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Improving the conditions under which incarcerated populations give “informed consent” is a desirable goal given prisoners' lack of autonomy; part of the Institutional Review Board's (IRB) procedures is the inclusion of representative voices from the prisoner population as a mechanism to reduce harms. The most recent review of the ethics of research on prisoners by the Institute of Medicine recommends an expanded role for prisoner involvement, outlining a collaborative research approach involving prisoners as active participants in all aspects of the research, including design, planning and implementation, not just at the IRB stage.

In this paper, we briefly outline the existing state of IRB protections for prisoners selected for research, and focus on the effectiveness of prisoner representatives in this process. We suggest that there are weaknesses within the existing system such that representation may provide little …