The reading and the class discussed how when people were being recruited for the Stanford prison experiment to participate as prisoners the study was started by police bringing them into police cars to bring them to the location of the study. This set fear into the participants before they even were treated as prisoners by the “guards” especially since the participants were “hippies” who were probably doing illegal things such as smoking weed.
What I found interesting was that out of all the times this study has been discussed in my previous classes, this was never brought up. It seems to be very important into considering why prisoners so easily took on the role of prisoners. Especially when that consideration was the purpose of the study.
This fear instilled into people by police can be seen in many cases of police confronting minorities when they are not even doing anything illegal. Just this week a black student decided to file a lawsuit against police who, when he was just walking down a street, surrounded him, held guns up at him, restrained him, and then put a gun up against his forehead and said they were going to blow his brains out if he kept moving even though he wasn’t moving and was listening to commands and acting appropriately.
People who are minorities and are targeted even when they are not doing anything wrong. Being targeted by police has been demonstrated to instill fear, so people who are targeted by police because they tend to do something illegal (like who use drugs and can often be identified promoting paraphernalia like hippies) must be instilled with a similar amount of fear.
A study done by Bolger and Bolger (2019) looked at the predictors of the amount of fear of crime in individuals based on the vulnerability and incivilities models. The vulnerability model addresses how females and elderly people are more fearful of being convicted of a crime. A subsectional of this model is the social vulnerability which addresses minorities being fearful of being convicted of a crime. The incivilities model addresses fear of being convicted of a crime when the individual lives in a neighbourhood that does not look well taken care of or is home to bad or reckless behaviour. Two measures were questionnaires that looked at fear of crime based on the neighbourhood one lives in. Another measure was a questionnaire that looked at how people felt about your neighbourhood. The last measure took a person’s zip code and determined the disadvantages of living in that neighbourhood. It was found that both people of colour in general as well as women of colour were more fearful of being convicted of a crime. The more a neighbourhood did not look like it was being well taken care of, the more a neighbourhood was home to bad or reckless behaviour, and the less favourable views individuals had of the police, the more individuals had a fear of being convicted with a crime.
This gives evidence that people are fearful of the police, and the things that predicted people being fearful were not things people were doing that were illegal, but rather just being a person of colour, a woman, elderly, or being in a bad neighbourhood. This shows that people are in fact instilled with fear by police even when they are not doing anything illegal (like what happened to the male black student mentioned before). Then if people are in fact doing illegal things, or know that their presence makes people think they are doing illegal things (like the hippies in the Stanford prison experiment), they definitely would also feel fearful of the police (in this case bringing them to the experiment). This sets the foundation of people feeling scared and like someone breaking the law in the experiment, and helps these individuals get into the roles they were given. Bolger, M. A., Bolger, P. C. (2019). Predicting fear of crime: results from a community survey of a small city. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 44(2), 334-351.
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