In many American prisons, the treatment of prisoners is a national disgrace. Numerous reports have documented widespread prisoner abuse, prison rape, medical neglect and severe overcrowding. In recent weeks, for instance, there have been a number of important articles describing abuse in the Los Angeles County Jails. Here's a sampling of headlines from the LA Times: "LA County Deputy Says He Was Forced To Beat Mentally Ill Inmate," "Inmate Dies Two Days After Being Punched In The Head By Deputy," "Ex-Deputy Says He Routinely Used Improper Force," and "Report Cites Widespread Abuse At County Jails." The horrific details stem from a new report released by the ACLU, which includes testimony from prison chaplains:
Let's be clear: the overwhelming majority of these prisoners have committed crimes. Many of them have committed serious violent crimes. They are serving their time. They deserve to be punished. But that doesn't begin to explain the awfulness of their living conditions.
Although it's nice that the abuse present in the LA County Jail system has gotten some press attention, this is a glaring exception to the rule. For as long as they've been prisoners, we've been ignoring their mistreatment. When was the last time you heard a powerful politician talk about prison rape or prison overcrowding? When was the last time prisoner abuse made it into a poll or was the subject of a protest? Our politics is suffused with moral issues, from abortion to gay marriage. And yet, we never seem to make time for this collective moral failing.
Why do we ignore prisoner abuse? After all, we are usually empathetic creatures, sensitive to the suffering of others. Why does this suffering leave us cold?
Part of the answer is rooted in a human bias. It turns out that we all have an intuitive belief in justice - people get what they deserve. This instinct makes all sorts of social contracts possible, but it comes with a perverse side effect, causing us to ignore stories of suffering that directly contradict that assumption. Because we believe in justice, we ignore stories of injustice.
This is known as the Just World Hypothesis and it was first developed by the social psychologist Melvin Lerner. One of the classic demonstrations of the effect took place in 1965: Several volunteers are told that they are about to watch, on closed circuit television, another volunteer engage in a simple test of learning. They see the unlucky subject - she is actually a graduate student, working for Lerner - being led into the room. Electrodes are attached to her body and head. She looks a little frightened.
Now the test begins. Whenever the subject gives an incorrect answer, she is given a powerful jolt of electricity. The witnesses watching on television see her writhe in pain and hear her scream. They think she is being tortured.
One group of volunteers is now given a choice: they can transfer the shocked subject to a different learning paradigm, where she is given positive reinforcements instead of painful punishments. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people choose to end the torture. They quickly act to rectify the injustice. When asked what they thought of the "learner," they described her as an innocent victim who didn't deserve to be shocked. That's why they saved her.
The other group of subjects, however, isn't allowed to rescue the volunteer undergoing the test. Instead, they are told a variety of different stories about the victim. Some were told that she would receive nothing in return for being shocked; others were told that she would be paid for her participation. And a final group was given the martyr scenario, in which the victim submits to a second round of torture so that the other volunteers might benefit from her pain. She is literally sacrificing herself for the group.
How did these different narratives affect their view of the victim? All of the volunteers watched the exact same video of torture. They saw the same poor woman get subjected to painful shocks. And yet the stories powerfully influenced their conclusions about her character.
Here the most disturbing data point: the less money the volunteer received in compensation for her suffering the more the subjects disliked her. The people explained the woeful injustice by assuming that it was her own fault: she was shocked because she wasn't paying attention, or was incapable of learning, or that the pain would help her perform better. The martyrs fared even worse. Even though this victim was supposedly performing an act of altruism - she was suffering for the sake of others - the witnesses thought she was the most culpable of all. Her pain was proof of her guilt. Lerner's conclusion was unsettling: "The sight of an innocent person suffering without possibility of reward or compensation motivated people to devalue the attractiveness of the victim in order to bring about a more appropriate fit between her fate and her character."
The situation is almost certainly worse when it comes to people who deserve to be punished. These abused prisoners aren't martyrs - they are criminals. Unfortunately, that makes it even easier for us to ignore their plight, to brush aside their suffering as an inevitable feature of our just world. And so we act like the subjects in the Lerner experiment blaming the volunteer, as we search for reasons why the wrongfully treated deserved what they got. Although we tell our kids that the world isn't fair, we don't really mean it. Deep down, we believe this world is essentially just, which is why we look away when it's not.
