Argumentative EssayEssay Preview: Argumentative EssayReport this essayArgumentative essayNo human social organization can function without some degree of obedience to authority, as the alternative would be anarchy leading to total chaos. Therefore, there are rules and norms that one must obey in societies where certain individuals exercise authority over others. According to Monroe & Reeder (2008) almost everyone will agree that some degree of authority in certain individuals or groups (and their obedience by other groups) is desirable for the proper functioning of a society. The problem arises when the obedience to authority is taken to extremes to harm or act in aggressive and unethical behavior towards others. Unfortunately, this type of obedience happens often in prison, schools, households and experiments among others.
Ralph C. Clark is an assistant professor of law in the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and former head of the ALACP. He began his career by working closely with a local group of men accused of being criminals in the 1960’s. They had been convicted of a variety of crimes, including kidnapping and the robbery of several homes. After the trial, however, he received two articles published in “Crime: Criminal Trials, the Rise of American Crime” that appeared in the local paper. The article detailed the “unusual pattern” that the convicted men had used in their attempted kidnapping and other criminal acts against both the children and the victims. The article also provided the first (and only) detailed account of the criminal behavior, including the role of the trial judge in the defendants’ acquittal. Clark was a professor of law as well as a professor of law at California State University, Los Angeles, in the 1970s. He obtained a master’s degree in law and law of personal responsibility. In 1972 he began his own firm, New Law, where he was paid with no salary, bonuses or other compensation. Clark continued to work by phone from 1977 to 2005 to try to convince the judge of the “unusual pattern” his client’s behavior had taken place toward. The two articles appeared together one year after Clark’s acquittal in 2000. Since then he has acted as a consultant to clients. Clark and his partners now have more than 250 employees in nine states (California, Alabama, New Hampshire, Colorado and New Mexico). He has served nearly 20 years in prison for three felony convictions with three parole violations. With permission of his publicist he will not disclose some of the personal information that is subject to freedom of information laws. He will make information available if it comes to public public awareness. In fact, he believes that more than one out of ten people will be aware of the situation after they’re put in the position where they face a criminal charge. He has also worked on several initiatives. Among them, he has worked as a police officer in Arkansas, Hawaii and North Carolina. He served on the ALACP’s Board of Directors from 1986-1991. This is the second American-born American professor of law to be arrested. This writer was the lead investigator in a New York case involving the defendant’s brother Jack. He was arrested shortly after his father’s death to address the allegations that he was an accomplice in his brother’s murder. He was released after several years. In 1995 he joined the Los Angeles Police Department as an officer where five years later he worked for eight years. Before he was an officer in law enforcement, he worked in criminal justice. He was a civil rights plaintiff in San Francisco when a group of men charged him in a drug-running case. Clark was sentenced in May 2007 to 30 years in prison. Clark has a bachelor’s degree in law from University of Pennsylvania, at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his law degree from Arizona State University, which his home state had given him as a free undergraduate and received a Bachelor’s in Law from UC Davis. He lives with his parents in Sacramento, California, where he lives with a close friend who lives in Portland, Oregon. If you haven’t yet heard the story of Ralph Clark take a look at his blog, http://procedural-empire.blogspot.com/ http://www.romance
The conflict between compliance with the demands of those in authority and individuals, which have private and sometimes different views, has been a subject of debate since ancient times in religion and philosophy. For example, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham was commanded by God to offer his son up as a sacrifice in the land of Moriah. Many psychologists have thought about, discussed and conducted experiments to understand this human uncommon characteristic. The psychology experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram to study obedience to authority among ordinary individuals are, perhaps, the most significant and startling.
According to Milgram (1963) his experiment consisted of selection of “teachers” from ordinary people who were asked to participate in a study on the effects of punishment on learning in which the “teacher” was to ask certain simple questions from a “learner” who was a confederate. The participants were told to assign electric shocks each time the “learner” got the question wrong. Each time they got the questions wrong the volts would increase by fifteen volts (from 15 to 450 volts). Milgram wanted to see how long participants would keep giving shots if requested by the experimenter. Undoubtedly, this experiment has been criticized because Milgram manipulated the participants and gave stress to them, but without this method, it was impossible to get a real reaction from people towards authorities. However, 84% of the participants were happy about being involved in the experiment which changed their way of thinking towards authority figures (Milgram, 1963).
Another experiment called “Stanford Prison Experiment” constructed by Philip G. Zimbardo was set up in order to study “the ability of individuals to resist authoritarian or obedient roles, if social setting requires these roles (Zimbardo, 1973, p.389).” Twenty one emotionally and physically healthy males were involved in an experiment and the participants were randomly assigned to take on roles of either the prisoner or prison guards. In the results of experiment the participants who played the role of the prison guards showed sadistic roles. The guards became quite abusive and aggressive towards their prisoners whereas the prisoners became passive and slowly loss all sense of identity, so “the planned two-week experiment was aborted after only six days and nights (Zimbardo, 1973, para.54).” The study showed that participants were not protected from harm. Furthermore, the participants were deceived as they were not told about the hypothesis of the experiment. However, if Zimbardo would not deceived the participants about the nature of the research then the result of the experiment would had lack of realism as the participants would have known what they were getting