And again, who is doing the procedure? It is a minor medical procedure and the AMA and WMA has deemed it unethical.
This is where the government holding the prisoner is placed in a lose-lose solution. When Bobby Sands and other Fenianists went on a hunger strike in Britain, the government under Mrs. Thatcher refused to feed them letting some of them die and was widely condemned for it. Now that the Obama is force-feeding prisoners, they are receiving condemnation.
Personally, as I don’t believe a man has the right to starve himself to death, I’m all for force-feeding them and this is strengthened by pragmatic reasons:as allowing the death of a prisoner will give the prisoners the impression of martyrs and tarnish the image of the government while force-feeding them conversely helps humiliate the cause of the prisoners.
Prisoners have some Fourth Amendment rights but they’re much more limited than the general public’s.
I won’t go into all the details because it’s really complicated. But generally, there are some situations in which you can search a prisoner automatically. There are some situations in which you can conduct general searches of a random percentage of prisoners. And there are some situations where you can only search a prisoner if you have specific cause to search him. And these rules vary based on what kind of search you’re conducting (there are five different ways to search a person) and on who is authorizing the search (there are four different levels of authorization). And that’s just the rules for when you can search a prisoner. There’s a whole different set of rules on how you can search a prisoner. And another equally complicated set of rules for searching places.
We (the prison system) are acting in loco parentis for all of the prisoners in our custody. Which often made me wonder where their mother and I went wrong in the way we raised those kids.
On the occasions in which it was done, it was always done by professional medical staff - doctors and nurses. This policy of the AMA is something new to me.
I know waaaaaaaaaay more about forced feeding than I ever wanted to.
Basically since the inmate is a ward of the state, the state can, with court order, do things to preserve a life in the absence of underlying disease and in the presence of clear and present danger to life and limb. That is to say we won’t force a kidney failure patient to dialyze if he’d rather die as a result of the natural progression of his kidney failure. But we may ask a court to order feedings to prevent the death of a hunger striker who’s trying to make a point or get a demand met.
The last time I testified in court regarding a hunger striker, I testified that the patient was not presently in clear and present danger of loss of life or limb due to his current pattern of food refusal, and not unexpectedly, the judge declined to issue an order to force feed.
Other times I’ve testified, outcomes were different.
In these cases, it’s the state agency (the department of Corrections, usually) asking the court to decide whether or not forced feeding is legal/necessary, and it’s my job to answer medical questions. The court decides whether or not the rights of the inmate outweigh the custodial responsibility of the state to not aid or abet suicide. It is then the court that would order feedings to be done as medically necessary and appropriate.
Much more could be written by me (and has been, in other venues) on this topic. It’s one of my least favorite to deal with.
Yes,* loco parentis* is Latin for crazy parents.
So am I allowed to force feed my adult kids? Not like any force has ever been required to get them to eat, but hypothetically. Like say I wanted to force them to stop eating, which might be good for them, and will definitely save me some money.
No it doesn’t mean crazy parents. Ok?
It’s not a difficult or incomprehensible procedure.
I’ve seen it done with babies, and I sure could put a feeding tube down an adult and then check the location.
Remember that lots of the prisoners will have given themselves and others IV injections.
So “not medical staff” has a bit of a hollow ring.
Generally speaking your rights as a parent (or as a parent figure) fade out as your children grow up. By the time they’re adults, your responsibility for them and your control over them are done.
To see how this principle has changed over the years, look at colleges. Colleges used to have a strong control over their students based on the in loco parentis principle. They could do things like establish curfews and place restrictions on their movement and tell them they had to attend events.
One of the outcomes of the sixties protest movement was to kill off a large portion of this. Colleges were told by the courts that they could not set standards on their students’ social behavior. If a college student wanted to spend Saturday night drinking in a bar downtown, go home with some girl he met, and skip chapel in the morning, that was his business. The school’s only business was his education not how he lived his life.
