A "prison" experiment?

After having watched this movie numerous times now, I still can't equate my feelings to what it's trying to tell me.

The objective, from what Zimbardo would like us to believe, is how "an institution affects an individual's behavior". Alright. Well, what exactly was this institution in this experiment? I didn't see much adherence to procedure and protocol past the first 3rd of the movie, of which is mentioned more than once in this film yet is never quite defined and appears to reside in ambiguity and at the mercy of both the guards' and researchers' predilections.

Throwing out abidance to the contract to "See where things go" or, "Let the guards handle it" is not enforcing any type of institutionalism, it is allowing anarchy to manifest within a superficial construct of it. It was nothing more but torment of the prisoners at the guards' whim. This experiment was a practice in unrestrained, discretionary authoritative absolutism at the behest of the guards and encouraged by these "researchers", who if they held any respect for the scientific process at all, at the very least should've known better than to include themselves in the proceedings.

Once the terms of the contract were broken, none of these prisoners held any obligation to follow an authority that itself didn't respect the hierarchy that empowered it. The guards aren't the ultimate authority, they are the simply the implementation of a higher one, yet that higher one were nothing but scientists allowing the situation to degrade while pulling strings when needed to ensure it did in the direction they desired. This study isn't a look into how the institution affects individual behavior (as is claimed), but more so the consequences inflicted upon individuals because that institution hadn't been established at all.

There was not much form or function here that I saw, it was throwing 20+ schoolkids in differing roles with basically no intervention to their actions and watching the chaos ensue. What's to be expected, and what exactly are we supposed to glean from this that we haven't learned from history and everyday life? That people can be horrific to each other when some are given power over others? Stanford, be sure to thank those who suffered for saving me tuition costs for such an edification. Furthermore, what is to be ascertained to be applicable to real world institutions who actually heed to a semblance of structure and order through an experiment that appears to have abided by none?

It strikes me that the failure of this fiasco (and from what I've researched outside the film) was the inability or unwillingness to establish and maintain an outside, effective, enforced objective authority in regulation of the proceedings it proclaimed to study, thereby relegating any conclusions useless, or at best, highly questionable. This contract seemed to be dismissed at the earliest possible convenience for the scientists' morbid sadistic fascination masquerading under scholastic pretense. Ethics aside, on what foundation can the behavior observed from this be based, much less utilized? I've read this experiment was funded by the Navy in the development of S.E.R.E. (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape) training, and if that's the case I suppose I could grant it a bit more leeway as it delved into the psychological impact of being imprisoned under a variance of unregulated conditions, but that differs from an institution. I've also read that the Navy hiring Stanford is a fabrication, so am ultimately left at a loss as to what the real objective of this study was.

Regardless, when you name it the "Stanford prison experiment", you are alluding to well established institutions, and these institutions have rules. This experiment ran contrary to that in nearly every respect. It was a study on the effects of essentially unmitigated power, not on how institutional authority holds bearing on individual behavior.

That this experiment spiraled so out of control after only six days as to be called off is a testament to that.