Human Guinea Pigs: Prisoners

Since the beginnings of society’s division into a hierarchy of man’s importance, the bottom of the social pyramid was always those seen as lacking morals. Whether immoral qualities were synonymous with skin color or occupation, a supposed lack of moral integrity allowed for those higher in stature to impose at times grueling oppression upon the degraded. As society evolved many advances pushed for equality among the masses so that each man or woman was allowed the freedom of bias or judgment. However, no matter how advanced the human race, there is still a hierarchy and at the lowest of its levels lies prisoners. Prisoners in modern times are often seen as morally deficit and depraved monsters that deserve the worst of punishments to repent for their crimes. Consequently, since prisoners occupied the lower levels of society’s class division history suggests that they are to be subject to the oppression of their proclaimed superiors, the unchained population. The use of prisoner’s for medical research has gone from something that has been considered adequate to something that is unacceptable and inhumane.

The use of prisoner’s for medical research is absolutely cold-hearted. To force anyone to be experimented for medical research without his or her informed consent is both illegal and immoral. Medical ethics requires doctors or pharmaceutical companies to conduct their experiments with the informed consent from patients or volunteers, meaning that an individual should be fully informed about the potential harms or benefits experiments would like to bring. There's no point that such a basic moral principle could be tramped, this should be applied equally to both general public and prisoners, for the latter group although being depr...

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...oners are unfairly lured into something that they may not want to do. Because prisoners are so easily accessible the benefits of research can be great and be better controlled. This is very tempting to government and companies that see huge potential profits in prison research. This can lead to laws being by-passed and, as has happened in the past, prisoners can very well be treated as experimental animals.

All in all, using prisoners as research subjects is one of the most immoral and unethical issues of our time. This issue began in the 1940s and when opposition to these actions began in the 1960s, new regulations came into place making this issue somewhat more, but not at all completely, acceptable. The use of prisoners in medical research is about exploitation and profit and this heinous activity contributes to the corruption of health care in our country.