It is important to mention that inducing birth before term increases the incidence of respiratory problems in the baby (beyond the abhorrent ethical issues).
> It is important to mention that inducing birth before term increases the incidence of respiratory problems in the baby (beyond the abhorrent ethical issues).
Since this is so highly voted, maybe also note that the key is "before term", which is not the case as far as I can tell in the article.
Not that I don't find the practice repugnant, but let's not steer off into outright FUD when blasting our moral outrage.
We also don't have any medical history on these patients. Maybe it's policy, maybe they just heard it that way. It's a risk/benefit ratio; if the mother hits certain criteria for pregnancy-induced hypertension or (worse) preeclampsia, the only definitive therapy is delivery.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying there's not enough information to be sure.
Certainly. But what we do also know is all three women in this article consented to the release of their medical records, and the newspaper's review of those records did not find any condition warranting induction. And while journalistic failures of fact-checking, even egregious ones, have occurred, this is one that could be so easily verified with even the most cursory look. It doesn't require an obstetrician or physician, hell, an EMT with less than 200 hours of medical education is taught that, as you say, one of the biggest risks in late term pregnancy is preeclampsia. Even a quick Google search would say as much. Given that this is the core of the story, it would take Herculean amounts of Wikipedia-esque "Assume Good Faith" with respect to the Arizona DOC having concerns that warranted these interventions that could be discovered with less than a minute of review of their medical records.
Also vile, that the women were then billed for the cost of their inductions, despite them being in custody. Arizona seems to want it both ways (which is unsurprising, given that they have a pretty horrific history in such things - until last year, prisoners in active delivery were still required to be handcuffed to beds and still kept in shackles, through birth itself) - you're a ward of the state (which generally _doesn't_ remove medical autonomy), so we'll make your medical decisions, and then we'll bill you for our choices.
It seems to me like this is a crime. Why are there not more formalized procedures and criminal penalties for those in the justice system for the state choosing to turn a blind eye to documented crimes within its ranks?
> NaphCare spokesperson said one incarcerated patient was induced “per hospital specialist’s orders as a maternal-fetal safety precaution due to a pre-existing condition.”
Irrespective of indication you still need informed consent for a medical act like an induction (unless the patient is unable to consent). The 'against their will' bit is the critical part.
My observations of Arizona's approach to criminal justice leads me to believe it's mostly a make-work program. Many of my passengers were deteriorated by their time in Arizona's jails and prisons. While there are a few violent people who need to be segregated, most people do not magically get fixed by being locked up. Read somewhere that people begin to develop psychological problems after 7 days of imprisonment. Many of my passengers had cases of PPSD: Post-Prison Stress Disorder.
My one passenger exemplifies the futility of Arizona's system of criminal justice (link in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34157865 ). He only had the one charge (drug paraphernalia - it was supposedly someone else's pipe) from... 2013 or so. He just can't get off probation because he bails himself out and can't show up for his next court date. I think he's terrified of being killed by the jail. His diabetes is uncontrolled, and the jail implements a starvation diet (which is why I asked /u/ddtaylor if the food was adequate in his AMA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34158365 ). His blood sugar is dropped by the forced time-release insulin injections, but the jail routine doesn't allow for him to check his blood sugar level or provide adequate amounts of edible food.
Three of my female passengers were definitely harmed by 'justice'. One got sent to prison for 5 years for having shared a single opioid pill with a friend (circa 2009), another had substance abuse problems that she couldn't shake.
This AZCentral article talks about Arizona's minimum-security prison in Perryville. My passenger who got 'moody' at menopause was sent there for her 3rd DUI. She tried to stay sober after being released, but then life happened and she hadn't learned how to cope. She's doing fine now, no thanks to her time getting 'corrected'.
I have all my notes - ought to write a book.
This article says the babies are separated from their mothers after 72 hours, as provided for by Arizona's version of a 'Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act'. But ... 72 hours is not enough to get a child off to a good start in life. Now that we have GPS trackers, there's no reason to not create a more compassionate system of supervision for mothers in the system. If not for them, for their children.
Congressman Thomas Massie (MIT Alumni) said he'd read all the quote-tweets of his query: "If you were in Congress, what would your priorities be for 2023?". I put a little effort into a thread about the predicaments of abundance and how Arizona's biggest job project is its criminal justice system: https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1609412832227110914
If you ever do write the book- or even a blog(edit- read your taxiwars blog- thanks for being a great and compassionate human), please drop a link I'd love some more perspectives.
