Important bans protecting prisoners from medical experimentation are on the verge of dissolution.
As reported by the New York Times today in a front-page story, last month the Institute of Medicine recommended that federal agencies drop the bans. The bans, long justified by the fact that people behind bars can scarcely be viewed as voluntarily consensual, stanched a once-booming industry of experimenting on the incarcerated. Drug companies disassembled the testing labs they’d built next to the prison gates.
If lawmakers take up the IOM’s recommendations as expected, the floodgates may once again be opened.
The IOM takes pains to detail researchers’ transgressions against prisoners in scientific experiments–see this NYT video on the Holmesburg trials, for example–but considered that the hypothetical benefits of prisoner research outweigh the certain and well-documented risks.
These lauded benefits, unlike clearly detailed risks, sound wonderful but are curiously vague.
More details to come…For now, chew on the fact that many of the authors of the IOM recommendations conduct prisoner research (to answer various social science and epidemiological questions) themselves. A conflict of interest, perhaps?
