghetto crime
has been displaying since the early 1960s.

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It is not true, as Haney and Zimbardo would have us believe, that our current high rate
of imprisonment is due merely to punitive courts and longer sentences. The reason that
we have so many more men in prison now than in 1960 is that the crime rate now is
several times higher than in the 1960s. And these are not only drug crimes. As Figure 4
reveals, the number of violent crimes reported to the police, divided by the U.S.
population, is currently about four times the rate in 1960. Many more crimes are
reported, more arrests made, and many more men are convicted of violent crimes than 40
years ago and, fortunately for the rest of us, many of these violent criminals have been at
least temporarily segregated in state or federal prisons.

VIOLENT CRIMES vs.N of INMATES
Rates per 100,000 U.S. Population

-50% ! I I , I 1 I 1 I
1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

Year

I – CiRIMES -a-* I N M A T E S I
Figure 4. The increase since 1960 in the rates of violent crimes reported
to the police and in the proportion of the U.S. male population serving
terms in state or federal prisons.

Figure 4 reveals that the increase in the rate of imprisonment actually lagged the
increase in the crime rate, beginning its acceleration only about 1980. The figure also
displays the much-heralded dip in violent crime that has occurred since about 1993. The
most likely explanation for this modest decline is the fact that 1.3 million potential
perpetrators, compared to about 200,000 in 1970, are now behind bars. Because the
typical prison inmate committed some 12 serious crimes during the year prior to his last

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arrest (Bhunstein, Cohen, & Farrington, 1988), takii a million such men off the streets
and into prison is bound to yield at least a temporary diminution in the crime rate. Haney
and Zimbardo consider it “barbaric’ that we have so many men in prison. While it is not
a satisfactory solution to our crime problem, I believe with most Americans that
sequestering violent crimmals is preferable to just turning them loose.

Rehabilitation Does Not Work

If Haney and Zimbardo are correct in what they think they learned from the SPE,
everyone-including prison inmates–should respond to sociahzed environments in a
socialized manner. By creating such conditions in our prisons then, afler perhaps a fairly
short period of acclimation and habituation, formerly unsocialized inmates should
become accustomed to behaving lie law-abiding citizens and be ready for release. As
Haney and Zimbardo point out, it would be necessary also to provide socialized
environments for these parolees to return to, adequate jobs, housing in good
neighborhoods, and the like.

And there is no doubt that some inmates, after serving their time even in our current
unenlightened prisons, manage to remain within the law (or at least unapprehended) after
their release. Some inmates, after all, are reasonably normal, socialized persons who
were unfortunate enough to be too strongly tempted; some, indeed, were actually
innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. Because recidivism is only
frequent and not inevitable, one may be led to believe that some criminals are
rehabilitated even by the present system and, therefore, that many more might similarly
benefit from a more enlightened correctional system.

The fact is, however, that Haney and Zimbardo cannot point to a single convincing
study indicating that prison reforms designed to augment rehabilitation have ever been
successful. I am not about to claim that every reasonable method has been tried. In fact,
I should be very interested to see what would happen if each new inmate were to learn
that his future supervisor, teacher, and disciplinarian was to be a distant computer,
“John,” with whom he could communicate by means of a very sturdy keyboard and
monitor inset into the wall of his cell. The computer would provide programmed
learning tasks appropriate to the inmate’s ability and interests. By doing what the patient
but implacable computer required, the inmate could earn more palatable food, TV time,
access to a telephone, and other privileges. Only after he had achieved appropriate basic
educational goals, and had demonstrated his willingness to live by the computer’s rules,
would an inmate begin to be allowed to mix with other inmates and take further steps in
demonstrating his improved level of socialization.

But I am not so na’ive as to claim, as Haney and Zimbardo seem to believe that, even
with unlimited resources and control, I (or they) could turn Oak Park Heights into a
prison with single-digit recidivism rates. A young person who has managed to reach his
or her late teens almost wholly unsocialkred is likely to remain a danger to society for
life. Like our talent for language, our human proclivities for socialization require to be

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elicited, shaped, and reinforced in childhood or they may be forever lost. As Judge C.D.
Gill (1994) has wisely observed, ‘The place to fight crime is in the cradle.”

