Should prisoners be able to shave time off their sentences by donating their organs or bone marrow?
That’s what two Massachusetts lawmakers introduced a bill earlier this year. It would have allowed incarcerated people to get up to one year taken off their sentences.
To the team at “Something Offbeat”, the proposal seemed like it was out of a science fiction movie.
“I do think it ends up kind of being like a sci-fi novel,” said guest Cary Aspinwall of the Marshall Project, a journalism outlet that focuses on criminal justice. “Like somebody mentioned to me, like ‘Blade Runner’, where it's like… you don’t want to have prisons full of people that you view as lesser, and they’re just there to harvest for organs and parts for people who are free… that to me is very problematic.”
In Massachusetts, an outcry from criminal justice advocacy groups, resulted in the lawmakers sayng they would amend the language in the bill to eliminate sentence reduction.
Still, ethics questions remain, and Aspinwall tackles them with host Mike Rogers on this week’s episode,
Each week, “Something Offbeat” dives into stranger-than-fiction headlines. If you have suggestions for stories the podcast should cover, send them to us at somethingoffbeat@audacy.com.
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