It's not every day that a neighboring town makes the front page of the New York Times. It's especially surprising when the reason is, at heart, a local government ethics problem.

The town is East Haven, CT (most recently in the national news for a part of it being overrun by waves during Hurricane Irene), and the problem ostensibly involves the mistreatment of immigrants in town by certain police officials. That's the criminal point of view. But the real problem is loyalty. The police, and certain town officials, put their loyalty to each other ahead of their loyalty to the town's residents. Four police officers have been indicted, one of them the head of the police union, and it appears that the union and the mayor are solidly behind them.

According to an article in Parsippany (NJ) Life, a Parsippany school board member filed an ethics complaint against himself with the state's School Ethics Commission. Is this odd course of action the best way to bring transparency to the school board, an institutional rather than personal problem?

Imagine this story. A mayor calls a group of local contractors and developers to a closed meeting on furthering economic growth in the city. The guests are given a welcome pack, and in the welcome pack is a plain brown, unmarked envelope. The mayor ran on a platform of stopping corruption, but the contractors and developers have seen this happen before. Politicians are all the same, they think.

During the meeting, the mayor asks her guests to open the envelopes. Inside the envelopes is one sheet of paper, on which the guests are asked to write the names of three local government officials or employees who have asked them for, or simply expected and accepted, gifts, bribes, kickbacks, or the hiring of relatives. She promises to have these individuals investigated.

This third blog post on Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect looks at some ways to deal with situational forces.

Recognizing Our Limitations
One of the college students who played a guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment said later, "I was actually beginning to feel like a guard and had really thought I was incapable of this kind of behavior. ... [W]hile I was doing it I didn't feel any regret. I didn't feel any guilt. It was only afterwards, when I began to reflect on what I had done, that this behavior began to dawn on me and I realized that this was a part of me I had not noticed before."

It is a part of most of us. But if we refuse to recognize this, as most of us do, we can do nothing to control it. This is the first-level act individuals are responsible for when they take a position of authority:  recognizing that they are capable of acting unethically in that position. This can be very difficult. People need help recognizing this, and they usually don't get it.

A year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post about a 2007 book by Philip Zimbardo, entitled The Lucifer Effect. I had read about Zimbardo's book in another book, Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity.

I finally got around to reading The Lucifer Effect, and I highly recommend it, despite its length and the small size of its type (for the middle-aged and older, this is a book that's better read as an e-book, where you can make the type as large as you want; I, alas, bought the paperback edition). In this and following blog posts, I will go beyond what I wrote in 2010.

Zimbardo's book starts with an experiment he did back in 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment, where normal college students were assigned roles as guards and prisoners, and quickly became either abusive, silent as to others' abuse, or accepting of abuse to them even as they rebelled in some ways against it. The experiment shows how quickly we can all be shaped by aspects of the situations we are in and the roles we are asked to play, and thereby accepting of new, unethical norms.

Zimbardo also looks at others' experiments, as well as real-life situations, such as the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons.

Local governments are hardly prisons, but they are situations that, especially where there are poor ethics environments, can place strong pressures on individuals to go along with unethical norms. The pressures involve us in loyalty, secrecy, becoming and remaining one of the gang, and playing the games necessary to raise funds in order to get re-elected and to appease those with power, whether in the government, in the party, or in the community (that is, large taxpayers, employers, developers, contractors, organizations, and their lobbyists).

Legal Disciplinary Proceeding as Ethics Enforcement Forum
Occasionally, government ethics enforcement spills out from ethics and criminal proceedings into other types of proceeding. Since Maricopa County's officials have managed to turn ethics and criminal enforcement into a form of internecine warfare, the state's lawyer disciplinary program has gotten into the action.