Civil rights and the coming generation

[ColbertWatcher]

Are students switched on to the erosion of our rights?
Two recent discussions in an undergraduate law class reveal some worrying attitudes towards civil liberties and human rights
Comments (138)
Rosa Freedman
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 5 April 2009 15.30 BST

A colleague of mine, a well-respected barrister and professor of criminal law, recently discussed the concept of torture with a class of undergraduate law students. The young people on this course, at a top redbrick university, are among the highest intellectual school-leavers in the country. These same young people will become the lawyers, academics, professionals and future leaders of our country. Upon being asked whether torture could ever be acceptable, the class discussion went in a direction that defied the natural intelligence and legal knowledge of these students. Instead of discussing the rule of law or the morality of torture, they focussed on potential situations in which torture would be acceptable in their eyes. One student spoke of torturing a person suspected of placing a bomb under a school bus. Another raised the issue of terrorism and the use of torture. None of the young people reflected on the rights of a detainee. Neither did the students discuss the fundamental concept of absolute prohibitions within the legal system. My colleague appeared perplexed, not least due to these being final year students for whom such concepts should have become entrenched in their thinking.

Torture may be viewed as too emotive a subject for young people to deal with coldly and rationally, especially in light of the events of recent years. It may even be argued that these young people are no different in their attitudes towards torture than many adults in our society. However, other students faced with a different dilemma involving civil liberties responded in a similar manner, exposing their lack of regard for rights. The young people were given the following scenario:

A prison officer is killed in the courtyard where 100 inmates were having recreational time. The CCTV camera shows that one prisoner remained in the furthest corner of the yard, while the other 99 attacked and murdered the officer. The CCTV images do not show any features of the lone man who distanced himself from the crime. Every prisoner, when interviewed, says that he is innocent.

The students decided that all 100 prisoners should be convicted of murder, despite the fact that one inmate was clearly innocent of this charge. None of the young people were prepared to apply their legal knowledge and understanding in such a manner as to acquit all 100 prisoners in order to avoid convicting an innocent man. The students' concept of a miscarriage of justice was that the guilty may be allowed to go free rather than worrying about convicting the innocent.

(... Sadly there's more at the link ...)

--The Guardian

[Zhade]

1. Oy.

Meanwhile, 66 responses to Palin's bullshit family drama.

[havocmom]

2. Wonder if the response would favor civil rights if the question was

to take away their blackberries on some ridiculous pretext that all were worthy of punishment because a few broke some law.

[ColbertWatcher]

3. LOL! Good one! n/t

[PM Martin]

4. Add Ipods and handheld videogames to that list.

[havocmom]

5. OMG! there would be riots on campuses in a hurry

[LuvNewcastle]

6. That's disturbing.

n/t

[dustbunnie]

7. And these findings are some sort of statement about the coming generation -

as opposed to the ones that came before? How would those who lived in the 1950s, 1930s have answered differently?

[ColbertWatcher]

10. Don't know. This article is about the coming generation(s). n/t

[EFerrari]

8. How is this different than the Stanford study, though?

Stanford prison experiment
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Those selected were chosen for their lack of psychological issues, crime history, and medical disabilities, in order to obtain a representative sample. Roles were assigned based on a coin toss.<1>

Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early. After being confronted by Christina Maslach, a graduate student in psychology whom he was dating,<2> and realizing that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his direct supervision, Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners and guards had become too grossly absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment after six days.<3>

Ethical concerns surrounding the famous experiment often draw comparisons to the Milgram experiment, which was conducted in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo's former college friend. Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr wrote in 1981 that the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment were frightening in their implications about the danger which lurks in the darker side of human nature.<4>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

[dustbunnie]

9. I guess you could say the difference lies in the OP's experiment being hypothetical -

just a discussion, whereas what you posted was an actual physical/psychological experiment, with subjects.

Still though, I don't see how people have digressed so terribly throughout the years. I would imagine the outcome of such a loaded discussion would have gleaned the same results in earlier times. We can make that assumption just based on historical records of how people actually behaved.

[ColbertWatcher]

11. True, but I think the author of the article emphasized ...

... that the students were learning about law and felt they (of all people) should know better.

