Philip Zimbardo & the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE)

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 28th Oct 2024

Earlier this month (October 14^th , 2024), Dr Philip Zimbardo passed away, aged 91. His name might be one that you aren’t familiar with, but you are probably aware of the “infamous” Stanford prison experiment (SPE) of 1971, he created and was the architect of. The experiment that was meant to last two weeks was ended after six days when Zimbardo’s, then partner Christina Maslach, visited/observed it and concluded that it had passed an ethical boundary; Zimbardo playing the role of “Prison Governor” had gotten so caught up in the experiment that he’d lost sight of the real and actual...Click To Read More

The War Poets & the Romanticization of Violence

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 21st Oct 2024

Violence is often sensationalized and/or sanitized; it is either portrayed as a glorious heroic battle or a normalized and sterile conflict. Self-deception prevents us from thinking about the dull thud of a shoe or boot repeatedly connecting with the head of a person as they lay unconscious on the ground – something I still hear/remember from a late-night gang fight I witnessed as a teenager in a Glasgow MacDonalds. Anyone who makes the argument that they have become “normalized” or “oblivious” to violence and aren’t affected by it etc., has lost part of their humanity; even when I was actively...Click To Read More

Shoplifting in Boston: Making a Successful Stop

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 14th Oct 2024

I have worked in retail loss prevention – preventing “shoplifting”, thefts by employees, and thefts throughout the supply chain such as at distribution centers - in a number of different capacities, and it is an area of crime-prevention that I have always been interested in. Especially when organized retail theft, has possible links to terrorism e.g., there is evidence that Al-Qaeda started to engage in organized, large-scale shop-lifting enterprises, to help fund their activities because they could no longer rely solely on Bin-Laden’s “legitimate” construction businesses for income when the economic downturn in 2008 hit construction especially hard. AQ, was...Click To Read More

Hopelessness & Violence

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 7th Oct 2024

Criminologists Jack Katz and Randall Collins have made the case that crime and violence in the social sciences tends to be explained by referencing and directly linking the criminal and/or violent act to something else e.g., violent offending is the result of childhood neglect or the result of lead exposure etc. Often, the social sciences look to a specific cause in order to explain a certain effect, and if not establishing a cause, then at least a correlation. One “relationship” that has been persistent within criminology is that of poverty and crime, even though statistically the relationship has been shown...Click To Read More