I think we need to stop the office of Sheriff being voted-in public office. It makes beholden politicians and schemers Sheriffs and they have way too much power to be just some random person with no insight or knowledge about laws or protecting the peace, or how to deal with incarcerations.
All law enforcement have the same dilemma: they're given a job with only a few tools. I had to call 911 a few times over my 3.5 years in my taxi. They were as helpful as they could be, but the machine does not always serve humanity's best interests.
If you add an email to your profile I'll send you updates - https://relay.firefox.com/ or some other forwarder would work.
To save others a click, this is about artificially starting the birth of a baby, not about a 13th-amendment prison slavery complaint. Which is similarly vile, but another topic.
> "They induce us all now so that we don't go into labor in prison."
I'd be curious what the power structure looks like between the prison medical staff and these women's primary care providers/obstetricians. At some point, a small number of women will need advice from a doctor that if they haven't begun labor naturally, they should get it induced. But definitely not universally 39 weeks, and definitely not to someone who primarily answers to the prison rather than to the patient.
Inducing every pregnant woman for scheduling convenience is a terrible human rights violation if you place anything close to a reasonable value on the health of the mother and the baby compared to the convenience of prison guards. The baby will be ready when the baby's ready, an inability to schedule that to something tighter than a 3-4 week window is just a fact of biology that the state needs to accept.
Prison medical staff are not obstetricians. They're usually family practitioners. And while old-time family doctors used to deliver babies, most newer grads have minimal experience because the astronomical cost of malpractice insurance for delivering one baby means they just won't ever do it. General medical issues, not childbirth.
In my experience, prisons usually have a contract with one hospital or system in the state to care for issues too complex for prison healthcare.
No, sorry, it's a summary and a quote from the original article. I merely tried to distinguish between "Inducing birth labor" and "Inducing slave labor," as the parent poster seemed confused by the ambiguity; the Wikipedia article merely tells you which of these two commonly known forms of induced labor the original article is focused on.
"Labor induction is a medical procedure that stimulates childbirth and delivery. It can be done with pharmaceutical or non-pharmaceutical methods and is estimated to be used in about 25% of pregnant women in Western countries. Medical reasons for inducing labor include postterm pregnancy, intrauterine fetal growth restriction, health risks to the mother, premature rupture of the membranes, premature termination of the pregnancy, fetal death in utero, twin pregnancy after 38 weeks, and certain health conditions in the mother. Methods of inducing labor include medication, mechanical or physical approaches such as artificial rupture of membranes or membrane sweeping, and intrauterine catheters. Medications used for induction include prostaglandins, synthetic oxytocin, and mifepristone. Non-pharmaceutical methods include acupuncture, herbal remedies, and sexual intercourse. Inducing labor at or after term is generally believed to improve outcomes for newborns and reduce the number of cesarean sections."
(I did not proof read any of this, take with a grain of salt)
In a way. In Furman v. Georgia, the interpretation of "cruel and unusual" led to a four-part test ([1]):
- The "essential predicate" is "that a punishment must not by its severity be degrading to human dignity", especially torture.
- "A severe punishment that is obviously inflicted in wholly arbitrary fashion."
- "A severe punishment that is clearly and totally rejected throughout society."
- "A severe punishment that is patently unnecessary."
In a real way, cruel but banal is permitted under this test. For instance solitary confinement and slavery, the latter of which is expressly permitted for prisoners under the 13th amendment.
This is of course why the US penal system needs wholesale reform.
I think a lot of our current practices in the prison system fall under "cruel and unusual punishment". A large segment of Americans are obsessed with punishment and at every opportunity they push for harsher sentences and the cruel treatment for prisoners.
I don't think we can truly reform the justice system until we deal with the culture that brought us to this point. It's the cruelty of the voters that holds us back from large scale changes, and the cruelty of the employees working within the prison system that enable it at a local level.
They probably want to make sure that the women have actual medical care when delivering, rather than having a baby when nobody is around.
I still think it's pretty awful, but it may be an attempt to be less awful given the awful state of prison medical care, which is generally non-existent.
