Can Power Change People?
Thirty Volunteers Enter, but Who Gets to Decide?
The New Stanford Prison Experiment, Netflix’s 2026 six-part reality series, puts thirty volunteers inside a real correctional facility and divides them into guards and prisoners. Produced by Alfred Street Industries, with Jane Lipsitz and Dan Cutforth among its executive producers, it borrows the premise of the notorious 1971 study while promising different safeguards and a broader group of participants. Everyone enters knowing that the arrangement is temporary. What they cannot know is how quickly an assigned responsibility might become a personal identity, or how differently other people will interpret the same rules. The immediate problem is practical: some strangers must organise daily life, while others must accept decisions they had no part in making.
The First Division Creates Unequal Lives
Eight participants initially become guards, leaving twenty-two to experience the prison as inmates. That allocation changes what each person can do before anyone has earned another participant’s trust. A uniform grants some people the ability to issue instructions; the others must negotiate their daily lives within restrictions.
The setting gives those instructions immediate consequences. Privacy, food, personal space and the ability to decide what happens next become sources of friction. These are volunteers, but volunteering does not prevent discomfort. Knowing that an experience has an end date offers little help with a difficult hour.
Larry Foy, introduced as “Scary Larry”, brings previous experience of incarceration into the programme. He becomes the first participant to leave. His departure complicates the expectation that familiarity with prison should make someone better equipped to tolerate the simulation: returning to a restrictive environment can carry meanings that another participant does not share.
The production provides an exit mechanism through the safe word “pineapple”, alongside psychological screening and access to support. These provisions establish an essential boundary around the programme. A participant’s willingness to remain is supposed to be renewable, rather than a commitment that overrides subsequent distress.
The first departure also creates an interpretive trap for the audience. If remaining is automatically treated as success, leaving becomes evidence of weakness before the person’s reasons have even been considered. Yet a voluntary exercise should allow someone to decide that continuing no longer serves them.
At this stage, the participants have no common definition of achievement. Enduring the full stay, learning something about oneself, maintaining order and challenging arbitrary authority could all count as success. Those aims can coexist briefly, but they create incompatible expectations once one person’s challenge becomes another person’s disciplinary problem.
Two Guard Shifts Create Two Versions of Authority
The division between guards and prisoners soon proves less stable than it first appears. The day and night shifts approach their responsibilities differently, and inmates notice the inconsistency. Questions about routines become questions about whose instructions really count.
Chet Hudson emerges as a forceful presence among the guards. Laura Berens also demonstrates leadership, although her approach is not identical to his. The programme therefore establishes differences within the supposedly powerful group before suggesting that a uniform produces a single kind of behaviour.
For the inmates, inconsistent management creates opportunities. A rule that changes with the shift becomes easier to challenge because its necessity is no longer obvious. If one group permits something another prohibits, obedience starts to look like accommodation of individual preferences.
Pete Zaremba and Brendan Hardey become central to the resistance developing inside the pod. Their willingness to question the arrangement distinguishes them from participants who would rather keep the peace and get through their stay. The prisoners share restrictions without sharing a strategy.
This is where rebellion becomes a collective-action problem. A participant who confronts a guard may believe he is defending everyone’s freedom. Someone nearby may believe that the confrontation will make everyone’s evening worse. Agreement about discomfort does not automatically produce agreement about resistance.
The programme then introduces riot training. This is an organised intervention, rather than evidence that confrontation has emerged entirely without prompting. It asks the guards to demonstrate control and changes the circumstances in which the prisoners decide whether to comply.
That intervention should affect how the unfolding conflict is understood. A person responding to a deliberate show of authority is responding to a situation created for that purpose. The event may reveal something meaningful about their choices, but those choices cannot be separated from the instructions and expectations surrounding them.
A Small Promotion Turns into a Severe Punishment
The hierarchy becomes more complicated when inmates can acquire responsibilities within it. Brendan is appointed a trustee by the night shift, placing him in an awkward position between the guards and the wider prisoner group. The appointment offers recognition without removing the basic limits of his confinement.
