The published accounts of the Stanford prison experiment mention it in an acknowledgment. The 1973 paper thanks “David Jaffe who served as ‘warden’ and pre-tested some of the variables in the mock prison situation”. Zimbardo’s slide show, his 1992 film and most of his articles leave it out; The Lucifer Effect gives it an endnote. The archive gives it eighty-two pages: “A Simulated Prison, David Jaffe, Social Psychology, Spring, 1971”, the report of a student project, with appendices of rules, participants’ diaries and a release form, now digitised in Box 9, Folder 60 of the Zimbardo papers. Thibault Le Texier read it in 2017 and made it the first of his seven findings: that in designing the experiment of August, Zimbardo “borrowed several key elements from a student experiment conducted 3 months before”.

A section that floundered

Jaffe was an undergraduate leading a discussion section of Zimbardo’s social psychology course in the spring quarter of 1971, and had, he wrote, decided to specialise in criminal justice after a seminar on punishment and deterrence the quarter before. He billed the section as one on punishment and the criminal system, and it got off to “a rather slow start”: “I had trouble with fluctuating student personnel and with establishing a firm meeting time and place.” By the third week he had four students who agreed, “with varying degrees of enthusiasm”, to study prisons. “I did not know much about prisons myself,” he wrote, so he set reading: Erving Goffman’s Asylums, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, part of Herbert Packer’s The Limits of the Criminal Sanction and the corrections section of the 1967 President’s Crime Commission report. He arranged a visit to Soledad, which was cancelled “because of violence that had occurred there”, and one to a San Mateo County jail, to which only he went. Through this research he met Carlo Prescott, recently out of San Quentin, and brought him to the class.

The group could not settle on a project. Jaffe took the problem to Terry Osborne, a graduate student he was doing research with, who “suggested that we might try to set up a simulated prison for a weekend. I received the idea with mixed feelings.” It could be done in a quarter; “On the other hand, I was afraid that such a project could easily turn into a meaningless game rather than a psychologically valid study.” Two of the four students were “immediately enthusiastic”, two “quite skeptical”, and they agreed “only under the strong pressure of the others’ enthusiasm”. The next three weeks went entirely to planning.

What they planned

They began, Jaffe wrote, “with the whole prison system in mind”, and settled on three effects to produce in their prisoners: “the feeling of loss of freedom”, dependence on the staff “for the satisfaction of all their needs, even those as basic as food and toilet privileges”, and deindividuation, “partly by forcing the guards to deal with the prisoners in groups, and partly by costuming the prisoners in ugly, standard prison gowns, each with a number on it. From the moment prisoners donned their gowns, they were to be called only by their prison numbers.” These were the effects to be achieved “in the 24 hours that we had to work with”.

The schedule came first, “because the rules followed relatively naturally once we knew exactly what was going to occur”. Saturday: noon, orientation of guards; 1:00, arrest and initiation; 3:00, individual interviews with the warden and an enforced rest period; 4:30, count; 5:30, dinner; 6:00, work, which was shoe shining; 8:00, room cleaning; 8:30, count; 9:00, lights out. Sunday: security checks and counts at 1:00 and 4:00 in the morning; 6:00, prisoners awake, exercise, clean room, count, breakfast; 8:00, homework; 10:00, group therapy; noon, lunch. Then a sentence that the later experiment would act on: “The question of whether or not to actually let prisoners out at noon on Sunday was left open. Professor Zimbardo suggested that the strongest manipulation of loss of freedom we could make would be to hold prisoners beyond the time they expected to be released. As it turned out, we did attempt this manipulation, but we were not very successful.”

The place was “one room and a hallway in the Toyon Hall basement”, which Jaffe described as “quite stuffy and dingy, with pipes on the ceiling, bare, dusty wooden floors, drab walls, and little light”; the one window was covered with tin foil. Jaffe would be the warden. John and Bill, the two enthusiasts, would be prisoners; Jim and Nancy, the two sceptics, became guards and then, Jaffe wrote, “quasi-penologists or prison administrators” who helped him plan, so that the prisoners from the class could be kept “partially ignorant of our final plans in order that the experience would be more ‘real’ for them”. He noticed what that did to his design: “even the guards’ rules were formulated with the prisoners’ experience in mind, and discussions of effects we intended to produce in the guards became less and less frequent and explicit.” They aimed for fifteen participants and got eleven regulars, “with a few others floating in and out, helping occasionally as relief guards. Six of the participants were prisoners.” Three days before the Saturday they gathered supplies: “material for ten prison gowns, rope, chain, blindfolds, cotton, towels, shoe polish, rags, clubs, squirtguns, hairnets, paper bags, paper cups, paper plates, tin foil, adhesive tape, buckets, brooms, cheese, cold cuts, lettuce, bread, wire, wire cutters, pliers, tape recorder, and tape.” Nancy and Jaffe made and numbered the gowns; Jim cut rope and chains; Jaffe typed the rules, a release form, and “the speeches I would have to make to the guards and to the group of participants as a whole before actually beginning the weekend.”

