The Captive Lab Rat: Human Medical Experimentation in the Carceral State

Abstract

Human medical experimentation upon captive, vulnerable subjects is not a relic of our American past. It is part of our present. The extensive history of medical experimentation on the disabled, the poor, the mentally ill, and the incarcerated has been little explored. Its continuance has been even less discussed, especially in the legal literature. The standard narrative of human medical experimentation ends abruptly in the 1970s, with the uncovering of the Tuskegee syphilis study. My research shows, however, that this narrative is incorrect and incomplete. The practice of experimenting on the captive and vulnerable persists. Our current approach to human medical experimentation disregards informed consent and privacy, allowing the pharmaceutical and medical industries to play an outsized role in shaping clinical research. The confusing amalgam of laws, rules, and codes loosely governing such research almost entirely fails to regulate or prevent patient mistreatment and abuse. Acquiring a true understanding of our system of mass incarceration requires us to unearth the hidden contours of our current experiments on the poor, the disabled, and the confined, and calls for a wholesale revision of the flawed legal and medical regime overseeing human medical experimentation.

Incarcerated individuals’ experiences of COVID-19 in the United States

“…Incarcerated individuals are likely less noticed within the larger debate about who should receive a vaccine and scholars have noted the complex ethical factors related to including incarcerated individuals in vaccine trials (Kronfli and Akiyama, 2020;Wang et al, 2020). These factors stem from a long history of medical exploitation of incarcerated populations and they complicate the ability of researchers to target public health initiatives in correctional spaces both in the USA and abroad (Ahalt et al, 2018;Ako et al, 2020;Appleman, 2020) and have resulted in decreased trust among some incarcerated individuals about medical treatments more broadly (Alagood, 2015). Given the explosive rates of transmission documented within correctional facilities across the USA, many experts are calling for incarcerated individuals to be vaccinated as quickly as possible (Siva, 2020).…”

COVID-19 Vaccine Refusal and Medical Distrust Held by Correctional Officers

“…Physicians who can tackle these challenges are difficult to recruit due in part to concerns about career advancement, burnout, and job satisfaction [ 38 ]. Finally, the history of carceral systems failing to deliver an equivalence of care [ 39 ] and engaging in experimentation on vulnerable subjects [ 40 , 41 ] may not instill confidence in the current medical establishment, neither for incarcerated adults nor the frontline security staff who bear witness to those realities.…”

“…Second, US prisons are disproportionately populated by Black men who have many reasons to distrust state agents [ 9 , 28 , 40 , 42 ]. Recent estimates report that more than 40% of incarcerated adults are Black men [ 43 ], they come to custody with poorer health status (relative to men of other ethnoracial categories) [ 30 ], have likely confronted routine criminal legal system intrusion as the most policing-surveilled subjects in the US [ 10 , 44 , 45 , 46 ], and they are the largest proportion of US residents who are lethally brutalized by police [ 47 ].…”