When Prisoners’ “Right to Die” Goes Online: A Case-Study of Legal and Penal Sensibilities

Prisoners in Canadian federal penitentiaries can obtain medical assistance in dying (MAiD). This raises questions about the nature and legitimacy of pain and death in incarceration. The authors analyze responses to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation online news article discussing the provision of MAiD to prisoners. The comments exemplify different sensibilities about the state’s lethality with respect to prisoners. These sensibilities—both legal and penal—draw on an array of cultural referents to orient to prisoners’ deaths generally, but also MAiD specifically. The authors explore how certain referents factor in these legal and penal sensibilities and appear to mediate commenters’ judgements. For example, capital punishment factors significantly in conversations about MAiD for prisoners, as well as imaginations of prisoners’ bodies in pain. As a result, there is a spectacularization of prisoners’ carceral death, despite the humane, “civilized” death MAiD provides, which circumscribes how some commenters imagine the procedure and prisoners’ deaths.