Mike Adorjan and Rose Ricciardelli’s edited collection, Engaging with Ethics in International Criminological Research, was recently published by Routledge. Of course, the book examines the likely suspects – ethical practices in relation to studies of policing, imprisonment and vulnerable populations. However, there are more unusual pieces on illuminating the Dark Net, carceral tours, and working in Hong Kong and China. My own contribution (Israel, 2016) examined the sad history of abuse of consent in research involving prisoners and prisons in the United States. It is an account of the exploitation of prisoners and a failure of criminologists to have any impact on the regulation and review of prison-based research.

Consent procedures have been created by research ethics regulators to protect research participants from abuse. In the United States, prisoners have been particularly vulnerable to the exploitative practices of researchers. However, contemporary consent procedures also stop researchers from uncovering institutional practices that exploit non-autonomous individuals. In doing so, research ethics regulation forms part of a broader strategy of self-protection established by public and private correctional services. Some scholars outside the United States have used covert research to evade prison protectionism. However, few have sought to link criminology’s understanding of state and state-corporate violence to the abuse of prisoners by researchers or extend their critique of protectionism to the work of research ethics regulators… I explore how requirements to obtain consent have been systematically evaded within prison-based research in the United States to the detriment of prisoners, but also how responses to scandal have led to the overprotection of institutions at the expense of prisoners’ ability to exercise autonomy, access justice, and benefit from the research process. Sadly, this chapter also demonstrates the apparent irrelevance of criminologists to the reform of regulation of research ethics in American prisons.

References

Israel, M (2016) A Short History of Coercive Practices: the Abuse of Consent in Research involving Prisoners and Prisons in the United States, in Adorjan, M and Ricciardelli, R (eds) Engaging with Ethics in International Criminological Research. London: Routledge. pp69-86. https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138938403

Contributor
Mark Israel is a senior consultant with AHRECS, adjunct professor of law and criminology at Flinders University and a visiting academic at The University of Western Australia.

This post may be cited as:
Israel M. (2016, 19 September) Abuse of prisoners in the United States. Research Ethics Monthly. Retrieved from: https://ahrecs.com/human-research-ethics/abuse-prisoners-united-states