The fifteen rules are in the appendix. Prisoners must eat at meal times; must remain silent during rest periods, after lights out, during count and meals and “whenever a guard requires silence”; must participate in all prison activities; must keep the cell clean, with “Sleeping bags” rolled and stowed; must not deface the walls; “must address each other by number only. Inquiry into real name is forbidden”; must address male guards as “Mr. Correctional Officer” and female guards as “Miss Correctional Officer”; “must never refer to their condition as an ‘experiment’ or a ‘simulation’. You are in prison until you are paroled”; must obey all orders, a guard’s order superseding any written one and the warden’s superseding both; must report all violations; and “Failure to obey any of the above rules may result in punishment.” Eleven of the seventeen rules read to the prisoners in Jordan Hall on August 15 are these, with the sleeping bags changed to beds and the female guards removed; Le Texier set the two lists in a table in the supplement to his paper.

What happened

Jaffe did not tell it chronologically; he picked incidents for evaluation and referred the reader to a tape he had made, two hours and forty-five minutes of the weekend, which he said he had listened to “at least five times”. The staff kept to the schedule with exceptions he recorded. They woke the prisoners only once in the night, at about two, because “we had all noticed that the prisoners were sleeping fitfully at best, and we were all struck with a sense of compassion, especially whenever we heard their chains rattle as they tossed and turned in their ‘beds.’” The guards, who had arranged short shifts, could not sleep either; Jaffe took a shift himself, the guard with him fell asleep, and the 4:30 count was abandoned. At noon on Sunday the staff announced that paroles were denied, as Zimbardo had suggested. “One prisoner threatened violence if he was not released to go to a meeting. Taking my own exhaustion into account and projecting it onto the guards who would have had to deal with the situation (none of us had slept more than three hours that night) I decided to parole the complaining prisoner. After this parole, another prisoner escaped, and the system disintegrated rapidly within the next half-hour.”

The count had been the thing that worked. Jaffe described it to the guards of the August experiment on their orientation day: the prisoners lined up against the wall, made to count off and then to call their numbers, forty minutes of it, and at the end the guard on duty repeating, “Yes we all enjoyed the count, Mr. Correctional Officer.” He also told them about a blanket he had filled with straw and burrs, and the sarcasm that had worked, and the howling and chanting that had gone on in May, “this might be something you might want to incorporate into daily routine”. Among the diaries in the appendix is a prisoner’s note that one of the prisoners was a woman, “Thats one luxury ‘real’ convicts don’t” have, and a guard’s account of the female prisoners refusing to go back into the cell and lying down outside after a shower; a diary of a participant describes running “about fifty yards out of the Toyon basement” at noon on Sunday and the fear he felt at the sight of the building afterwards. Le Texier’s summary is that the prisoners “tried to assert their individuality, but soon they obeyed the guards—with one exception, a female student who would fight their authority until the end.”

When the group presented the weekend in class, Jaffe wrote later, Zimbardo “was apparently very interested” and asked for a report. Jaffe introduced him to Prescott. Zimbardo invited Prescott to teach the summer course with him, took on Jaffe as warden, and, Jaffe wrote in his self-perception after the August week, “suggested that the most difficult problem would be to get the guards to behave like guards. I was asked to suggest tactics based on my previous experience as master sadist”. Of the arrests, the chain on the ankle, the gowns with numbers, the counts and the schedule, Le Texier wrote, “Zimbardo copied several elements of the SPE from the Toyon Hall experiment”; of the rules, that eleven of seventeen “were directly copied”. In forty-seven years, he counted, Zimbardo gave the weekend credit twice. Jaffe’s own last words on his part in the larger experiment are in the entry: that he was “a classic subject” in a study on institutional brutality “that was originally my own creation.”

Sources

• David Jaffe, “A Simulated Prison,” Social Psychology, Spring 1971, 82 pages with appendices, Philip G. Zimbardo papers (SC0750), Box 9, Folder 60, digitised in the Stanford Digital Repository object Stanford Prison Experiment as SC0750_s5_b09_f60.pdf. Every quotation above not otherwise attributed. Read in the digitised copy, which is a scan of a carbon and in places faint. purl.stanford.edu/cj735mr4214, purl.stanford.edu/vx097ry2810
• Audio transcript, tape 2, Orientation of Guards, August 14, 1971, in the same object as Orientation_of_guards.pdf: Jaffe’s account of the count, the blanket and the sarcasm. purl.stanford.edu/dx583pt8943
• Dave Jaffe, “Self Perception,” undated, SC0750, Box 9, Folder 40: “master sadist,” “tough-guard,” and “a classic subject.” purl.stanford.edu/gg576zj2664
• Thibault Le Texier, “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment,” American Psychologist 74, no. 7 (2019), 823–839, and its Supplemental Material A, the comparison of the two sets of rules; the dates, the six and six, the female student, and “copied.” doi:10.1037/amp0000401
• Craig Haney, Curtis Banks and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973), 69–97, acknowledgments. prisonexp.org/pdf/ijcp1973.pdf