Professor Philip Zimbardo has written an indepth and important book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. It is based on his experience running the prison experiment in 1971 at Stanford University where randomly selected students were chosen to be prison guards and imprisoned people. The study had to be abandoned in only a few days (and should have been earlier) because the guards became so cruel.
Professor Zimbardo explains and provides lots of research for how prisons create criminals. He advocates for a public health approach to our crime problem:
“We need to adopt a public health model for prevention of evil, of violence, spouse abuse, bullying, prejudice, and more that identifies vectors of social disease to be inoculated against, not dealt with solely at the individual level. A second paradigmatic shift is directed at legal theory to reconsider the extent to which powerful situational and systemic factors must be taken into greater account in sentencing mitigation.” p. viii
Restorative justice is a public health approach. It works with groups and is a powerful inoculator as suggested by Zimbardo. If we began using this simple and humane approach that anyone would want their own children to experience when they make mistakes that hurt others, we would begin to create a more peaceful world.
Mahalo professor Zimbardo for this great book and all your work and insight.