Ethical Treatment Of Prisoners

Particular scholars have proposed prisoners should be the target group for researchers to enroll in human clinical trials. Using prisoners has the potential to be a more efficient way of conducting clinical trials versus using only volunteers to research and develop useful drugs or treatments. One explanation for this is that conducting efforts to recruit volunteers, screening them, determining if they are healthy enough to continue through the entire research study, and having a readily available pool of candidates, is more difficult and costly than turning to prisoners as subjects.
Indeed, by strictly using volunteers, important research may be delayed in order to find suitable candidates, whereas using prisoners may remedy this situation. For example, if there was an …show more content…
Clinical trials on prisoners should be replicated to reflect experiments and ethics applied to general populations. By following these standards, results of the experiments should appear similarly to results of experiments that would have otherwise occurred with volunteers. If the same standards of care are followed when using prisoners for scientific and medical experiments that are for the greater good of society, it should not be considered as punishment to participate, but rather a means to contribute to society while incarcerated.
However, there are concerns over the ethical treatment of prisoners if they were to become the targets of human clinical trials. An argument against the use of prisoners for experimental trials surrounds the important issue of coercion. Even if safeguards are put into place in order to assure that prisoners have informed consent and the same standards of care as non-prisoner subjects, it may never be enough to protect the rights of those prisoners. It could be understood that in an incarcerated population, there is no