Advocate wrote:There are abuses in everything, but life goes on. You try your best to prevent abuses, but we should not shut down worthy projects. Drug testing is important to all of us and must proceed. Prisoners are not unintelligent and can make informed consents.
How about the CIA-commissioned experiments that tested the impact of hallucinogenic drugs? And what's your view of the army-commissioned experiments on radioactive materials and carcinogens? In those experiments, the prisoners were deliberately misinformed about what the experimenters were going to do to them. Private citizens in this situation could mobilize the press, lawyers, and what not, much more effectively than prisoners can. So, when you say: "You try your best to prevent abuses", I have to ask you,
what is "your best"? Precisely which measures are you suggesting that lawmakers take to prevent the recurrence of past abuses?
Thomas, the CIA thing is a bad example. A CIA agent by the name of Olson (I think) was slipped some acid. There was no consent. He ultimately committed suicide.
There are abuses in our banking industry. Would you propose banning all banking.
If there is a problem with testing in prisons, provide more oversight. An outright ban is probably unwise.
Advocate wrote:There are abuses in our banking industry. Would you propose banning all banking.
No I wouldn't. But I would ban any banking system that places the prosecution of banking fraud in the hands of the fraudulent bankers themselves. That would be the proper analogy to what was going on in federal prisons before Congress banned the practices in the 1970s.
The New York Times article in Miller's initial post (
webbed here) links to several of the studies conducted on the government's behalf -- the same government, mind you, who would have been in charge of prosecuting abuses, and who was also in charge of censoring the inmates' mail and phone calls. These studies give me no reason to believe they were odd outliers of some crazy individual agents. On the contrary, they give the appearence that the abuses were systematic, frequent, shameful, and hard for the victims to prosecute. I don't want these abuses reinstated. And I see no evidence at all why, as you put it, "the CIA thing is a bad example" for what was going on in those prisons.
In the hope that these sources are accessible generally, and not just to New York Times subscribers, here are their links to the studies in question.
Chemical Warfare Study by the U.S. Army (March 1969)
Dioxin Experiments for Dow Chemical (December 1964)
Radioactive isotope experiments (March 1966)
Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of Research in Behavioral Modification (August 1977)
Human drug testing by the CIA (August 1977)
I must say that it baffled me to read through the answers in this thread. It mystifies me, to name just one example, why Phoenix, who describes herself as a libertarian, would open America's prison system to major-league abuses by big government like that.
Phoenix32890 wrote:I think that people have "caught on" to the experimental abuses that were heaped upon certain groups in the past. I don't think that the government could get away with that crap today.
What makes you believe that? After all, they're getting away quite nicely with Guantanamo Bay so far. What makes you think that a government that can waterboard detainees without too much interference, can't feed radioactive isotopes to prisoners and lie to them about it?
I'm with thomas on this one.
It isn't just government agencies which can too easily fall outside of appropriate ethical bounds and full transparency. Business interests don't have a pristine record either when it comes to setting up testing methodologies which endanger the people being tested (IG Farben, Dow, etc). Obviously, certain segments of a population are much more likely to be targeted as guinea pigs or potential guinea pigs because of ethnicity, poverty, or some other "measure" which marginalizes them and places them down at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Prisoners or folks in mental hospitals clearly fit in there.
As computing power has increased, more of the predictive work is being done that way. So we are heading out of the woods, perhaps.
This is a serious subject. I for one am against such tests. Someone mentioned that those in favor of prisoner testing mention the 'increased medical benefits'. I wonder what those could be, becuase I don't see any.
I read most of the first post(not all, I skipped a lrge part of the middle) and this is fascinating. I also read the first of Thomas his links, regarding a report on an analysis about some sort of medical agent. Halfway through the medical mumbojumbo (which I skipped, on account of limited intelligence on my side and incredibly high density of medical words on it's side, but there ws a paragraph in the middle(page 10) or so that caught my eyes. It showed some of the basic demands made of any 'volunteers' for the project, and, listed amongst those were
- Minimal of 8 years of education
- The ability of performing 20 simple addition problems in a space of three minutes.
This IMHO seems to imply : People with reasonable logic capabilities and the capability to read and write. Probably not the world's brightest minds, but certainly not the slowest on the block either.
That of course has nothing to do with the level of coercion used, or the phrasing of the offer made to them.
I am somewhat paranoid in this, but I am sincerely opposed to this testing. I understand and agree that testing drugs is vital in order to be able to create new and better medicine. And they need volunteers to do so. But don't bring that into a system which is largely concealed from the 'public eye' and in which coercion can certainly be a significant factor in gaining 'volunteers'.
The danger lies in the callousnes many people profess to feel for the 'criminals' locked inside. It is that attitude which makes abuse much more likely and probably more cruel. The extreme consequence of that attitude are of course summed up by saying 'Nazi concentration camp doctors', people who can in my opinion easily be listed among the most vile torturers in those institutions.
The (wo)men inside the prisosn are also human. They have been locked up to pay for their crimes. Each and every individual there is unique in the combination of motive, crime, and repentance. Some are highly dangerous individuals, such as murderers or serial rapists. Others may be no more then thieves, caught one too many times but forced by drug habit or other form of moneydrain to revert to thievery. Some may even be innocent.
Allowing such business practices, in which millions of dollars can be made or lost, inside prisons means letting businessmen looking for ways to make money or cut expenses into an institution that is for the most part hidden from the public eye, run by the people who are part of the system that will prosecute malpractice if so found inside that system, and consisting of a population for which little public sympathy can be found and who can easily be coerced into participating against their own better judgement.
Those factors mixed together make a murky stew indeed, and it would not surprise me the least to find abuses and corruption within a few years. Much reward, little risk, and little 'consciential troubles'.