Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Prisoners. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prisoners. Show all posts

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Organs in exchange for freedom? Bill raises ethical concerns

Steve LeBlanc
Associated Press
Originally published 8 FEB 23

BOSTON (AP) — A proposal to let Massachusetts prisoners donate organs and bone marrow to shave time off their sentence is raising profound ethical and legal questions about putting undue pressure on inmates desperate for freedom.

The bill — which faces a steep climb in the Massachusetts Statehouse — may run afoul of federal law, which bars the sale of human organs or acquiring one for “valuable consideration.”

It also raises questions about whether and how prisons would be able to appropriately care for the health of inmates who go under the knife to give up organs. Critics are calling the idea coercive and dehumanizing even as one of the bill’s sponsors is framing the measure as a response to the over-incarceration of Hispanic and Black people and the need for matching donors in those communities.

“The bill reads like something from a dystopian novel,” said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a Washington, D.C.-based criminal justice reform advocacy group. “Promoting organ donation is good. Reducing excessive prison terms is also good. Tying the two together is perverse.”

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Offering reduced sentences in exchange for organs is not only unethical, but also violates federal law, according to George Annas, director of the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health. Reducing a prison sentence is the equivalent of a payment, he said.

“You can’t buy an organ. That should end the discussion,” Annas said. “It’s compensation for services. We don’t exploit prisoners enough?”

Democratic state Rep. Carlos Gonzalez, another co-sponsor of the bill, defended the proposal, calling it a voluntary program. He also said he’s open to establishing a policy that would allow inmates to donate organs and bone marrow without the lure of a reduced sentence. There is currently no law against prisoner organ donation in Massachusetts, he said.

“It’s not quid pro quo. We are open to setting policy without incentives,” Gonzalez said, adding that it is “crucial to respect prisoners’ human dignity and agency by respecting their choice to donate bone marrow or an organ.”

Sunday, January 29, 2023

UCSF Issues Report, Apologizes for Unethical 1960-70’s Prison Research

Restorative Justice Calls for Continued Examination of the Past

Laura Kurtzman
Press Release
Originally posted 20 DEC 22

Recognizing that justice, healing and transformation require an acknowledgment of past harms, UCSF has created the Program for Historical Reconciliation (PHR). The program is housed under the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, and was started by current Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, Dan Lowenstein, MD.

The program’s first report, released this month, investigates experiments from the 1960s and 1970s involving incarcerated men at the California Medical Facility (CMF) in Vacaville. Many of these men were being assessed or treated for psychiatric diagnoses.

The research reviewed in the report was performed by Howard Maibach, MD, and William Epstein, MD, both faculty in UCSF’s Department of Dermatology. Epstein was a former chair of the department who died in 2006. The committee was asked to focus on the work of Maibach, who remains an active member of the department.

Some of the experiments exposed research subjects to pesticides and herbicides or administered medications with side effects. In all, some 2,600 incarcerated men were experimented on.

The men volunteered for the studies and were paid for participating. But the report raises ethical concerns over how the research was conducted. In many cases there was no record of informed consent. The subjects also did not have any of the medical conditions that any of the experiments could have potentially treated or ameliorated.

Such practices were common in the U.S. at the time and were increasingly being criticized both by experts and in the lay press. The research continued until 1977, when the state of California halted all human subject research in state prisons, a year after the federal government did the same.

The report acknowledges that Maibach was working during a time when the governance of human subjects research was evolving, both at UCSF and at institutions across the country. Over a six-month period, the committee gathered some 7,000 archival documents, medical journal articles, interviews, documentaries and books, much of which has yet to be analyzed. UCSF has acknowledged that it may issue a follow-up report.

The report found that “Maibach practiced questionable research methods. Archival records and published articles have failed to show any protocols that were adopted regarding informed consent and communicating research risks to participants who were incarcerated.”

In a review of publications between 1960 and 1980, the committee found virtually all of Maibach’s studies lacked documentation of informed consent despite a requirement for formal consent instituted in 1966 by the newly formed Committee on Human Welfare and Experimentation. Only one article, published in 1975, indicated the researchers had obtained informed consent as well as approval from UCSF’s Committee for Human Research (CHR), which began in 1974 as a result of new federal requirements.


Friday, November 29, 2019

This Researcher Exploited Prisoners, Children, and the Elderly. Why Does Penn Honor Him?

Image result for albert kligman
Albert Kligman
Alexander Kafka
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published Nov 8, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

What the university sites don’t mention is how Retin-A and Renova, an anti-wrinkle variation of the retinoic acid compound, were derived from substances first experimentally applied by Kligman’s research team to the skin of inmates at Holmesburg Prison, then a large facility in Philadelphia.