[dustbunnie]

13. Perhaps. But there weren't any of the details of the discussion available -

so it's hard to ascertain how the students managed to convince one another. Torture has always been a part of our world, as well as accepted. Ask anyone who lived during WWI or WWII what the feelings were regarding torture. The US had internment camps, the Algerian debacle paved the way for waterboarding and other practical torture methods. Just because people outwardly decry it, doesn't mean they mind what goes on in some rat-infested dungeon, as long as their side wins.

As far as the other, what if the hypothetical year had been 1950, and scenario went as follows: one lone white man is attacked at the corner five and dime by 99 black men. Witnesses say one black man stood away from the crowd but no one saw his face clearly enough. Should the 99 go free? We know from the way the law was applied (and learned) that that wouldn't have been the case at all. So today, the scenario is replaced by 99 prisoners, the new people to hate. How do times differ?

[ColbertWatcher]

14. Good point.

I just think that given a history of civil rights abuses, you'd think that law students would be attuned to this kind of thing.

Unless, of course, if this is some other kind of law class?

[dustbunnie]

17. History is doomed to repeat itself.

You would think that 1950s students/lawyers/judges would have learned from the human depravity of the Holocaust, but no, not really. And so on, back in time.

Perhaps this example merely emphasizes how students/anyone really, in a group environment, can convince each other of anything. Perhaps they eventually moved to a weird "greater good" conclusion from the discussion, which would have no bearing on how they would carry out the letter of the law once out in the real world.

Maybe if the scenario had been something more like... 5 prisoners out of 100 ripped apart a prison guard, their impressions would have been different. The story also talks about "should the prisoners go free" when clearly they're prisoners, so no one is going free anyhow. It was just loaded all the way.

[ColbertWatcher]

18. Milgram's Obedience to Authority came out in 1963.

According to Wikip*dia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment )

The study on bystander effect wasn't published until 1968 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect ).

Not to mention to this day we have people dismissing psychology and studies into human behavior.

So, there's that.

[dustbunnie]

20. Yes, I'm aware of those.

But still, the OP is nothing but someone's musings, and offers only anecdotal info regarding a discussion that took place in one classroom. Is that one classroom a microcosm of US society to come? Can you offer something else, a little more substantial. I can remember having wacked out discussions, and often times the minority with a different position was either swayed or bullied over to the majority side. That's how it was at uni.

Everyone thinks their own generation was the "greatest" and that the up and comers are intellectually and physically flabby, and so useless the world will end in their time. (In our case, the physical flabbiness is a fair point, but the rest?) And somehow, every new generation manages to persevere, with pretty much stable morality.

Anyway, who's to say that all lawyers must be more "moral" than others. Especially those who go into criminal law. Having an opinion about torture, or whether 99 savage murderers should go free as opposed to saving the one innocent really has nothing to do with how a person will conduct him/herself in a professional environment. Nor does it really have anything to do with knowledge of the law. (The OP author states the discussion was about "morality.") Look at Alan Dershowitz if you'd like a famous example.

[ColbertWatcher]

22. You're right there's more anecdotal stuff than anything else.

Talk about flabby.

[EFerrari]

12. There may be one other little thing. In these discussions

about right and wrong or -- about justice, it's possible that the issue itself activates our inner authoritarian and in a way that a less loaded situation would not.

/oops

[ColbertWatcher]

15. Perhaps authoritarian behavior has become all too common?

Making it seem more acceptable?

[EFerrari]

16. Is it being normalized? I hope not but I don't know.

Just here on DU, it's a lot more common to get a value judgment than it is to get more information or a question in response to a lot of OPs. :shrug:

[ColbertWatcher]

19. I'd just like to know what message my generation is not sending to the next.

I hope we aren't assuming they share our values.

[ContinentalOp]

21. Yes, let's blame the young people and not even name the law school.

We wouldn't want to cause the "top redbrick university" any embarrassment. I don't know anything about the UK university system and I had to look up what the "redbrick" schools are (it's more specific than I suspected) but are these really prestigious schools? Liverpool? Sheffield? Manchester? Really now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redbrick_university

[havocmom]

23. Sometimes, when reporting about schools, there ARE privacy issues to consider

and sometimes such privacy has force of law.

Just sayin'