See, e.g. that guy who lost his dick to preventable cancer due to not being able to see anybody about it in time:
> They probably want to make sure that the women have actual medical care when delivering, rather than having a baby when nobody is around.
there should never be a time when someone we've locked in a cage is in need of medical care when "nobody is around". Prisons should be staffed at all times and prisoners should have ready access to adequate healthcare whenever the need arises. That may mean prisons in remote locations need more onsite medical staff, but nobody should have to go without access to medical care.
When the state takes away someone's freedom and locks them up, the state assumes responsibility for their care and their needs and it's long past time we started insisting they do their job.
Great idea in theory, but there's just not enough obstetric practice at a typical prison for a doctor to retain their skills; you can't just do it once a month, and to be accredited you have to have an available operating room on the labor and delivery floor at all times - so if you only have two OR's, you can't start a section in the second one until the first has been cleaned. And we see women who aren't prisoners who come in 6 cm dilated after an hour or so of labor and deliver within 30 minutes. 1.5 hours is a really short time to arrange medical prisoner transport and get them to a hospital.
Specialist medical care is really not that easy to do outside relatively urban areas, and people don't generally like living near prisons.
I'm not sure what the solution really is, short of a small locked ward that's attached to a real hospital where they can spend every day after 38 weeks. But that gets expensive fast.
> short of a small locked ward that's attached to a real hospital where they can spend every day after 38 weeks. But that gets expensive fast.
Yeah, I'd guess if they're too far from a hospital to be safe it'd be best to keep them at a hospital until the baby is born. They might not need an entire ward for that though. Just handcuffing them to a bed and posting a guard outside their room should be fine for most inmates. Even that won't be cheap, but it shouldn't be too often someone pregnant ends up behind bars.
The analog would be forcing him to see a specialist against his will. Another poster pointed out that the hospital said they were required to do this to protect one of the mother's health.
I don't know whether that was true, but then again, I don't know whether anything said in this story is true or not.
I'm surprised that you feel that strongly on induction of labor which is routine, very safe and used frequently. My wife was induced to help reduce the need for emergency c section.
Induction is mostly boring (you spend a long time hooked up to an IV).
My induction was invasive, uncomfortable, long, and I definitely had mixed feelings about being pressured into it by doctors. If I had NO choice in it, it would have absolutely been traumatic. Might have been boring for you but maybe ask your wife how she would have felt if she had no choice in it.
> I'm surprised that you feel that strongly on induction of labor which is routine, very safe and used frequently. My wife was induced to help reduce the need for emergency c section.
Presumably because it's being done without their consent.
> But all three women said they were told by prison medical providers they were being induced because it was a policy of the Arizona Department of Corrections for all pregnant incarcerated women, not due to their individual conditions. The women say they were given no explanation for the policy, but they believe it is being implemented to reduce liability for the prison system.
They are wards of the state which means the state is legally required to care for them to the best of it's ability.
If you are a prisoner and want to die of eg cancer instead of seeking treatment that is not an option generally up to you. The state will treat you, whether or not you want it.
If the prison can argue that the induction leads to meaningfully better health outcomes (and induction frequently does!) then that is the end of the matter.
Your freedom to make subpar decisions or have deeply personal choices (eg a water birth or use a birthing center) is curtailed when you are in prison.
> They are wards of the state which means the state is legally required to care for them to the best of it's ability.
The prisons aren't caring for them to the best of their ability — that's the whole problem.
See also:
> It is important to mention that inducing birth before term increases the incidence of respiratory problems in the baby (beyond the abhorrent ethical issues).
You're moving the goal posts, now. The *vast* majority of prisoners are not dangerous.
Further, the article referenced specifically mentions people being induced prior to the safe time to induce labor.
Further, further, in the context of the existing prison system and human rights violations inside prisons (and *all* humans have human rights. This isn't "freedom of speech", these are even more base than that), this is yet another monstrous example of harming people in the State's care in prisons.
The article cites 3 people, two at 39 weeks and one at 37. Term is 35 (but inducing that early isn't ideal, 37 is the earliest you want to go if you can choose).
Those are all term and all very safe.
Most prisoners are dangerous. The idea that you got busted for an 1oz of weed and went to prison isn't aligned to reality. If you are in prison (not jail) then you went through the full sentancing dance and weren't eligible for a supervised release or a program. That usually means you either keep committing crime or did serious crime. You didn't steal a bicycle.
Conflating natural delivery (where the body has decided, for whatever reason, that it is now time to deliver the child) with induction is not an appropriate comparison.
