People have been concerned about the ethicals associated e.g. with Tuskegee, but today we have the opposite problem even in many developed country prisons, let alone the undeveloped world.
The point of this tract, though, is not to get at the “why can’t we experiment on these people, a well conducted experiment would be an obvious upgrade” because it is. Rather, I intend to lay out justification for experiments on prisoners at the rational standard of care, not the deficient one.
Part of the red tape of medical research is dealing with universal precautions, variability in diets, etc. that comes from having to deal with the preferred free state of human beings. We still can treat (and indeed would want to treat from a medical perspective, otherwise your experimental conditions do not mirror the real world) prisoners in a way that forces them to take care of themselves, stay in isolation conditions where they can’t be raped or inject drugs, etc. In other words, all these observational and population study limitations are removed (though your sample population is of course skewed).
Part of our problem with cancer research and treatment is having to deal with human beings that have to go work at their jobs, be with their families, withstand brutal side effects, etc. instead of being at the beck and call of biologists, with an on-site care team, who can sequence their cells, pick at their broken body parts, and in general try labor intensive approaches to investigation and cures, even for things that “look” like they are working (but problems come back with a vengeance, because the other nasties in the body had their competition killed). To give a lifer parole, cure or no cure, after you do all you can to help them – it’s easy to explain that you gave an old, sick rapist and murderer parole because you tortured him at risk of his iatrogenic death for years trying to cure him, while saving more lives earlier with the advance knowledge you gained.
For example, you can get an endless supply of Stage IV/metastatic cancer samples that can be handed around with no releasability restrictions since your felon already did something horrible to lose control over his body. This removes the need to use whacked out cell lines that won’t translate to clinical benefit. A plus: if you cure it on your patient’s own cells, you have a better chance of it working in your patient.
Also, people complain about no labor, no clinicians, no doctors to do the work. This is wrong in a macro sense, but say it is so. Funny, there are a bunch of bounties to be handed out on a work-release or in-prison setting, and by the way, you are training your prisoners in skills they could apply in demand professions after they’ve done their time.