Ethical Issues Essay

Kodi Conner
Ethical Treatment of Prisoners
Soc120
Demetra Ford
Aug 1,2011

Ethical Treatment of Prisoners
In the past 30 years, the population of prisoners in the United States has expanded more than 4.5 fold, correctional facilities are increasingly overcrowded, and more of the country’s disadvantaged populations—racial minorities, women, people with mental illness, and people with communicable diseases such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), hepatitis C, and tuberculosis—are under correctional supervision. Because prisoners face restrictions on liberty and autonomy, limited privacy, and often inadequate health care, they require specific protections when involved in research, particularly in today’s correctional settings. Given these issues, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) commissioned the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to review the ethical considerations regarding research involving prisoners. The resulting analysis emphasizes five broad actions to provide prisoners involved in research with critically important protections: (1) expand the definition of the term prisoner; (2) ensure universally and consistently applied standards of protection; (3) shift from a category-based to a risk-benefit approach to research review; (4) update the ethical framework to include collaborative responsibility; and (5) enhance systematic oversight of research involving prisoners.

A prisoner is define as any person who is “involuntarily confined or detained in a penal institution” as a result of violating a criminal or civil statute, detained in other facilities as an alternative to criminal prosecution or incarceration, or detained pending arraignment, trial, or sentencing. The present regulation’s emphasis on custodial detention is too narrow. Of the nearly 7 million persons under adult correctional supervision in 2004, only 2.1 million were in prisons and...