> 37 is the earliest you want to go if you can choose).
I would be willing to wager money that you are not going to find ANY obstetrician in the US who will induce at 37 weeks for no other reason than familial "choice" ("elective induction"). In fact ACOG specifically says that it should not happen without medical basis.
> The idea that you got busted for an 1oz of weed and went to prison isn't aligned to reality.
Perhaps you should read more about prison in Arizona, and of law enforcement officials like Sheriff Arpaio.
> It is grotesquely expensive, unduly punitive, discriminatory against minorities (especially against Latinos) and does little to actually keep our communities safe or cut down on recidivism.
> About 1 out of every 40 Latino men in Arizona are currently in prison. Even more are currently in the various other phases of the criminal justice system (pretrial release, jail, probation, parole, warrant status etc.). Arizona prison population is more than 40 percent Latino, but Latino’s only make up about 27 percent of our overall population.
> Our legislature is to blame for these insane prison statistics because it allows itself to be influenced by Arizona prosecutors to scuttle any prison reform initiatives. Prosecutors have a powerful lobby called Arizona Prosecuting Attorney’s Advisory Council (“APAAC”) which it uses to influence the legislative process to its own benefit. In the last few years alone, Arizona’s prosecutors have opposed bail reform, sentencing reform, and lighter drug sentences while supporting stiffer penalties for a number of offenses.
You may recognize APAAC - it's one of the sources you quoted with reference to "prison is full of dangerous and violent offenders". When I first read it it sounded like a District Attorney's campaign speech, and no wonder - it's their lobbying organization, that has opposed each and every reform bill in AZ in the last 24 years.
> You didn't steal a bicycle.
Or of an Arizona man convicted of several thefts in the space of three months from yards, sheds, all agreed by the state to be non-violent offenses, and only a couple involved entering any structure at all... his sentence? Two hundred and ninety two years. What did he steal that earned this sentence? A drill, flashlight, telescope, credit card.
Arizona also repeatedly sentences people sentences, up to life, with parole. Including plea bargains. And then it abolished the concept of parole. For nearly 300 people, this means now the state has "changed the terms of the deal or sentencing after the fact". (https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...)
Your attitude of "most of these people are dangerous criminals" is also not entirely aligned with reality.
> The vast majority of prisoners are not dangerous.
Wow, what a divergence from reality.
The vast majority of prisoners are dangerous. This myth that the US incarcerates prisoners not because we have a huge criminal class, but because we just like locking people up, is one of the most inane talking points on the left, one easily disproven with a few seconds of googling, and yet people keep repeating it.
Percentage of criminals in AZ that have committed violent felonies or are repeat felony offenders: 94.2%
of these, the number who are considered "violent offenders": 65.4%
One of the many mistakes made by people is looking only at Federal statistics (About 10% of all inmates are held by the Federal government, the rest are held by state governments). In general, many people have a very difficult time grasping federalism, and don't understand that the Federal legal code focuses on interstate offenses and other offenses that states can't handle. E.g. not things like violence or robbery, but say, embezzlement, trafficking across state lines, securities fraud, etc. The FBI/Justice Department do not get involved in most violent crime.
The next part of the deception is to look only at Federal prison statistics and say "hey, there's not a lot murderers here -- we are mostly locking people up for trafficking things across state lines!" -- and just hope that your listener is too unaware to say "wait a minute -- are you giving me federal prison statistics in a debate about crime? What is wrong with you?!"
I would also note the delicious irony that the same people who complain about "white collar crime" (e.g. property crime) being given a less stringent sentence than "blue collar crime" (e.g. violence) are the most vocal ones insisting that we shouldn't be incarcerating non-violent offenders.
You have to decide whether robbery/fraud is something that deserves a prison sentence and then be consistent -- not calling for prison for some CEO when you are in corporate-hating mode, and then demanding release of non-violent offenders when you are weeping after watching Les Miserables.
The irony of complaining about cherry picking statistics while yourself cherry picking statistics is astounding. If you combine federal and state prisons about 40% of prisoners are reported to be in prison for violent offenses (in 2019 according to statistics prepared by the Bureau of Justice Statistics). So, yes, the majority of prisoners are in fact imprisoned for non-violent offenses. But this is not the end of the story, there is no universal standard for what is considered a "violent crime" so states are free to set their own standards (often under considerable political pressure from the local legislature). Some states consider any theft involving drugs or even embezzlement as violent crimes. Beyond this, these statistics are collected and maintained by the same institutions which have a direct monetary incentive to over report violent crime in order to obtain increased funding. This is a clear conflict of interest.