I’m not saying I couldn’t theoretically insert a feeding tube if I had to. But I’d be the first to admit it would be a terrible idea to ask me to do it. I’ve never had any medical training beyond basic first aid and I’ve never inserted a feeding tube. I certainly wouldn’t claim I’d do it as well as a trained nurse or doctor. And I highly doubt it was the AMA’s intent to imply that guards should perform medical procedures when it said its members shouldn’t be doing them.
Also while some prisoners do give themselves injections (while being watched) I’ve never seen a prisoner give another prisoner an injection. It’s the same principle as I mentioned above. It would be highly irresponsible to have a prisoner doing medical procedures on somebody rather than having a doctor or a nurse doing it.
Oh, agreed, I wouldn’t want someone to do it untrained.
But you wouldn’t need to be ‘medical personnel’ to have the proper training, is all I meant.
Some of the guards could be certified in the procedure. It would take a few hours.
AMA may oppose feeding prisoners, but tube feeding of patients is quite common.
The training itself would be uncontroversial.
Thanks to everyone for your responses.
I appreciate the legal perspectives offered by lawbuff and John Mace. Obviously legal obligations and rights will differ depending on location (neither in nor from the US myself), and I was presenting the topic as an ethical dilemma.
But ethics and law are intertwined, so discussion of law is inevitable.
I think someone in the pit thread suggested that the UK legal system does not require a hunger-striking prisoner to be force fed.
Thank you little nemo for your inside perspective. I was hoping you’d join the discussion, and your information is very useful in helping me form my own opinion of the issue.
I’m beginning to see force feeding as an unpleasant, but not unethical necessity.
I think the points raised by Buck Godot in post #2 are especially pertinent and elegantly expressed.
Thanks.
“Shakedowns” are already permitted by case law, I know that, but don’t have the case in my head.
Most likely, both motivations are involved.
[QUOTE=Grumman]
If your prisoner considers their current predicament a fate worse than death (such as because they’re an innocent man who has been locked in Gitmo for a decade and sees no possibility that he’ll ever be released), you are not doing them a favour by robbing him of the only means of escape he has left.
[/quote]
Maybe not, but then, I didn’t say they were doing the prisoner a favor, or doing that the prisoner believes to be in his best interest. They are fulfilling their duty to keep the prisoner alive and healthy. That is their duty, accomodating the prisoner’s desires is not.
[QUOTE=Grumman]
And that’s assuming you’re legitimately trying to stop him killing himself, and not just using his supposed suicidal tendencies as an excuse to torture him.
[/QUOTE]
I did make that assumption, as the OP established “on hunger strike” as a given.
Prisoners fall into a different category, in my opinion. Not that they have less rights (well they do, but not the point here), but because if prisoners were allowed to commit suicide, then what’s to stop a corrupt guard from killing prisoners and saying it was suicide?
Back in Grad School my roommate from South Africa told me that it was common knowledge that the police would throw people out of windows and say that they committed suicide in a fit of guilt.
Would you be able to tell the difference between a dead prisoner who died of his own choice not to eat and one that died from being denied food? I think we probably could, but I don’t know. It makes me uneasy. Prisoners should not be allowed to commit suicide.
Ted Bundy went on a hunger strike deliberately to loose weight so he could fit out of some type of vent that only had a small opening, and eventually escaped.
The guards can kill prisoners now and claim it was suicide. Nothing would change.
Not quite, since the guards do have some responsibility to prevent that from happening. Now, I’m not saying they are going to be put in jail if a prisoner commits suicide, but too many on any guard’s watch, and he’s going to be losing his job PDQ.
I disagree that hunger strikes are suicide attempts. I’m finding it hard to articulate the distinction, other than that death isn’t the intended goal of the hunger striker, a change in circumstances is. In some cases, those changes are legitimate grievances and striking is the only agency the prisoners have.
This isn’t to say that I think they should be handled differently - I’m cool with people committing suicide in any case, so I think hunger strikers shouldn’t be force fed.
Has a large scale prison hunger strike ever occurred? What would the logistics be like if you had hundreds of inmates simultaneously refusing nutrition?