Last night as I was flipping through the movie channels hoping to find something good and interesting to watch, I stumbled across Das Experiment on Starz Cinema. It was a German film that seems to have been inspired by the Prison Experiment done at Stanford in the 1970’s. It was in German but if you don’t mind subtitles it is well worth watching. The basic idea is this: 20 men volunteer for an experiment for which they will be paid. 12 of them are to be prisoners and 8 to be guards. The guards are strictly told that there will be no violence used, but that it is their critical task to maintain order. Of course, the guards become more totalitarian and the prisoners become more subdued, but with some dramatic twists.

This film was released in 2001. Which made some of the imagery in this film even more shocking to me. I couldn’t help but draw some comparisons to Abu Ghraib. The movie illustrated that this is the kind of thing that will happen when guards are under-trained and not adequately supervised. Which seems to have been the case in Abu Ghraib. The Stanford study is over 30 years old now, but apparently we can’t learn from this information.

Even without looking at the political side of it, this film was well worth watching. It was very well done and very thought provoking (at least I thought so.)