But even if violent offenders were the majority, violent offenders in general are, perhaps surprisingly, less likely to reoffend. This is because the best predictors of violence in the general population are age and secondarily gender. The overwhelming amount of violent crime is committed by male adolescents and young men. While we may be fascinated with macabre cases where serial killers and other extreme offenders were released, these are outliers. We should not base policy decisions on our emotional responses to crime but on measurable outcomes.
> This myth that the US incarcerates prisoners not because we have a huge criminal class,
The US has a “huge criminal class” because of its criminalization, incarceration, and disenfranchisement (not just voting, but more general engagement in society) practices, which grew up initially as a concious, direct replacement for chattel slavery.
The size of the criminal class is not the trigger for the policy, but its objective. Initially out of racial animus and desire for commercial exploitation, including via the (now closed by federal statute despite the absence of a Constitutional prohibition, formally, though many would disagree that it is actually eliminated in practice given the nature of prison labor policies) penal servitude loophole in the 13th Amendment, but now the institutional interests of the politically powerful law enforcement—prison—industrial complex in protecting and expanding its own role is layered on top of those interests.
> Percentage of criminals in AZ that have committed violent felonies or are repeat felony offenders: 94.2%
You can be a repeat felony offender with only non-violent drug offenses to your name. Explain to us how multiple drug possession felonies makes you "dangerous" to society?
We're a few interactions into this debate. I want to clarify, are we discussing what is legal or what is morally just? Because those are far from the same. I personally would rather discuss what is morally justifiable, since that is a more important standard.
> We're a few interactions into this debate. I want to clarify, are we discussing what is legal or what is morally just? Because those are far from the same. I personally would rather discuss what is morally justifiable, since that is a more important standard.
Who's morals? Yours? His? What makes your morals better than his? Why do you think your bar for "morally just" is the correct one?
Arguing morals is pointless - it's all subjective.
The best you can do is argue whether the rules are being adhered to or not.
Second best is to argue for addition or removal of rules.
I think there are many examples in history where discussing morals was more important than discussing the letter of law. When women couldn't vote, was "what's right" or "what's legal" the more important question?
You speak as though the law is not subjective, but legal rules are ultimately subjective just like moral rules. Was the holocaust legal? Most people when faced with the holocaust think "who cares what the law was, this is morally wrong". I'm sure there's some arguments out there that the holocaust was in fact illegal, and that's a fine academic argument about the law to have, but at the end of the day the people in power did what they did, and so I guess the legality of it all wasn't that important.
Arguing morals is very important.
And so back to my point, the more interesting question is "what is morally right and how do we want to structure our society in the future?" But if one side is arguing about morals and the other side is arguing about legalities, and they don't realize they're talking about different things, then it's hard to make progress.
> Second best is to argue for addition or removal of rules.
And to answer your comment, arguing morals is pointless because there is no evidence that your morals are, in fact, any better than what you are arguing against.
None.
Arguing without evidence is pointless. You're simply saying "My opinion is better!", but in a more sophisticated manner.
Basically, you're doing the highbrow equivalent of "My God Is The Real God Only".
> Second best is to argue for addition or removal of rules.
What would we base our arguments for adding or removing rules upon? Financial incentives? Upon what will we base our assumption that financial incentives are important? Logical arguments are great, but after going down a layer or two we find there are only moral arguments. They are not pointless.
The above was going to be my first response, but then I took a step back and tried to address your argument as a whole.
I'm guessing you haven't spent much time considering moral philosophy, but even simplified toy examples, like the Trolley Problem quickly move past purely logical arguments and are firmly in the subjective realm. We won't be able to have a philosophical discussion here, but if you want I'd recommend the book "How to Be Perfect" as a relatively fun read on the subject and a good introduction.
> What would we base our arguments for adding or removing rules upon?
In practice we use a lot of things to attempt to convince a population to be for/against a law. We do it based on emotion (i.e. how much outrage/empathy/fear can be mustered on this particular crime), a sense of fairness sometimes.
But almost all the arguments using morals are poor ones - the against argument for female bodily autonomy is argued using morals, for example, and it didn't work.
