Supermaxes are technologically advanced prisons designed to keep individuals in long-term solitary confinement, structurally eliminating all physical, human contact for months, years, and sometimes decades at a time. Supermax designers and prison administrators explain that supermax prisons contain “the worst of the worst prisoners”—those too violent and dangerous to live in a general prison population. This article explores and challenges the legally and publicly accepted idea that supermaxes control violence. Drawing on interviews with and the writings of former supermax prisoners, (...) I document the often-invisible ways supermax prisoners experience violence. I argue supermaxes should be viewed not just as tools of violence control, but as tools of violence production. Supermaxes are a novel and uniquely modern form of state violence, and their legal and ethical implications should be reconsidered. (shrink)

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Paul Christopher and colleagues describe a study of why prisoners choose to enroll in clinical research. The article represents an important methodological and policy contribution to the literature on prisoner participation in research and medical experimentation. Given the methodological and ethical debates to which this research seeks to make an empirical contribution, the careful manner in which the study was conducted and the transparency with which the authors describe the research is especially (...) noteworthy. In sum, I respect the research steps the authors took. However, I disagree with their conclusions about both the absence of coercion for prisoner clinical research participants and the merits of applying risk-benefit models to govern prisoner research participation. (shrink)

Covid‐19 has infected thousands and killed hundreds in prisons, jails, and immigration detention facilities across the United States. Responding to this crisis, leading medical researchers have called for expanding opportunities for people in prison to participate in vaccine trials. These calls, like current regulations, focus on individualized risk assessments around consent, coercion, and harm, while ignoring the unnaturalness of deprivation conditions in U.S. prisons. We need new frameworks of analysis that refocus on structural, rather than individual, risk assessments. Integrating structural (...) perspectives—including skepticism of claims of scarcity, avoidance of representational distortions, and attention to institutional agency—into our existing, overly individualistic frameworks might permit the design of more ethical research projects involving people who are incarcerated. Still, the unnatural deprivations of incarceration might be so great that research subjects might need to be removed from prison entirely in order to ethically participate in research. (shrink)