Drunk Tank Pink

Product details

The academic journal Orthomolecular Psychiatry opened its final issue of 1979 with a classic study that has captured the imaginations of prison guards, football coaches, and disgruntled parents. The author, Professor Alexander Schauss, described a simple experiment involving 153 healthy young men, a researcher, two large sets of colored cardboard, and a well-lit laboratory. The young men entered the lab one by one to participate in an unusual strength test. The experiment began when the young men stared at one of the cardboard sets. Half of the young men had their sets of cardboard dark blue, and the other half light pink. After a full minute, the researcher asked the young men to raise their arms in front of their bodies while he pressed down just enough to force their arms back down to their sides. Once the young men regained their strength, the researcher made a few quick notes before repeating the experiment. First, he asked the young men to stare at the other set of cardboard, and then he performed the strength test again.

The results were remarkably consistent: all but two young men suffered considerably more weakness after staring at the pink cardboard, and their resistance to the researcher's pressure was almost nonexistent, while the blue cardboard kept them fully strong, regardless of whether they stared at it in the first or second strength test. It seemed that the pink color drained the young men's strength, albeit temporarily.

In order to prove that this effect was not a coincidence, Schauss conducted a second experiment; but this time he used a more accurate force gauge, in which he asked 38 young men to squeeze a measuring device known as a dynamometer (a muscle contraction force gauge), and all 38 participants without exception squeezed less forcefully one after the other after staring at the pink cardboard.

Schauss began describing the calming and miraculous power of the color light pink in public lectures across the United States. In one televised lecture, a Mr. California Muscles contestant performed several simple overhead bicep exercises but struggled to complete a single one after staring at a piece of pink cardboard. Given the color's power, Schauss suggested that correctional officials should consider placing unruly inmates in a pink cell. Two officers at the U.S. Naval Correctional Center in Seattle, Washington, repainted one of the cells pink. For seven months, Assistant Officer Gene Packer and Commanding Officer Ron Miller observed newly arrived inmates entering the pink cell angry and agitated, only to emerge calmer after 15 minutes. New inmates are typically aggressive, but the officers reported no violent incidents during the seven-month trial period.

Fans honored the adventurous officers by naming the color "Baker-Miller Pink," and other correctional facilities across the country painted cells the same pink color. At one pre-trial detention center in San Jose, California, some young inmates suffered so much from the pink color that their exposure to it had to be limited to just a few minutes a day. When smaller county jails began locking up violent, drunken inmates, they put them in pink cells, and the color was informally called the pink cell color.