His continued resistance frustrates the guards who gave him that responsibility. Kiana Gaona and her colleagues increasingly interpret the conduct of Brendan and Pete as a challenge requiring consequences. What began as an effort to manage a group becomes entangled with feeling personally disrespected.
The decisive response is a “23 and 1” restriction: twenty-three hours locked in a cell, with one hour out. The episode’s discussion establishes that less severe options were available. The severity therefore requires explanation; it cannot simply be presented as the only possible way to maintain order.
The mechanism matters more than a broad claim that the guards become cruel. They identify troublesome participants, discuss how to contain their influence and use control over movement to do it. The penalty reduces the prisoners’ ability to interact with the group whose cooperation they have been seeking.
It also turns an argument about authority into a bodily experience of time. A reprimand ends when the conversation ends. A prolonged cell restriction continues long after the official has moved on to another task. The person administering it and the person enduring it inhabit very different versions of the same decision.
A useful question here is whether a sanction addresses a specific danger or simply makes dissent costly. Those aims can be confused when the people making the rules are also the people offended by a challenge. Without an independent check, irritation can acquire the language of necessity.
The prisoners’ tactics remain open to criticism. Provocation does not become wise merely because it opposes authority. But responsibility for an excessive punishment belongs to the people who choose it; a difficult participant does not remove their obligation to consider proportionate alternatives.
The Role Reversal Carries Old Grievances Forward
The next intervention changes the allocation of power. The original male guards become prisoners. Laura, Kiana and Shavonnah Jefferson remain guards and form an all-female day shift, while former inmates Brendan, Pete and Jeff Cook become the new night shift.
This is a selective rearrangement. Everyone does not simply exchange places with an equivalent counterpart. The people who have experienced some of the sharpest conflict now receive authority over people who know their history.
Chet reacts badly to losing his guard role. He believes he has established a functioning system and sees little purpose in continuing as a prisoner. His response makes the reassignment more revealing than a straightforward exercise in imagining another person’s position.
An instruction to accept an unfamiliar role sounds different when the role carries less status. Someone can believe strongly in the legitimacy of a hierarchy while assuming that their own place within it is deserved. Reassignment exposes whether that belief survives a personal loss.
The promoted inmates face the opposite difficulty. Their new uniforms give them official responsibilities without erasing the relationships formed when they were prisoners. The other men remember their arguments, vulnerabilities and behaviour. Authority arrives immediately; credibility does not.
That makes the reversal an imperfect test of whether suffering produces empathy. The new guards are also responding to embarrassment, rivalry, friendship and the possibility of proving themselves. Their earlier experience is one influence among several, rather than a guarantee of either kindness or revenge.
A fairer standard for judging them is practical: can they explain rules, apply them consistently and recognise when another person’s dignity is at stake? Having experienced unfair treatment may help them identify a problem. It does not automatically teach them how to run a difficult group.
The story consequently moves beyond the original division between powerful people and powerless people. Individuals now have a history on both sides, and they carry that history into every new disagreement.
Keeping People Safe Requires More Than a Badge
The new night shift struggles to establish respect. Being appointed to supervise former peers creates an uncomfortable distance: the guards remain familiar people, but they now have obligations that can put them against those same peers.
Conflict around Brendan and Pete grows sufficiently tense that Laura and the other female guards intervene. The concern is that the confrontation could become physical. The intervention also exposes disagreement between guard groups about when to step in and how decisively to act.
This provides a more specific standard for leadership than confidence or loudness. A person responsible for safety must notice a developing risk, assess whether discussion is still productive and act before a preventable confrontation becomes worse. Waiting can itself become a consequential decision.
There is also a genuine coordination problem. Stepping into another shift’s dispute may undermine its authority, particularly if that group already feels insecure. Yet preserving a colleague’s status cannot be the only consideration when people appear vulnerable.
The programme’s gender arrangement invites comparison, but it cannot establish a general rule about how women or men lead. These particular participants have different personalities, different histories within the pod and different relationships with those they supervise. The comparison is interesting precisely because the circumstances are specific.
Laura’s contribution can be assessed without turning her into a representative of all women. She identifies a situation requiring intervention and helps bring it under control. That action is enough to discuss; it does not need an unsupported claim about innate nurturing or superior temperament.
