The New Stanford Prison Experiment: Netflix put 30 volunteers in a real prison — the 1971 original didn't survive six days

Netflix released The New Stanford Prison Experiment on October 21, 2026: six unscripted episodes in which 30 volunteers are randomly split into 8 guards and 22 prisoners and locked into a decommissioned section of the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center in Canton, Georgia, for a planned two weeks (Variety via Yahoo). The executive producers are Jane Lipsitz and Dan Cutforth, the team behind Top Chef and Project Runway, now working through their company Alfred Street Industries. The show asks the same question Zimbardo did: does power corrupt?

"If we were simply recreating the original experiment, that would be unconscionable."

— Jane Lipsitz, executive producer, to Netflix's Tudum

What actually happened in 1971

In August 1971, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo picked 24 young men out of more than 70 who answered a newspaper ad, paid them $15 a day and turned the basement of the psychology building into a jail, with himself as superintendent (Biography). The study was supposed to run up to two weeks. On the fifth night, Christina Maslach, a young psychologist Zimbardo was dating, confronted him about how the prisoners were being treated, and he ended it the next morning, August 20, day six.

For decades it was textbook proof that ordinary people turn cruel in the right role. Then in 2018, French researcher Thibault Le Texier published a book built on the Stanford archives, and journalist Ben Blum tracked down participants for Medium. The recordings showed Zimbardo encouraging the guards to be tough, and Douglas Korpi, the prisoner whose breakdown became the study's most famous moment, said he'd faked it to get out and study for an exam (Live Science).

"Anybody who is a clinician would know that I was faking."

— Douglas Korpi, Prisoner 8612, to Ben Blum for Medium, 2018

Zimbardo defended the study until he died on October 14, 2024, at 91 (Wikipedia).

How Netflix rewrote the rules

The new version keeps the uniforms and the cells and changes almost everything around them:

• The location: A real jail with real inmates elsewhere in the building. Cutforth told Variety that hearing them yell during intake made the volunteers realize "this is not a joke."
• The cast: Instead of 24 male college students, 30 people from different ages, regions and politics, including three women and at least one man who'd served real prison time.
• The exit: Anyone could leave by saying "pineapple." Korpi, in 1971, felt he had to fake a breakdown to get out.
• The safety net: Background checks, psychological screening, a medic and psychologists on call around the clock.
• The pay: Undisclosed and, according to Lipsitz, deliberately too low for anyone to be in it for the money.
• The phases: Producers split the two weeks into four phases: transformation, hierarchy, a role reversal on day 7 and self-governance.

That last item is where the "experiment" part gets thin. The phases are producer-designed twists, and Reality Blurred's Andy Dehnart points out that producers also handed the guards instructions and staged a riot drill without a riot (Reality Blurred).

Don't miss: Netflix's Natalee Holloway trailer has viewers asking about Joran van der Sloot's other victim

What happens inside

The two guard shifts split immediately. Chris Lee's night shift treats the job like a company retreat, while Chet Hudson's day shift runs on strict rules, with Hudson comparing managing prisoners to breaking horses (High On Films). The first exit comes in episode 1: an inmate who has been incarcerated before quits after his toilet won't flush, and his cellmate follows him out with the safe word (The Review Geek).

Head guard Kiana Gaona later punishes two dissidents with 23 hours of cell confinement. On day 7, the male guards swap places with the most rebellious prisoners, and Hudson walks out, saying he has "nothing to learn from being a prisoner." The three women end up as an all-female shift, and the one they pick as head guard, Laura Berens, turns out to be the most competent leader in the whole run, per TIME's Judy Berman (TIME).

Six people quit over the course of the experiment, according to Variety. In the final phase, the guards are removed and the prisoners run the place themselves, and they decide to leave together a few days before the two weeks are up, per Slate.

The only people who ended Netflix's prison early were the prisoners, and they did it together.

What the critics think

Reviews have been rough, and mostly for the same reason: the show calls itself an experiment and is built like a reality competition.

• Slate: Nadira Goffe says nothing about the series is revealing or raw: "It's all just gloss."
• Reality Blurred: Dehnart, who stopped watching partway through episode 2, writes, "That's not an ethical experiment. That's sad desperation."
• TIME: Berman faults its shallow treatment of gender and race and concludes it becomes "as pointless as the first one."

Lipsitz told Variety the ending "could have gone a million ways." The way it went looks a lot less like Zimbardo's prison than like the BBC's 2002 version, The Experiment, run by psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher (Wikipedia). Their guards never settled into their roles, the prisoners organized and broke the regime, and an ethics committee stopped it two days early, on what would have been day six.

That's the most interesting thing Netflix's show ends up demonstrating, and it isn't what it set out to test. Netflix's guards got producer instructions and a staged riot drill, but no superintendent pushing them to be harder, and the prisoners answered by organizing. Once the producers took the guards away, the inmates walked out together, which is close to what critics of the 1971 study have argued for years: Zimbardo's guards had a lot of help.

Previously we wrote: Why was The Amazing Race cancelled? CBS isn't the network that dropped the axe