From the 1950s into the 1970s, the prison served as Kligman’s “Kmart of human experimentation,” in the words of Allen M. Hornblum, an author who exhaustively documented the Penn researcher’s projects at Holmesburg in his books Acres of Skin (1998) and Sentenced to Science: One Black Man’s Story of Imprisonment in America (2007).

Colleges are questioning the morality of accepting research funds from Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sexually molesting young girls, and the Sacklers, makers of OxyContin.

They are searching their souls over institutional ties to slavery and Jim Crow-era exploitation.

Hornblum and others have asked for decades whether Penn should be honoring Kligman, and Hornblum and Yusef Anthony, the former inmate whose story Hornblum tells in Sentenced to Science, will ask again in a lecture at Princeton next month. The current ethical climate amplifies their question.

The university’s president, Amy Gutmann, and a Penn colleague, the bioethicist Jonathan D. Moreno, recently published a book on bioethics and health care. “They are advising the world on all of these different issues,” Hornblum says, “but they don’t know what’s going on on their own campus? They don’t know it’s wrong?”

Penn says it “regrets the manner in which this research was conducted” and emphasizes the university’s commitment to research ethics. But it has given no indication that it plans to take any action regarding the lectureship or the university’s portrayal of Kligman.

Kligman, who died in 2010, defended his work by saying that experiments on prisoners were common at the time, and he was right. But, Hornblum says, the scale and duration of the Holmesburg experiments stood out even then.

The info is here.

Sunday, April 7, 2019

In Spain, prisoners’ brains are being electrically stimulated in the name of science

Sigal Samuel
vox.com
Originally posted March 9, 2019

A team of scientists in Spain is getting ready to experiment on prisoners. If the scientists get the necessary approvals, they plan to start a study this month that involves placing electrodes on inmates’ foreheads and sending a current into their brains. The electricity will target the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that plays a role in decision-making and social behavior. The idea is that stimulating more activity in that region may make the prisoners less aggressive.

This technique — transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS — is a form of neurointervention, meaning it acts directly on the brain. Using neurointerventions in the criminal justice system is highly controversial. In recent years, scientists and philosophers have been debating under what conditions (if any) it might be ethical.

The Spanish team is the first to use tDCS on prisoners. They’ve already done it in a pilot study, publishing their findings in Neuroscience in January, and they were all set to implement a follow-up study involving at least 12 convicted murderers and other inmates this month. On Wednesday, New Scientist broke news of the upcoming experiment, noting that it had approval from the Spanish government, prison officials, and a university ethics committee. The next day, the Interior Ministry changed course and put the study on hold.

Andrés Molero-Chamizo, a psychologist at the University of Huelva and the lead researcher behind the study, told me he’s trying to find out what led to the government’s unexpected decision. He said it makes sense to run such an experiment on inmates because “prisoners have a high level of aggressiveness.”

The info is here.

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Call for retraction of 400 scientific papers amid fears organs came from Chinese prisoners

Melissa Davey
The Guardian
Originally published February 5, 2019

A world-first study has called for the mass retraction of more than 400 scientific papers on organ transplantation, amid fears the organs were obtained unethically from Chinese prisoners.

The Australian-led study exposes a mass failure of English language medical journals to comply with international ethical standards in place to ensure organ donors provide consent for transplantation.

The study was published on Wednesday in the medical journal BMJ Open. Its author, the professor of clinical ethics Wendy Rogers, said journals, researchers and clinicians who used the research were complicit in “barbaric” methods of organ procurement.

“There’s no real pressure from research leaders on China to be more transparent,” Rogers, from Macquarie University in Sydney, said. “Everyone seems to say, ‘It’s not our job’. The world’s silence on this barbaric issue must stop.”

A report published in 2016 found a large discrepancy between official transplant figures from the Chinese government and the number of transplants reported by hospitals. While the government says 10,000 transplants occur each year, hospital data shows between 60,000 to 100,000 organs are transplanted each year. The report provides evidence that this gap is being made up by executed prisoners of conscience.

The info is here.

Thursday, December 7, 2017

Attica: It’s Worse Than We Thought

Heather Ann Thompson
The New York Times
Originally posted November 19, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

As the fine print of that 1972 article read: “We are indebted to the inmates of the Attica Correctional Facility who participated in this study and to the warden and his administration for their help and cooperation.” This esteemed physician, a man working for two of New York’s most respected hospitals and receiving generous research funding from the N.I.H., was indeed conducting leprosy experiments at Attica.

But which of Attica’s nearly 2,400 prisoners, I wondered, was the subject of experiments relating to this crippling disease, without, as Dr. Brandriss admitted, adequate consent? Might it have been the 19-year-old who was at Attica because he had sliced the top of a neighbor’s convertible? Or a man imprisoned there for more serious offenses? Either way, no jury had sentenced them to being a guinea pig in any experiment relating to a disease as painful and disfiguring as leprosy.