Same-sex marriages weren't won by making moral arguments inasmuch the other side lost by making moral arguments.
When you see an argument based on morals, replace the word "morals" with "my god says so", because in practice that is all it is.
> if you want I'd recommend the book "How to Be Perfect" as a relatively fun read on the subject and a good introduction.
Thanks, I'll have a look for it. I'm afraid it seems that I haven't convinced you that arguing from morals is pointless, but I'm going to try one more time :-)
But, I respect your position, and it is not an uncommon one.
... so, parting thought ...
How can you continue an argument using your moral position as support, when the other party can dismiss your argument by saying that your moral position is inferior to his?
I think it's disingenuous to imply that it's impossible to separate legality from morality or ethics.
Saying "women shouldn't be forced to have medical procedures performed against their consent" is not just arguing about whose opinion is better. You are missing the forest for the trees.
> Saying "women shouldn't be forced to have medical procedures performed against their consent" is not just arguing about whose opinion is better.
Who's arguing that? I already made my position on that point clear: I think it's repugnant.
This thread (if you read back upthread) is literally only about the following sentence:
> I personally would rather discuss what is morally justifiable, since that is a more important standard.
But, while we're here anyway, I may as well ask why is the argument "women shouldn't have medical procedures performed against their consent"?
Why isn't the argument "people shouldn't have medical procedures against their consent"? Surely the notion that everyone should be treated equally is a morally superior position, so why focus on the less-moral argument?
It is important to mention that inducing birth before term increases the incidence of respiratory problems in the baby (beyond the abhorrent ethical issues).
There are legitimate reasons to need to induce labor (certainly not in every case). It’s not performed for exclusively trivial reasons like circumcision for example.
To the best of its ability would mean not inducing at 37 weeks, which _increases_ problems.
Induction at 38 weeks or below is _not_ recommended due to poorer outcomes absent a compelling reason.
The solution here is to ensure appropriate medical care, not to say "we can't and won't provide that, so this is what we're going to do, and if you don't like it, maybe you shouldn't be a criminal, and if this has negative health implications for your child, well, then, maybe it shouldn't have had a criminal for a mother".
I am unsure of whether this comment is meant to justify arbitrary human rights abuses against prisoners on the basis of their status as such, or simply to state that prisoners' human rights are indeed commonly abused. Could you please clarify your position in this regard?
If the latter, I think you will find that it does not really need to be said. Most people around here are likely familiar with the abuses of the carceral state.
> If the prison can argue that the induction leads to meaningfully better health outcomes (and induction frequently does!) then that is the end of the matter
The prison doesn't even _have_ an argument, they're denying the truth. So even by your unbelievably-low bar, they're failing.
If you are in prison and have a serious tooth infection (and that can be fatal though rarely) then yes, the state can absolutely force you to have a root canal.
The state only has to show that the care is reasonably required for your meaningful health.
> If you are in prison and have a serious tooth infection (and that can be fatal though rarely) then yes, the state can absolutely force you to have a root canal.
This isn't really comparable; it would be like the prison forcibly removing your teeth because you may get a serious tooth infection and they don't want to be liable for that.
Well, not only are you evil, even worse: you're wrong. The only scenario in which the state can compel you to receive medical treatment while in prison is to ensure the safety of staff or other inmates (e.g. they can force a violent inmate to take anti-psychotics or force inmates to receive vaccinations to prevent the spread of disease). Otherwise, prisoners have the same rights to informed consent as you and I do.
At this point it's worth pointing out that this user has conspicuously ignored this and other replies that point out that, beyond any moral qualms, the user is woefully uninformed about the medical rights of prisoners. Dunning-Kruger strikes again.
Nothing in this contradicts what I said. Prisoners have a right to informed consent which can be removed in certain circumstances, specifically to ensure the safety of staff or other inmates. You made a much broader categorical claim that prisoners simply do not have the right to informed consent and you are wrong. For example, here is a document from Tennessee outlining the scenarios in which an inmate can and cannot refuse care: https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/correction/documents/113-5...
I'd suggest doing some actual research into the relevant case law, e.g. Washington v Harper, instead of just googling until you find something that can be misinterpreted to support your position. While prison administrators have wide leeway to force treatment they are still required to show that it's necessary, either for safety reasons or because the treatment was mandated as part of the sentence of the inmate.
