State Budgets and Expiring Patents: A Perfect Storm for Revisiting Human Subjects Research With Prisoners?

Since the Institute of Medicine released its 2006 report that recommended loosening current restrictions on using prisoners as human research subjects, Biopolitical Times has paid attention to the shifting justifications used to make the widespread usage of prisoners in this manner – once common yet unthinkable for the past few decades – thinkable once again. While human subject research in prisons never fully disappeared after horrible abuses were revealed in the 1970s, federal laws quickly emerged to restrict it to special circumstances when federal money was involved. However, two recent stories in the New York Times suggest that in addition to the IOM report, on-the-ground conditions for revamping such research may be ripening.

The first story from February describes the expansion of prison labor into novel areas to help plug holes in state budgets. The Times notes:

Prison labor — making license plates, picking up litter — is nothing new, and nearly all states have such programs. But these days, officials are expanding the practice to combat cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue, using prisoners to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees.

In New Jersey, inmates on roadkill patrol clean deer carcasses from highways. Georgia inmates tend municipal graveyards. In Ohio, they paint their own cells. In California, prison officials hope to expand existing programs, including one in which wet-suit-clad inmates repair leaky public water tanks. There are no figures on how many prisoners have been enrolled in new or expanded programs nationwide, but experts in criminal justice have taken note of the increase.

“There’s special urgency in prisons these days,” said Martin F. Horn, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction. “As state budgets get constricted, the public is looking for ways to offset the cost of imprisonment.”

At the same time that budgetary pressures are leading prison labor to expand into new areas, a second New York Times article from March details how the pharmaceutical industry is under increasing pressure to cut costs due to dwindling revenues from expiring patents. The article notes that this year patents for 10 blockbusters will expire, leading companies to suffer $50 billion in losses. Kenneth Kaitlin of the Center for the Study of Drug Development notes in the article, “This is panic time. I don’t think there’s a company out there that doesn’t realize they don’t have enough products in the pipeline or the portfolio, don’t have enough revenue to sustain their research and development.” This bleak outlook has led to massive layoffs in an effort to stem the bleeding; drug companies cut 61,000 jobs in 2009 and another 53,000 jobs in 2010.

Bringing these two stories together, what happens when states fully realize that prisoners are not only money savers for their own budgets, but potential sources of revenue that can be contracted out to private ventures needing cheap unskilled labor? And, if current regulations change in the direction recommended by the IOM, what happens when pharmaceutical companies realize that the tremendous costs endured by running clinical trials with civilian volunteers – increasingly mitigated by outsourcing trials to developing countries – might be more cheaply and conveniently conducted with U.S. prisoners?  Reports show that before current restrictions were put in place, 90% of all new drugs were tested on incarcerated individuals. Is a perfect storm brewing to take us back to the future?