Conscientious Objection Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The use of the term conscientious objection typically refers to a person who refuses on religious or moral grounds to participate in a mandated professional activity or duty, such as a pharmacist who refuses to issue a prescription for a morning after pill or a draftee who resists required military service. Conscientious objection may be a legal violation motivated by the individual’s belief that he or she is morally prohibited from following such law, usually because the law itself is considered wrong in some way. However, the resistance may not rise to the level of a legal violation, such as when conscientious refusal is written into the law as a justifiable exception to the rule.

For instance, religious exceptions to medical interventions are allowed under law, often with a signed waiver, as with parents who refuse lifesaving surgery or blood transfusion for a child due to religious beliefs. Conscientious objection, which is typically an individual belief-motivated act of resistance, differs somewhat from civil disobedience, which tends toward drawing public attention to willingness to break the law in the pursuit of social justice. In the criminal justice system, individuals sometimes interact with police and other justice officials in ways that show their noncooperation or collective resistance, and these can demonstrate ethical concerns with particular criminal justice policy or practice.

In the area of criminal justice, ethical debates surrounding policing and correctional practices demonstrate individuals who act, often in nonviolent ways, to resist police and correctional authority or policy, and occasionally to express particular oppositional beliefs symbolically. These individuals in justice settings can be considered conscientious objectors to particular justice officials or criminal justice practices. Sometimes conscientious objection is an act of last resort, in which other more conventional challenges to authority have been exhausted or otherwise are closed off as options for the individual. Conscientious objection is an act of resistance, as individuals without power or authority attempt to voice their concerns in ways that question the potentially unlawful or inhumane practice of those with power.

Conscientious Objection to Policing: Resisting Arrest and Unlawful Arrest

Previous research considered the influence of a suspect’s demeanor on police behavior, with attention to physical resistance and verbal disrespect either as an illegal act or as an affront to authority. Resistance to an arrest may also capture conscientious objection in that the noncompliance stems from a person’s own beliefs in conflict with the law, or from a belief that the arrest is unlawful and, thus, the police behavior is questioned. Political activists motivated by belief in a cause may engage in criminal activity as a strategy to disrupt organizations thought to be the source of problematic conditions. Therefore, the resistance of police action or arrest is a form of political expression that might be considered conscientious objection or civil disobedience.

Political expression by activists increasingly is controlled by police with a territorial strategy, in which there is legal restriction of public demonstrations to certain locations. These practices are well documented in examples such as the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference, and the 2011 Occupy Movement protests. These protesters as conscientious objectors challenge the very police practices designed to keep order and resist the legitimacy and authority of police. While police restriction on protest territory has been upheld as a constitutional means of maintaining public order, there are those who resist this space restriction as an attempt to restrict freedom of speech. Activists and police negotiate about protest time, place, and nature of the activity to occur. There has been increased militaristic tactical response to dissenters by police, as well as during natural disaster response, thus creating a blurring between military and police agents.

Belief that arrests are unlawful is another example of conscientious objection, in which individuals resist or later challenge an arrest because of perceived unconstitutional police behavior or unjustified reason for the police action. Abuse of authority through excessive use of force is a common reason for claiming an unlawful arrest. Other ethical objections to police authority may include defective warrants, discrimination or bias such as racial profiling, other uses of police discretion, and police use of authority to gain favors or avoid accountability. Police are tasked with enforcing the law while also protecting citizens, and this simultaneous work can create tensions in the police role and in interactions with the public.

Conscientious Objection to Correctional Practice: Hunger Strikes

While there are political prisoners who are arrested and imprisoned because of their illegal protest activity, there are those prisoners who may become politicized, as they become conscientious objectors during their time in prison. Jails and prisons are sites of state control and often humiliation, in which the most basic elements of human dignity and privacy are challenged. Yet there are many examples of individual acts and collective solidarity among prisoners who act politically to resist unlawful and inhumane treatment. Because their lives in prison are so constrained, prisoners create resistance strategies reflective of this context such as by organizing a family or community while they cannot interact with their own families on the outside. Individuals file lawsuits to challenge conditions in prison, and prisoners also engage in conscientious objection via hunger strikes, one of the few means or opportunities available to them.

Hunger strikes by prisoners may involve suicidal behavior, though more commonly they reflect conscientious objection to particular prison policies and practices. For example, hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention camp have engaged in hunger strikes to protest the refusal of prison authorities to provide legal counsel, among other concerns. In another example from 2011, a hunger strike spread across California correctional institutions with thousands of individuals striking to end the inhumane treatment of prisoners, particularly the routine operation over 100 percent capacity (or overcrowding), extreme isolation of those in the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison, and pressure at the SHU to inform on others as a way out of their isolation or to shorten their sentence.

The conscientious motivation for hunger-striking behavior is a form of moral and/or political expression designed to draw attention to the problematic conditions of the prison or the coercive practices impeding individual beliefs. The conflict between the hunger-striking inmate and the prison relates to an individual’s right to privacy and the state’s compelling interest in maintaining an orderly prison environment. Ultimately, hunger strikes create a need for medical attention, as prison authorities must either let the person die or force-feed them. A debate arises about whether it is ethical to force-feed a competent adult. Also, when a hunger striker is determined to be mentally incompetent or becomes unconscious as a result of the lack of food, there is an ethical question about when force-feeding is compelled. In the United States, hunger-striking prisoners have been forcibly fed to prevent death. Courts have ruled that prisoners refusing a particular treatment out of motivation to manipulate the system, such as in an attempt to gain transfer to another correctional facility or better living conditions, may legally be force-fed. Yet force-feeding by physicians of competent prisoners on hunger strikes has been condemned as both unethical and illegal. Many argue that a competent adult retains the ethical authority to refuse medical treatment and that force-feeding amounts to torture.

In the case of loss of competence or consciousness, though, the idea of force-feeding to save the life often trumps other ethical concerns about the individual. The correctional system being challenged by hunger-striking prisoners is often the same authority behind the prison doctors tasked with making decisions about interventions. The area of medical ethics thus overlaps with criminal justice ethics in this case of conscientious objection using the mechanism of hunger strikes.

Bibliography:

Annas, George. “Prison Hunger Strikes: Why the Motive Matters.” Hastings Center Report, v.12/6 (1982).
Banks, Cyndi. Criminal Justice Ethics, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009.
Crank, John P., and Michael A. Caldero. Police Ethics: The Corruption of Noble Cause. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing, 2000.
Engel, Robin Shepard. “Explaining Suspects’ Resistance and Disrespect Toward Police.” Journal of Criminal Justice, v.31 (2003).
Keren, Michael. “Justifications of Conscientious Objection: An Israeli Case Study.” International Journal of the Sociology of Law, v.26 (1998).
Ohm, Tracey M. “What They Can Do About It: Prison Administrators’ Authority to Force-Feed Hunger-Striking Inmates.” Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, v.23 (2007).

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