Conducting ethics research in prison: why, who, and what?

Abstract

Why devote an issue of an ethics journal to prison medicine? Why conduct ethics research in prisons in the first place? In this editorial, we explain why prison ethics research is vitally important and illustrate our argument by introducing and briefly discussing the fascinating papers in this special issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (JBI). Ethics is often regarded as a theoretical discipline. This is in large part due to ethics’ origin as a type of moral philosophy, which is frequently associated with armchair theorising about principles and virtues and seems to have little connection with the “real world.” However, medical ethics and bioethics are increasingly becoming empirical disciplines. The “empirical turn” in ethics has led to an explosion in field research in ethics that uses the empirical methods of sociology, anthropology, and the health sciences to investigate a variety of ethical issues. The results of such research are often of much more value than purely theoretical discourses about ethics. The context of the penal system and incarceration is a particularly fertile field of investigation for empirical ethics. There is a vast literature on the ethics of punishment, including detailed dissections of the concepts of retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation. However, identifying the ethical issues that prisoners and prison staff face (including guards and administrators, but also health care professionals) requires a unique set of approaches to navigate the difficult-to-access prison environment. Immense energy is needed to gain access to the prison setting in order to gather data from prisoners and prison personnel. When conducting research in prison, researchers need to ensure that prisoners are willingly volunteering to participate, without any undue pressure or unrealistic expectations from researchers. Moreover, prison staff grapple on a daily basis with the conflict between the duty to care for prisoners and the duty to protect others. Understanding staff perspectives about the discrepancies they encounter between their professional responsibilities and caring for prisoners can be highly charged, as staff may often find themselves trying to reconcile opposing obligations or fulfilling one obligation at the expense of another. The lived experiences of prisoners and prison staff members and their attitudes towards different ethical issues that challenge them thus must be gathered using face-to-face interviews (and surveys) that employ carefully designed questions to address highly sensitive issues in an indepth but non-threatening manner. As well as providing highly significant data for the field of ethics and prison studies, the results of such research can lead to procedural changes in prison and also enfranchise prisoners by giving them the ability to express their opinions and affect their environment. Through such research, the general public and policy-makers also may come to Bioethical Inquiry (2014) 11:275–278 DOI 10.1007/s11673-014-9559-7