Ethics Assignment

We were given the assignment of researching ethical lapses, and my partner and I came up with the idea of searching for ethical lapses in prisons. There did not seem to be that many reported cases or ethical lapses in general because people usually try to keep the mishaps quiet. However, we did find cases in Canadian prisons where inmates were involuntarily given shock and other drug treatments. There are also many cases of inmates being submitted to tests to work out new pharmaceutical drugs. The problem with this is the prisoners really had no choice of whether they wanted to participate in the tests or not. I realize that prisoners lose some rights when they go to jail, but they should never be submitted to such dehumanizing treatments.

Another case we looked at was the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Photographs and videos were discovered of detainees being sexually humiliated and badly mistreated. One photograph shows a detainee cowering at the feet of a military dog while another shows a prisoner standing with a hood over his head with wires attached to his genitals. The guards who were involved in the mistreatment are up for court-marshall. They say that they were given orders, some from as high up as the White House, to "loosen up" the prisoners for interrogations. Those claims have been refuted, and it was pointed out that most of the prisoners had no importance to military intelligence. Most of the prisoners were common criminals and had no terrorist affiliation. The guards did it for fun.

There are many other cases of ethical lapses that are never reported. These just happened to be released. There are times when desperate measures are called for, but the cases described here do not warrant the treatments.