And what about the hundreds of corrections officers and civilian employees working at Attica? Even if no one in this extremely crowded facility was actually exposed to this dreaded disease, one in which “prolonged close contact” with an infected patient is a most serious risk factor, were these state employees at all informed that medical experiments being conducted on the men in their charge?

This is not the first time prisons have allowed secret medical experiments on those locked inside. A 1998 book on Holmesburg Prison in Pennsylvania revealed that a doctor there, Albert Kligman, had been experimenting on prisoners for years. After the book appeared, nearly 300 former prisoners sued him, the University of Pennsylvania and the manufacturers of the substances to which they had been exposed, but none of the defendants was held accountable.

The article is here.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

That Time The United States Sterilized 60,000 Of Its Citizens

By Alexandra Minna Stern
The Huffington Post
Originally published January 7, 2016

Not too long ago, more than 60,000 people were sterilized in the United States based on eugenic laws. Most of these operations were performed before the 1960s in institutions for the so-called “mentally ill” or “mentally deficient.” In the early 20th century across the country, medical superintendents, legislators, and social reformers affiliated with an emerging eugenics movement joined forces to put sterilization laws on the books. Such legislation was motivated by crude theories of human heredity that posited the wholesale inheritance of traits associated with a panoply of feared conditions such as criminality, feeblemindedness, and sexual deviance. Many sterilization advocates viewed reproductive surgery as a necessary public health intervention that would protect society from deleterious genes and the social and economic costs of managing “degenerate stock.” From today’s vantage point, compulsory sterilization looks patently like reproductive coercion and unethical medical practice.

At the time, however, sterilization both was countenanced by the U.S. Supreme Court (in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case) and supported by many scientists, reformers, and lawmakers as one prong of a larger strategy to improve society by encouraging the reproduction of the “fit” and restricting the procreation of the “unfit.” In total, 32 U.S. states passed sterilization laws between 1907 and 1937, and surgeries reached their highest numbers in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Beginning in the 1970s, state legislatures began to repeal these laws, finding them antiquated and discriminatory, particularly towards people with disabilities.

The article is here.

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Most Prisoners Are Mentally Ill

By Olga Khazan
The Atlantic
Originally posted April 7, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

The numbers are even more stark when parsed by gender: 55 percent of male inmates in state prisons are mentally ill, but 73 percent of female inmates are. Meanwhile, the think-tank writes, "only one in three state prisoners and one in six jail inmates who suffer from mental-health problems report having received mental-health treatment since admission."

An increasingly popular program might help thin the ranks of these sick, untreated inmates. What are known as "mental-health courts" have sprung up in a number of states as an alternative to incarceration. A shoplifter who has, say, schizophrenia might be screened and found eligible for mental-health court, and then be sentenced to judicially supervised treatment. These types of courts have expanded rapidly since 2000, and there are now hundreds around the country.

The entire article is here.

Monday, February 2, 2015

This Is What Happens When We Lock Children in Solitary Confinement

By Dana Liebelson
Mother Jones
Originally published Jan/Feb 2015

Here are two excerpts:

While in isolation, Kenny—who was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder prior to the sixth grade—wrote to his mother, Melissa Bucher, begging her to make the two-hour drive to visit him. "I don't feel like I'm going to make it anymore," he wrote. "I'm in seclusion so I can't call and I'm prolly going to be in here for a while. My mind is just getting to me in here."

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THE PRACTICE OF ISOLATING PRISONERS is deeply rooted in American history. In 1787, a group of prison reformers joined by Benjamin Franklin argued that if inmates were left alone in silence, they would become repentant. This Quaker-inspired method resulted in the creation, in 1790, of a penitentiary house containing 16 solitary cells in Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail. Some 50 years later, Charles Dickens visited the city's lockups, of which he wrote, "The system here is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong." In its most recent census of state and federal adult prisons, in 2005, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that nearly 82,000 men and women were in "restricted housing"—a lowball figure that doesn't include jails or immigration facilities.

The entire article is here.

Thanks to Deborah Derrickson Kossman for this contribution.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Navy Nurse Faces Discipline for Actions at Guantanomo

By Kevin Gosztola
Firedoglake Blog
Originally published August 27, 2014

The first and only officer on the medical staff at Guantanamo Bay to conscientiously object to force-feeding prisoners on hunger strike has reportedly had his assignment ended. He has been sent back to Naval Health Clinic New England, his “parent command,” while an investigation is completed, which may result in discipline or a court-martial.

The Associated Press reported on August 26 that Navy Captain Maureen Pennington, who is “his commander at the network clinics, indicated, “An investigation has been conducted into his conduct while stationed at Guantanamo but it has not yet been determined if he will face any discipline.” He is “now on leave and military officials declined to provide details about him or any allegations he may face.”

The entire story is here.