ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to characterize the types of normative conflict that arise for correctional health care professionals. Jurisprudentially, the prison’s implementation of the inverted liberal principle has historically taken the form of judicial deference to experienced prison administrators. Although prison medicine has had a long but not entirely illustrious history in the United States, courts have only occasionally scrutinized the sources and scope of the duty to treat. In systematically representing a profession’s normative commitments, it is often useful to organize them according to the discrete social roles encountered in generic professional practice. Many of the ethical dilemmas of correctional health are understandable as conflicts arising out of these three potentially competing sets of obligations: clinical, employee, and public health. A clinician who is known to reveal medical information to the detriment of patients will soon find that the resulting distrust makes it more difficult if not impossible to respond promptly and appropriately to the medical needs of inmates.