The Black:White Ratio of Prison Inmates Reflects the Black:White Ratio of
Criminal Perpetrators.

Haney and Zimbardo, in referring to “the ratialization of prison pain,” seem to
attribute the fact that nearly half of the prison inmates in the U.S. are A&an Americans
to racist bias on the part of the police and the courts. They even exaggerate the
discrepancy by saying, “although they represent only 6% of the general U.S. population,
African American men constitute 48% of those confined to state prisons” (p. 714.) With
similar logic one might say that, since men constitute only about 45% of the population
of Norway, the fact that 95% of Norwegian prison inmates are male is evidence of gender
bias. In another place (Lykken, 1995), I have offered a more reasonable and, I believe, a
more constructive explanation for the racial discrepancy in American prisons:

Although one might suspect that the criminal justice system is quicker to
arrest and to convict Black than White suspects, reports by victims of the race of
the person who robbed or assaulted them correspond closely to the proportions
of Blacks and Whites arrested for such crimes (J. Wilson & Herrnstein, 1985).
“In 1988, in the nation’s 75 most populous urban counties, Blacks were 20% of
the general population but 54% of all murder victims and 62% of all defendants”
(DiIulio, 1994). In Little Rock, Arkansas, victims of more than 80% of the
violent crimes (97% of Black victims) reported during 1991 identified the
assailant as Black (Uyttebrouck, 1993). Although AtZcan Americans make up
only one-eighth of the population of the United States (one-third of the
population of Little Rock), one gets the impression that many more than one-
eighth of the perpetrators of the violent crimes that we read about daily or see
reported on the television are Black and this impression is correct; in 1991,
Blacks accounted for 32% of U.S. property crime and 45% of violent crime
(FBI, 1992).

In 1965, when the Black illegitimacy rate had climbed to about 25%, Daniel
Patrick Moynihan wrote his famous memorandum on the break up of the Black
family, predicting much of the social dislocation that has since come to pass (see
Rainwater & Yancey, 1967). White illegitimacy, which was only about 5% in
1965, has now exceeded the level that, in the Black community, presaged all
those dire consequences. In his analysis of 1980 data from 150 U.S. cities,
Sampson (1987) found that the strongest predictor of both homicide and robbery
by Black juveniles was the local percentage of Black households headed by
females. Sampson also found a similar relationship within the White
community, where the percentage of families headed by females was a strong
predictor of both juvenile and adult offending. Figure 5 shows that White
illegitimacy in the U.S. is rapidly catching up to the Black rate, which seems
now to have reached its asymptote.

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U.S. ILLEGITIMACY RATES

~~____________________-_____.___________.__.____._____.~_._________._._.__________..___.___..__.___._____ . ..____ _ __._._.___..

70__________ _______.___.___._-_.__——___.___.___.___._._.___–__-___._______.___.___.___.___.___.___.._.-__—-_—–.—.

I – Black Women —-g White Women I
Figure 5. Birth rate for unmarried women by race: United States, 1970-92. Modified
from Vital and Health Statistics, Series 21: Data on Natality, Marriage, and Divorce, No.
53, DHHS Publication No. (PHS) 96-193 1, Figure 4, p. 4.

It can be shown that, computed separately for Blacks and Whites, a youngster reared
without the resident participation of the biological father is about 7 times more likely in
consequence to become delinquent and then criminal (Lykken, 1997). Fatherless rearing
results, across racial lines, in similarly increased risk for child abuse, for teenage
runaway, for school dropout, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency.

Summary

While I agree with Haney and Zimbardo that psychologists should try to play a
stronger and more constructive role in advising those responsible for social policy, I am
persuaded that the vague and politically correct nostrums that they recommend cannot be
helpful. We have too many men (and increasing numbers of women) in prison because
we have too much crime. We have too much crime because an ever-increasing
proportion of our children are reaching adolescence essentially unsocialized. Some of
these youngsters can be described as psychopaths, meaning that their innate
temperaments from early childhood made them very difficult to manage, too difficult for
the average parent.

