Dental Care

Adequacy of Dental Care for Prisoners

Some scholars question the quality of dental care afforded prisoners. Demonstrably, for example, patients who are not incarcerated are better protected by legal principles surrounding the issue of medical malpractice. Outside prison walls, medical personnel are held to the standard of negligence. Within a prison facility, however, a prisoner is protected from medical malpractice only by the more relaxed standard of deliberate indifference. According to some, the nature of this standard does little to safeguard prisoner-patients, since “behavior that amounts to negligence can never equal the culpability required for a finding of deliberate indifference” (Vaughn & Carroll, 1998, p. 12). Similarly, the federal courts have made it clear that prisoners can invoke a constitutionally guaranteed right to medical care only if “serious medical needs” are at stake (Vaughn & Carroll, 1998, p. 12). Those who are not incarcerated, conversely, need not demonstrate such a need before seeking medical assistance (although a severe lack of economic resources can significantly constrain their access to medical care). In addition, medical care may not be as good quality in prison, since “prison medical personnel suffer from limitations in resources, staff, and facilities” (Vaughn & Carroll, 1998, p. 27).

Critics of the level of medical care available to those who are incarcerated worry that the courts have embraced what Michael Vaughn and Leo Carroll (1998) refer to as the “principle of less eligibility” (p. 3). This principle suggests that the “conditions of penal confinement must be harsher [Page 223]than the living standards of the working classes and people on welfare” (p. 37). These same critics put forth an alternative and more egalitarian vision of medical care for prisoners in which they point out that physicians have a professional responsibility to provide the same level of medical care for all human beings, regardless of social status.

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