LAUSR

The target article by Birks and Buyx (2018) contributes to an (as yet) strikingly undifferentiated debate on the coercive use of neurointerventions or neurocorrectives for rehabilitative purposes in criminal justice systems. Largely untouched by insights from criminology , struggles for institutional reforms, and human rights of prisoners and without considerations of repeated failures of governments worldwide to observe them, philosophers have forwarded suggestions to expand the punitive powers of the state, granting permissions to directly intervene into minds of offenders. Arguments to this end are often rather speculative and decontextualized thought-experiments. These proposals are politically worrisome insofar as they convey the misleading impression of all-things-considered policy briefs. Birks and Buyx’s quest to stake out more finely differentiated normative foundations for imposing neurocorrectives is thus highly welcome. I agree with the authors’ rejection of the “Punishment Equivalence Thesis.” Even though both neurocorrectives and imprisonment interfere with mental integrity, they may still differ in other relevant aspects. The authors’ argument to this end, however, might be too weak with respect to many mental effects of imprisonment, and is surely too weak to provide sufficient ground for opposing mandatory neurocorrectives. It centrally draws upon the distinction between intended and merely foreseen harm. The authors claim that mental effects of imprisonment are usually unintended but foreseeable, whereas those of neurointerventions are closer to the constitutive effects of the intervention and should therefore be considered as intended. Distinctions between intended and merely foreseen effects are notoriously blurry (and subject to the distorting Knobe effect). The authors’ discussion of side effects of a pharmacological intervention (restlessness) testifies to this. Their argument as to why “one cannot say,” pace common parlance, that medications have unintended side effects when they share a joint proximal cause with the main effect (lowering serotonin) remains underdeveloped. But even if it holds, its application to some of the real mental effects of prisons does not serve their conclusion. A significant share of the harms to mental integrity caused by imprisonment would count as intended according to the authors’ criteria. Imprisonment is, inter alia, deprivation of social ties, emotional relationships, and novel and challenging stimuli. These deprivations cause mental effects in prisoners. It is fair to assume that they partially account for the low mental health conditions among them (Walker et al. 2014). However, it is worth noting that mediumand long-term effects of prison environments on mental health remain underexplored. Studies are inconclusive, more research is required. Some studies even suggest, perhaps counterintuitively, that prison improves mental health of inmates (Walker et al. 2014). Moreover, the necessary adaption of prisoners to the novel intramural social environment generates further mental and behavioral changes [a process criminologists call “prisonization”; a classic study is Sykes (1958)]. Social deprivation and integration into novel environments are constitutive of imprisonment, even in the more decent or ideal forms the authors envision. Associated mental changes would thus have to be considered as intended by the authors’ lights. The distinction then collapses. Furthermore, a distinction based on intentions fails to capture differences between various intended interventions. Consider the design of detention facilities. Institutions modeled after the Benthamian idea of the