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But crime has increased far too rapidly to be attributable to dysgenic factors. Most of
these troublesome youth are what I call sociopaths, meaning that their rearing
environment failed to elicit, shape, and reinforce their inherent human capacity to
develop an effective conscience as well as their instincts of empathy and altruism and
social responsibility. All but the most difficult children become adequately socialized in
the extended-family environments of traditional societies that most resemble the
environment of human evolutionary adaptation in which our ancestors evolved their
innate talent for social living. Such traditional societies have very little crime.

Crime rates increased when the child-rearing practices of modern societies deviated
from those to which our species had become adapted and we began to entrust the
responsibility of socializing children almost entirely to young parental couples most of
whom are untrained and inexperienced. Now more than a third of all American infants
are being raised without even the help and support of a resident biological father. I
believe that this social revolution, which began earlier among African Americans but the
White community is catching up, is the root cause of our current epidemic of crime and
other social pathology. If Haney and Zimbardo wish to give useful advice to policy
makers, I suggest that they forget about the SPE and consult instead Jack Westman’s
important book Licensing Parents.

REFERENCES

Blumstein, A., Cohen, J., & Farrington, D.P. (1988). Criminal career research: Its value
for criminology. Criminology, 26, l-37.

Bouchard, T.J. Jr., Lykken, D.T., McGue, M., Segal, N.L., & Tellegen, A. (1990).
Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins
Reared Apart. Science, 250,223-228.

DiIulio, J.D. Jr. (1994, Fall). The question of Black crime. The Public Interest, 3-32.
Eunkook Suh, Ed Diener, and Frank Fujita (1996). Events and subjective well-being:

Only recent events matter. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70,
1091-l 102.

FBI (1992). Unijbrm crime reports for the United States, 1991. Washington, DC: U.S.
Department of Justice.

FBI (1993). Age-speczjk arrest rates and race-spec$c arrest rates for selected oflenses,
19651992, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.

Gill, C. D. (1994). In the Foreword to J. C. Westman, Licensing parents. New York
Plenum @viii)

Haney, C., Banks, W. & Zimbardo, P. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated
prison International Journal of Criminology and and Penology., I, 69-97.

Haney, C. & Zimbardo, P. (1998). The past and future of U.S. Prison policy: Twenty-
five years after the Standord Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 53,709-
727..

Lykken, D. T. (1995). The AntisociaZ Personalities. Hillsdale, NJ. Erlbaum.
Lykken, D.T. (1997). Factory of crime. Psychological Inquiry, 8, 261-270.

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Lykken, D.T. (in press). The causes and costs of crime and a controversial cure. Journal
of Personality.

Mischel, W. (198 1). Introduction to personality (3”‘. Ed). New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston

National Center for Health Statistics (1993a). Vital statistics of the United States, 1989,
Vo2.L Nat&y. DHHS Pub. No. (PHS) 93-l 100. Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office.

National Center for Health Statistics (1993b). Vital statistics of the United States, 1989,
Vol. IIL Marriage and divorce. DHHS Pub. No. (PHS) 93-1103. Washington, DC:
U.S. Government Printing Office.

Rainwater, L., & Yancey, W. (1967). The Moynihan Report and the politics of
controversy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Sampson, RJ. (1987). Urban black violence: The effect of male joblessness and family
disruption American Journal of Sociology, 93(2), 348-382.

Tellegen, A., Lykken, D.T., Bouchard, T.J., Jr., Wilcox, K., Segal, N. & Rich, S. (1988).
Personality similarity in twins reared apart and together. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 54, 1031-1039.

Tellegen, A., & Wailer, N. (1994). Exploring personality through test construction:
Development of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire. In S.R Briggs,
& J.M. Cheek (Eds): Persona&v Measures: Development and Evaluation (Vol 1,
pp.

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3-161). Greenwich, CN: JAI Press.

Uyttebrouck, 0. (1993, April 14). Police study links blacks to 80% of violent crimes.
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, p. 1.

Westman, J. (1994). Licensing Parents: Can We Prevent Parental Abuse And Neglect?
New York: Plenum

Wilson, J.Q., & Herrnstein, R.J. (1985). Crime and human nature, New York: Simon, &
Schuster.

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