 Although no one died in the Stanford Prison Experiment on which the  movie was based, the experiment was prematurely ended after six days  out of a planned two weeks. The college students assigned to be  prisoners was "withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways" as a  result of the degrading treatment they received. Quite a few scenes  in the movie actually happened in the original experiment, including  the early fire extinguisher scene and the prisoners being forced to  clean the toilets by their bare hands.