Meanwhile, the failure of an inexperienced guard to command immediate respect should not make humiliation seem like a useful corrective. Publicly exposing someone’s weakness can deepen the insecurity already driving poor decisions. The challenge is to restore safety while leaving room for the person to learn.
The conflict therefore adds a practical limit to the promise of role reversal. Changing who possesses authority does not supply a shared method for exercising it. The participants still need boundaries, cooperation and a way to correct one another without turning every correction into another contest.
The Prison Remains a Television Production
Throughout these changes, the participants are watched and interpreted by behavioural psychologist Alison Wood Brooks, journalist Trymaine Lee and former corrections professional Michael Cantrell. Their different backgrounds offer different ways of explaining what happens, but commentary does not make an interpretation conclusive.
The programme also combines the participants’ developing experience with interventions designed by the production. That relationship creates a second level of authority above the guards. Someone outside the pod can alter the conditions under which everyone inside must act.
For a viewer, it is useful to separate three questions. What did a participant do? What conditions made that action possible or attractive? What does the programme encourage us to believe that action demonstrates? An answer to the first does not automatically settle the other two.
The production describes using remote cameras to minimise direct contact. That may reduce interruptions from a visible crew, but it cannot make the participants unaware that they are appearing on television. Awareness of an audience becomes part of the setting.
Nor does a large amount of recorded footage give viewers direct access to the whole experience. A six-episode programme necessarily selects and arranges material. This does not establish that an event is fabricated; it establishes that the audience encounters an edited account.
A disagreement can look different depending on how much of the preceding negotiation is included. A confession can clarify an action while also reflecting what a participant wants to believe about himself. These are ordinary interpretive problems in reality television, made more consequential by the language of experimentation.
The strongest way to engage with the series is therefore to evaluate its examples without accepting its broadest implied promises. It can make a dispute about punishment vivid. It cannot establish how every person would behave in comparable circumstances, or explain an entire prison system through one selected group.
What Happens at the End of The New Stanford Prison Experiment?
The series ends on the thirteenth day, when the remaining inmates agree to leave together. They link arms, declare “We have the power”, and the production announces that the experiment is over. Reaching that agreement, however, requires them to resolve a final disagreement about what completing the experience actually means.
Before this conclusion, the guards are sent home and the inmates enter a self-governance phase. They receive control of the pod’s practical arrangements, including keys and food. The familiar opposition between people giving orders and people receiving them is removed.
Freedom from the guards does not immediately produce a shared plan. Some men continue familiar routines, while others want the group to finish the exercise together. Chris Lee remains committed to staying for the full fourteen days.
For Chris, leaving early carries the meaning of failing to complete a commitment. For those advocating departure, choosing the endpoint is an opportunity to exercise the authority now available to them. They disagree about the meaning of the same action, rather than simply about whether confinement is enjoyable.
Mike Paramore argues for the significance of leaving arm in arm across their differences. Sonny Robertson then helps resolve the remaining divide by proposing a shared declaration instead of the safe word. The group can frame departure as a collective decision that honours the experience.
This is an unusually revealing negotiation because the physical route out is less difficult than the interpretive route. The men need an account of leaving that does not require some of them to regard themselves as having failed.
The agreed words allow different motivations to coexist. Someone seeking release and someone seeking completion can participate in the same action without first becoming identical in outlook. Consensus becomes possible when they find a meaning broad enough to accommodate both.
That does not make earlier individual departures inferior. Nobody should need a unanimous vote or an uplifting explanation to withdraw from a voluntary exercise. The final unity is emotionally significant, but the right to leave was already meaningful when exercised alone.
What the Experiment Can Actually Tell Us
The ending resists the simplest version of the programme’s advertised question. Power has been used to restrict, punish, organise, intervene and bring people together. Treating those actions as equivalent would make the word too broad to explain much.
A more useful distinction concerns accountability. Who can question an instruction? Who decides whether a punishment is proportionate? What happens when someone with authority makes a mistake? These questions direct attention towards arrangements that can be changed, rather than asking viewers to sort participants into good and bad people.
The name Stanford carries a particular burden here. The original 1971 experiment became famous for its account of ordinary people assuming damaging roles in a simulated prison. It ended after six days, well before its intended completion.
