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BioEdge: Spain puts prison psychology experiment on hold

BioEdge: Spain puts prison psychology experiment on hold

Bioedge

Spain puts prison psychology experiment on hold

by Michael Cook | 17 Mar 2019 |

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The Spanish Interior Ministry has put a halt to psychology experiments on violent prisoners which involved stimulating the prefrontal cortex with a mild electric current. Researchers wanted to see if the technique, transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, makes the prisoners less aggressive.

According to a pilot study whose results were published in Neuroscience in January, it seems to work. Prisoners who received tDCS reported that they felt less aggressive; prisoners in a control group felt unchanged.

But when New Scientist reported this week that the Spanish scientists would be doing a follow-up experiment with 12 prisoners after receiving approval from the Spanish government, prison officials, and a university ethics committee, the government backtracked and halted the experiment.

Researchers have high hopes for tDCS. In the long term, Andrés Molero-Chamizo, a psychologist at the University of Huelva, told Vox that it could “make life better for inmates, both by making prison a less violent environment for those in it and by serving as a method of offender rehabilitation that’ll eventually allow inmates to get out.”

However, many people, including, it seems, the current Spanish government, have qualms about experimenting on prisoners. True, all of the subjects in this experiment signed a consent form. However, they live in a coercive environment and they may feel that participation will get them better treatment or a reprieve. Under these circumstances the meaning of “informed consent” for inmates could be stretched to the breaking point. Furthermore, if prisoners are less violent, governments will have less incentive to improve the conditions of their incarceration.

“To me this is a classic and genuinely difficult ethical dilemma,” Roland Nadler, a neuroethicist at the University of Ottawa, told Vox, “whereby the availability of a technological solution that promises immediate reduction in avoidable suffering also poses a risk of draining the moral urgency out of correcting a more systemic problem.”

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

A California family was outraged recently when their grandfather was told that he had very little time to live by a "robot", or rather, what the media described as a robot. In fact, it was a teleconference screen mounted on a robot lectern. I don't suppose that the distinction makes much difference. The elderly man's children and grandchildren were horrified by the cold detachment of the procedure.

The hospital apologised, of course, but the incident is symptomatic of the impersonality which pervades our culture. Prodded on by our love affair with technology, human relations are being reduced to formal interactions. It may be overstating it to say that competence in face-to-face contact is a dying art -- but something is changing. To have a dozen Facebook "friends", for instance, is hardly the same as having a dozen friends.

But an even more -- I was thinking of inserting the word "sinister" but I won't -- application is the reduction of human sexuality to the twin and separable functions of recreation and reproduction. In an article below, British IVF pioneer Simon Fishel predicts that robots will handle the whole process of conception, from harvesting gametes to transferring embryos.

It seems to me that defending humane relationships will be one of the key challenges to bioethics in the coming decades.