This experiment, I believe, did not capture it's main purpose. Which was to see how prisionment effects a person during and after released. They selected random people with no training to be guards... therefore, they acted to what THEY thought a guard should act. You can only imagine what group of college boys would do to other group if they were in control and none had any say in the matter. Needless to say, the experiment went down a bad path. It went to extreme when it came to correcting bad behavior from the prisoners.
Now the question is if I still feel that people should go to jail? And the anwser is yes. Jails are not as bad as the Standford Prison was. It's not allowed, it's against the law. In the experiment, the guards had no training. In real life, guards do. In the experiment, the prisoners did nothing wrong. In real life, prisoners commit crimes... and still aren't treated as badly as those in the experiment.
The Standford Prison Experiment did not prove anything about the effects of a person who spends time in a REAL jail, because it wasn't a real jail. However, what it did prove is that people can adapt to roles and hurt others because of the role.
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