by Julia Knopes, Ph.D.

Recently, the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) announced that the USMLE Step 1 exam for medical students will change its score reporting from a numeric score to pass/fail as of 2022.…

Last month, PBS aired the remarkable documentary College Behind Bars. This four-part film follows men and women incarcerated in New York state as they make their way through a rigorous liberal arts degree program offered by Bard College. The Bard Prison Initiative is one of several programs offering college classes within the U.S. correctional system – a system which carries the dubious distinction of holding nearly twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. (The U.S. comprises 5% of the world’s population).

I have taught courses in several prison higher education programs, including a course on bioethics.  People have often asked me, “what is like to teach ethics to prisoners?”  While I understand their curiosity, I dislike this question. Teaching in prison does differ from teaching on campus in a number of important ways – most saliently, through restrictions on classroom technologies. But the question implies that there is something special or different about teaching morally-laden subject matter to students who have been convicted of serious and sometimes violent crimes. People are not inquiring about the impact of the prison environment on teaching and learning bioethics, but rather about people in prison as moral beings. The question suggests that prisoners are somehow morally different than those of us on the outside.

In fact, people in prison are us. One in two Americans have a family member who has spent time in jail or prison. Those of us who have not are likely white and/or financially well-off, as mass incarceration has disproportionately targeted low income communities and people of color.  As Evelyn Patterson notes, people in prison “represent a small proportion of those who commit delinquent acts. Prisoners are people are the people who were caught, indicted, and punished via incarceration.” (Think of the example of sexual violence, a crime experienced by more than 1 in 3 women and nearly 1 in 4 men in the United States. The vast majority of perpetrators do not even enter the criminal justice system, much less serve time).

That said, I did find that teaching bioethics in prison differed from teaching bioethics on campus, and not just because I couldn’t stream video clips or email my students. Incarcerated students are immersed within the ethically fraught ‘total institution’ of the prison, a space anthropologist Lorna Rhodes described as “designed to activate a sense of threat to the coherence of the self” (2004, 56).  Students were living and witnessing the moral failures of mass incarceration on a daily basis. When they sought medical assistance, they faced the bioethical challenges of delivering and receiving care in a context of punishment.  These challenges occur at all levels of the health care system, from the micro-level of clinician/patient trust to institutional and society-level questions about access to and deservingness of treatment.  In future posts, I’ll be addressing some of these ethical challenges more specifically, as well as exploring social and historical issues related to health and mass incarceration. 

In the meantime, PBS will be streaming Prison Behind Bars for free through late January. 

Last month, PBS aired the remarkable documentary College Behind Bars. This four-part film follows men and women incarcerated in New York state as they make their way through a rigorous liberal arts degree program offered by Bard College. The Bard Prison Initiative is one of several programs offering college classes within the U.S. correctional system – a system which carries the dubious distinction of holding nearly twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. (The U.S. comprises 5% of the world’s population).

I have taught courses in several prison higher education programs, including a course on bioethics.  People have often asked me, “what is like to teach ethics to prisoners?”  While I understand their curiosity, I dislike this question. Teaching in prison does differ from teaching on campus in a number of important ways – most saliently, through restrictions on classroom technologies. But the question implies that there is something special or different about teaching morally-laden subject matter to students who have been convicted of serious and sometimes violent crimes. People are not inquiring about the impact of the prison environment on teaching and learning bioethics, but rather about people in prison as moral beings. The question suggests that prisoners are somehow morally different than those of us on the outside.

In fact, people in prison are us. One in two Americans have a family member who has spent time in jail or prison. Those of us who have not are likely white and/or financially well-off, as mass incarceration has disproportionately targeted low income communities and people of color.  As Evelyn Patterson notes, people in prison “represent a small proportion of those who commit delinquent acts. Prisoners are people are the people who were caught, indicted, and punished via incarceration.” (Think of the example of sexual violence, a crime experienced by more than 1 in 3 women and nearly 1 in 4 men in the United States. The vast majority of perpetrators do not even enter the criminal justice system, much less serve time).

That said, I did find that teaching bioethics in prison differed from teaching bioethics on campus, and not just because I couldn’t stream video clips or email my students. Incarcerated students are immersed within the ethically fraught ‘total institution’ of the prison, a space anthropologist Lorna Rhodes described as “designed to activate a sense of threat to the coherence of the self” (2004, 56).  Students were living and witnessing the moral failures of mass incarceration on a daily basis. When they sought medical assistance, they faced the bioethical challenges of delivering and receiving care in a context of punishment.  These challenges occur at all levels of the health care system, from the micro-level of clinician/patient trust to institutional and society-level questions about access to and deservingness of treatment.  In future posts, I’ll be addressing some of these ethical challenges more specifically, as well as exploring social and historical issues related to health and mass incarceration. 

In the meantime, PBS will be streaming Prison Behind Bars for free through late January. 

by Keisha Ray, Ph.D.

Right now in America there is a growing movement to help Americans die well. Organizations like Life Matters Media and Death Over Dinner aim to help people with end of life decision-making and to help people facilitate conversations about death with their families, friends, and communities.…

by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

Last week, Amazon announced a new partnership with the UK’s National Health Service(NHS). In this arrangement, when patients ask their Alexa personal digital assistant health questions, the answers will come from the NHS’s website.…

by Keisha Ray, Ph.D.

In May a twitter user posted a picture depicting the muscular system of a female that included milk ducts.…

I have been leading a weekly ethics class for middle- and early-high school-aged youth. My preconceived assumptions about the abilities of adolescents to discuss bioethics issues have been dispelled by the depth and nuance of their insights.

The post Teaching Ethics to Adolescents appeared first on The Hastings Center.

by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

Medical School Interviewer: “If you could, please tell me why you decided to apply to medical school and pursue a career in medicine?”

Applicant: “So that I could refuse to treat the godless heathens.”

Interviewer: “Under U.S.

by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

When I was growing up I recall parents talking about chicken pox parties where parents would arrange to expose their children to a person with an active infection.…

by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

Being at a university on the quarter system means that my academic calendar is different than most faculty’s.…