http://www.prisonexp.org/the-story/

 
  • In my situation with SGI, I feel I am like the prisoners with “no fight” at the end of my appeal or having little choices available to me. I took this off the following website http://www.prisonexp.org/conclusion/
 
  • Close to the end of the Stanford Prison study, some interesting thoughts occurred:
    “Several remarkable things occurred during these parole hearings. First, when we asked prisoners whether they would forfeit the money they had earned up to that time if we were to parole them, most said yes. Then, when we ended the hearings by telling prisoners to go back to their cells while we considered their requests, every prisoner obeyed, even though they could have obtained the same result by simply quitting the experiment. Why did they obey? Because they felt powerless to resist. Their sense of reality had shifted, and they no longer perceived their imprisonment as an experiment. In the psychological prison we had created, only the correctional staff had the power to grant paroles.”
 
  • After you have read about the Stanford experiment, imagine the claimants representing themselves at the AIAC are the prisoners in this study, SGI are the guards/correctional staff in this study, while the commission members are the onlookers in this study.  
 
  • SGI made an objection to the type of evidence I presented to the AIAC citing it was not acceptable in the court.  I could see the commission members may have agreed with my evidence, but the type of evidence I gave was not suitable for court.  (However, the judges never said “Overruled” or “Sustained” after SGI’s objection which I think is a violation of court at some level … I watch Law & Order) The commission members then asked if I had any other testimony presenting the similar evidence.  I replied, “Let’s just get on with this procedure; I am tired going through this (fight) and I want this over.”

    At this point, I similarly felt powerless to resist anything at the tribunal. Did it matter if I opposed anything at the hearing? The laws dictate SGI wins (through restricted payment of expenses if you win your case, the imbalance of legal knowledge between SGIs lawyer and the claimant, the commission members not being able to use all the laws at the AIAC, the commission members not having the ability to transfer the case to a higher court, the design of the disagreement process, etc.)
 
  • In the same way as the prisoners, my sense of reality had shifted, I felt powerless to resist.  It did not matter if I were to win that particular argument against SGI, I would end up losing regardless due to the design of the system.  Even though the claimant won the case, she still lost monetarily. The costs awarded in her appeal did not cover all her and her parent's expenses because of SGI's mistake. And because SGI has declined to help her after the re-appeal deadline, (before the deadline, SGI stated they were going to help her with the bottleneck during those years of not getting Living Assistance) her parents are forced to pay for the assistance needed to get her bottleneck finished.  So essentially her family is paying twice.
 
  • Only SGI, like the guards in the study, had the power to change anything in the claimant's situation.  Whatever the claimant present to the commission, nothing would change. SGI would always trump her evidence because of the unequal power distribution within the courtroom and the restriction of laws used at the AIAC.  Nevertheless, she would have lost.  Going to the AIAC to get a decision changed in her automobile claim for this particular issue was one of the most demoralizing experiences she ever had in her life.

Please click on the page "Lawyers, Judges & Inflation" to find out why the courts are figuring out punitive damages wrong in Canada.