> receive vaccinations to prevent the spread of disease
Here, my county and the one adjacent have two Sheriffs who are twin brothers, and are vehemently anti mask, etc. (Actually, one has since lost his bid for re-election).
Their attitude to the jails under their control was to _refuse_ to allow inmates to mask, even in dorm holding cells, and to refuse to vaccinate any prisoner against COVID who was in custody.
Tangential, but since Arizona passed a law recognizing personhood at conception, it would seem they'd be guilty of unlawful detainment of the fetus if they keep pregnant women as prisoners.
The article says the prisons are probably doing it for "liability reasons." Given the horrible state of medical care in prison in general, they're probably trying to make sure that labor happens with doctors available, rather than spontaneously when nobody might be around to provide any medical help at all.
The hospital said they're doing it to protect the mother's health due to complications. So it's more like they're trying to avoid making things even worse.
It is horribly lacking, and that should be fixed, but trying to make sure her baby is delivered safely isn't really reducible to "reducing costs."
It's lacking because they aren't paying for an on-call or easily accessible doctor; or for the staff to be able to respond sufficiently quickly to an emergency where they would be able to see the concern and then get a doctor there quickly.
In both cases, part of the solution is to pay more / have better employees (that you get, in part, by paying more). That's why I argue it's "reducing costs". It's a banal and boring explanation; but, most evil is.
If we're gonna make ridiculous strawmen like that, then these mothers should be guilty of unlawful detainment for not letting the fetuses out of their wombs as soon as they were viable
It's not really a ridiculous strawman, it's more indicative of how ridiculous these personhood laws are. Here in Arizona (I am here), you cannot get health insurance for fetuses, nor claim as a dependent. I would expect traffic tickets for using the HOV lanes (similar to the Texas woman doing so a few months ago).
This is all political theater and it does nothing for actual life. Not to mention that 9 of the 10 worst states for maternal and fetal morbidity are red states enacting policies like this.
I agree but this found all over the law in many instances around age / birth.
In states where personhood is established at birth, you can still be found guilty of murder if your actions result in the death of a unborn person outside the limited exemption of medical abortion.
Not a bad idea, in all honesty. Conservative states are already leaning towards this, and it's something that every reader on this forum should generally support.
The OP was saying the idea that personhood begins at conception is a poor model of reality. They are suggesting that we are picking and choosing attributes of personhood to meet our preconceived conclusions around abortion rather than making a rational assessment. They are falsifying the premise by showing its natural extension as applied to this situation.
> You may as well accuse mothers themselves as unlawfully imprisoning their children against their will, either born or unborn.
A kindergarden teacher is not "guilty of unlawful detainment" when they stop a toddler from wandering out of the classroom. A mother is not "guilty of unlawful detainment" by housing their young child.
OP has not made some profound statement about the personhood of fetuses. They have stumbled into the murky waters of children's civil rights and flailed about. Whether a fetus is a person or not makes no difference to their hypothetical scenario.
It's hard to quantify the benefits of prisons, since they primarily prevent the incarcerated from committing further crimes. The harms of prisons, on the other hand, actually happen. TFA here being just one horrific example, but one doesn't have to look far to find examples of inmate abuse either in the present or historically.
So "Should we abolish prisons?" boils down to "are the very real harms of prisons still less than the theoretical harms prevented by prisons?" I'm not confident about either side of that argument but it's worth considering.
I advocate for building more low-level prisons because they're vastly cheaper and better suited for people who've committed minor crimes. I get more pushback on this from the anti-prison crowd than when I advocate for more maximum security prisons.
It has started to feel like they're for anything that makes prisons unworkable, even if it kills prisoners in the meantime and leaves others on the street, than reforming the system because they wouldn't be able to argue against a humane and proportional prison.
Prisons suck but they suck less than it did without them. Without alternative ways to handle the preexisting problems prison abolition is a step backwards.
I doubt they are more against building "low-level prisons" than they are against building "maximum security prisons" -- they are just against building prisons, period.
If you build prisons, they will be filled. When you have lots of hammers, everything is nails.
My belief is that we don't need to keep building new prisons and if we invested in addressing people's basic needs and had better mental and healthcare we'd see less crime. Incarceration is an expensive way to not really solve the problem of crime.