But the scientific interpretation of that study has faced substantial criticism. In a 2019 archival investigation, Thibault Le Texier challenged its data collection, the instructions given to guards and claims about participants becoming fully absorbed in their roles. Those criticisms concern how the evidence was produced, not merely whether the experience was disturbing.
Zimbardo and Craig Haney subsequently defended the significance of the original study and disputed aspects of its critics’ accounts. The historical argument should therefore be represented as a contested research record, rather than a slogan that a reality programme can simply confirm or overturn.
The official Stanford Prison Experiment website also states that the Netflix production is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Zimbardo or his estate. The familiar title should not be mistaken for institutional continuity.
For the new series, the reasoning problem is straightforward. Several things change at once: responsibilities, relationships, expectations, fatigue and the participants’ understanding of what the producers want. An observed change in conduct cannot confidently be assigned to only one of those causes.
Similarly, a moving final agreement does not prove that removing supervision always produces cooperation. These participants reach a particular resolution within a temporary arrangement that includes an exit. Its value lies in the example it offers, rather than a universal prediction it cannot support.
The Limits of Borrowing a Prison’s Reality
The building is real, and the participants’ discomfort need not be dismissed because their stay is voluntary. Nevertheless, the ability to end participation separates this experience from the condition it imitates. That difference affects every conclusion drawn about imprisonment.
A person serving a sentence cannot ordinarily convert a shared statement of solidarity into an agreed departure. The programme’s final choice is available because of the production’s underlying arrangement. It is an expression of the participants’ freedom within that arrangement, rather than a demonstration that imprisonment itself depends only on consent.
The distinction also helps explain why the show is more useful as a study of negotiation than as a complete account of prison life. Its central conflicts concern temporary roles, competing expectations and relationships formed under observation. The wider institutions that determine incarceration remain largely outside that frame.
Taylor Tailored’s discussion of Wasteman offers a contrasting fictional situation: a man approaching release must protect a future that other people can endanger. There, the possibility of leaving is controlled by consequences extending beyond a voluntary exercise.
The reporting collected in Worst Prisons in Britain Ranked shifts attention again, towards recurring institutional conditions and inspection findings. It provides a different scale of inquiry from watching a small group negotiate an artificial hierarchy.
Both comparisons help preserve what is interesting about this series without asking it to carry evidence it does not possess. A television programme can illuminate a particular interaction while remaining an inadequate model of the institution whose setting it borrows.
The New Stanford Prison Experiment ultimately becomes most revealing when its participants have to explain their choices to one another. Punishment, reassignment and self-government expose competing ideas about fairness, responsibility and completion. Its final agreement offers a concrete example of people finding language for a shared decision. The hopeful part is that they manage it without resolving every difference between them; the necessary limit is that their success belongs to this group, in these conditions.
Sources
The New Stanford Prison Experiment — Netflix Media Center. Official series identity and premise.
The New Stanford Prison Experiment Reimagines Infamous Study for This Generation — Netflix Tudum. Release date, production methods, safeguards and expert panel.
Inside ‘The New Stanford Prison Experiment,’ Netflix’s Controversial Reality Series — Variety. Producer interviews covering the setting, interventions and participant protections.
The ‘Agents of Chaos’ From Netflix’s ‘New Stanford Prison Experiment’ Speak Out — SFGATE. Participant interviews and corroboration of living conditions, punishment and role reversal.
Springfield! Springfield! episode transcripts: The Experiment Begins, The Rebellion, Abuse of Power, A New Order, Identity Crisis and We Have the Power. Dialogue and event-sequence checks; these are unofficial transcripts.
‘The New Stanford Prison Experiment’ Creators Break Down Its Shocking Finale — Variety, syndicated by Yahoo. Producer discussion of the collective departure and thirteenth-day conclusion.
Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment — Thibault Le Texier. Peer-reviewed archival critique of the original study.
Continuing to Acknowledge the Power of Dehumanizing Environments — Zimbardo and Haney. Published response defending the original study’s significance.
Stanford Prison Experiment — Official Website. The original researchers’ account and the statement concerning the Netflix production’s lack of affiliation.