Even if we assumed the interventions would work we have a current wave of low-to-medium level crime and we need a current solution for people who are being arrested 100+ times per year, and/or avoid all arrest by staying under unwritten minimums of damage. If dealt with they have to be put somewhere and if the default is to build maximum security prisons, that's what we'll do, or maybe just over-stuff the ones we have making them more dangerous.
If we did build low-level prisons we'd not only have a solution for the interim, but it'd be an improvement over current conditions. I think they'd not only handle the new crime, but could pull non-violent offenders from the existing prisons as well - reducing overcrowding and better handling the actual danger the prisoners pose.
> Incarceration is an expensive way to not really solve the problem of crime.
Sure, and fire trucks don't solve fire. But both are part of the solution.
> addressing people's basic needs
What about crime that's not caused by poverty or need, like rape? There'll always be a need to lock people up.
I share the goal of lowering that number but I can't see how it gets to zero.
> and had better mental and healthcare we'd see less crime
Prisons aren't alone in not working as intended - that award goes to most one-size-fits-all government programs.
Those interventions aren't actually likely to solve the problem. They'll misdiagnose the problem, pick a horrible solution, and fail to execute properly anyways. I've seen this first hand with drug policy and addiction treatment. Our over-funded system is the most dangerous place to be. An addict on the streets of some poor city in the middle of nowhere has better outcomes.
We've built lots and lots of prisons. The USA has more incarcerated people per capita than anywhere else on the planet.
Certainly we still have problems with violence and other kinds of harm done by people to people.
If you think building more prisons will solve these problems (which are probably various and not uniform or monolithic), when we already incarcerate more people than literally anywhere else on the planet, I think the burden of proof is on you to show that building more prisons will somehow help. It doesn't seem obvious to me. As you say, building more prisons does not seem to me to be an intervention likely to help, as demonstrated by our experience so far.
We've currently got minor criminals in maximum security because there's a lack of low-level capacity. Simply building enough minimum security cells for the minor criminals already in the system would be more appropriate treatment, would aid rehabiliation, and would reduce overcrowding of actually dangerous prisoners. Further, the cost of incarceration scales with the security required, this would save money.
In addition, there'd now be a reasonable punishment for small crimes and we could start punishing people who now fall through the cracks before they become a problem.
> I think the burden of proof is on you to show that building more prisons will somehow help.
You're not using them correctly. Stop breaking the system by putting mental patients and minor criminals in prisons. Stop overcrowding, underfunding, letting sadists be guards, etc, etc, and then see if they work.
Besides, I'm not saying more, I'm saying new and appropriate ones. You can repurpose the old ones once prisoners are transferred.
This is why people are more against minimum-security prisons than maximum; minimum security prisons are an easy and obvious win and it hurts the "all prisons bad" narrative by showing the options aren't just gulags or nothing.
Could you please stop posting flamebait and/or ideological battle comments to HN? You've been doing this repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we have to ban such accounts (regardless of what they happen to be battling for or against).
So prisons can do whatever elective surgeries they like on their inmates? Why not do lobotomy on trouble prisoners? Sterilize all prisoners to avoid new pregnancies? Tattoo their prison number on them? Prisons could get some extra revenue by signing their inmates up for dangerous medical trials that drug companies are having issues recruiting for?
First of all: so what? People still have a right to decide whether or not to do a surgery regardless of whether a "specialist" recommends it. Prisoners still have rights.
Second of all: That was the reason according to the PR folks for the successor company to the private medical company that did this. Companies that are answerable to the prison. A PR person who also said "any decision to induce is solely the patient’s choice" which was clearly not the case here. Even if it is true, that specialist is following policies and priorities of the prison and company.
Being a ward of the state doesn't make you property of the state and doesn't mean that doctors all of a sudden can act against the best interests of their patients, both of them in this case. Really, this is revolting at every level and if you don't see the problem then that too is a problem.
Yes, but that's not what a ward means, a ward is a person who technically is under the protection of the state. That some states abuse the situation is a separate issue. It does not make you property.
"But all three women said they were told by prison medical providers they were being induced because it was a policy of the Arizona Department of Corrections for all pregnant incarcerated women, not due to their individual conditions."
Risk by itself is enough and there is no such thing as a medical procedure without risk. Induced delivery is fine if and only if it improves the chances of mother and baby, even if in the end everything goes fine. Utilitarian arguments and ethics don't mix.
In general, we don't let the state make arbitrary medical decisions for people just because they're incarcerated and it would be a little more convenient for the state.
