Ethical Contemplative Care Within Corrections

During my Death Doula certification practicum, I provided advanced care planning and grief support to incarcerated men serving life sentences in a maximum-security facility in Bath, Ontario. My role involved supporting individuals as they reflected on mortality, unresolved grief, estranged relationships, and the reality that many would die within the institution. The work took place under constant surveillance, with institutional protocols shaping the conditions of care, including limits on privacy, time, and ritual expression. One afternoon, I was assigned to support an individual who had been incarcerated for several decades for a violent offence. During our session, he spoke openly about his grief, not only for the people he had lost but for the life he would never live. As he spoke, I became aware of my own internal tension: how to remain compassionately present while holding awareness of the harm he had caused and the broader social narratives that frame incarcerated individuals as morally undeserving. Correctional staff moved in and out of the space, reminding me that confidentiality and autonomy were conditional. This raised a central ethical question: How can Buddhist contemplative care be practiced ethically within a correctional system structured around punishment, surveillance, and moral exclusion?

The central ethical dilemma in this case is whether a Buddhist contemplative caregiver can offer non-judgmental compassion within a system organized around punishment and moral exclusion without becoming complicit in that system’s dehumanizing logic. As Andrea Smith argues, the prison-industrial complex is embedded in broader structures that render some lives socially disposable, shaping who is treated as worthy of care and moral recognition.[1] Within this framework, incarcerated individuals, particularly those convicted of violent crimes, are frequently positioned outside the moral community. Compassion toward them becomes ethically suspect, while withdrawal of care is normalized. The dilemma concerns how to practice Buddhist compassion without reinforcing institutional dehumanization or minimizing the reality of harm.

Contextualizing the Ethical Landscape

Recent Canadian research on prison chaplaincy demonstrates that spiritual caregivers work within environments shaped by surveillance, restricted access, role ambiguity, and limited institutional recognition.[1] Chaplains describe their approach as intentionally non-judgmental and relational, while also naming the practical constraints of delivering spiritual care within a secular institution and under conditions that limit privacy and access.[2] These findings suggest that compassionate presence is not naïve idealism but a documented practice within correctional institutions. Each ethical response in this case affects multiple actors: incarcerated individuals seeking dignity and existential meaning; correctional staff responsible for institutional safety; spiritual caregivers navigating professional legitimacy; and communities shaped by narratives of punishment, accountability, and rehabilitation. Ethical caregiving in this context must consider these intersecting institutional, social, and spiritual dimensions.

Buddhist Ethical Foundations

Buddhist ethics begins with the recognition of dukkha, suffering arising through causes and conditions rather than isolated moral failure. As Stephen E. Harris explains, Buddhist traditions distinguish among explicit suffering, the suffering of change, and conditioned suffering, highlighting how subtle forms of unsatisfactoriness saturate ordinary experience.[1] From this perspective, individual actions are understood within interdependent networks of personal history, social forces, structural inequities, and conditioned mental states. Suffering is not limited to moments of acute pain; even pleasure is marked by instability, vulnerability to loss, and the distortions of craving.[2] Central to Buddhist ethics are ahiṃsā (non-harming) and karuṇā (compassion), which call for responding to suffering without attachment to deservingness or outcome. Non-harming extends beyond refraining from physical violence to include avoiding psychological harm, moral condemnation, or indifference. Compassion does not imply absolving accountability; rather, it invites a presence that recognizes both harm and humanity simultaneously. This framework challenges moral sorting, the reduction of individuals to their worst actions, while maintaining accountability by emphasizing right intention and right action within the Eightfold Path. In this way, Buddhist ethics holds together responsibility and dignity without collapsing one into the other.

Possible Ethical Responses

One response is to provide highly restrained, institution-aligned care prioritizing safety, policy adherence, and emotional distance. From a deontological standpoint, such restraint can be framed as a matter of reliability in fulfilling professional and institutional duties. Louise Terry distinguishes professional ethics from personal morality and emphasizes that ethical decision-making cannot rest solely on individual moral judgment.[3] In correctional environments, strict adherence to protocol may also protect staff and caregivers from role confusion or boundary violations. However, uncritical alignment risks reinforcing the dehumanizing structures Smith identifies—especially when “safety” becomes a moral narrative that justifies relational withdrawal.[4]

A second response emphasizes unconditional compassion without engaging structural critique. Some Buddhist practitioners might argue that alleviating suffering is primary and that institutional analysis risks diverting attention from immediate human presence. This stance aligns with karuṇā and mirrors chaplains’ emphasis on non-judgmental acceptance and sustained presence with people experiencing despair, depression, and profound isolation.[5] From a virtue ethics standpoint, which Terry describes as centring the moral character of the caregiver (including compassion, integrity, and courage), this approach prioritizes the formation of the caregiver’s ethical stance through relationship.[6] Yet without structural awareness, this response risks spiritual bypassing—overlooking how prisons function as tightly controlled institutions that shape and constrain suffering and care.[7]

A third response integrates compassion with structural awareness. This approach acknowledges harm, institutional constraint, and systemic inequities while remaining committed to non-harming presence. Terry’s discussion of principlism helps clarify the competing pressures at work: autonomy is severely constrained in prison settings; beneficence must be balanced against non-maleficence; and limited resources and public expectations complicate justice.[8] Context-aware accompaniment seeks to hold these principles in tension rather than privileging any one of them. The Canadian chaplaincy study reinforces the ethical plausibility of this approach: chaplains describe their work as contributing to hope, stabilization, and prison adjustment even amid institutional ambiguity and limited recognition.[9]

Chosen Ethical Response

I would choose context-aware Buddhist accompaniment. This response allows me to offer compassion while refusing to participate in the moral logic of disposability that underpins carceral exclusion.[10] It honours Buddhist commitments to non-harming and a conditioned understanding of suffering while recognizing institutional realities. In practical terms, this approach requires careful boundary-setting, supervision, and ongoing ethical reflexivity—especially within environments shaped by protocol, risk assessment, and restricted autonomy, which Terry identifies as contemporary ethical pressures in health and social care.[11] Rather than seeking redemption or moral resolution, it embodies right presence within constraint—meeting suffering without illusion, condemnation, or erasure.

Engagement with Course Materials

This case also reflects broader ethical tensions explored throughout the course, including professional responsibility, institutional constraints, and competing normative frameworks. Terry distinguishes between personal morality and professional ethics, noting that ethical decision-making in health and social care cannot rest solely on individual moral judgment.[12] In this case, my personal moral reaction to violent crime could not determine my caregiving response. Instead, I was required to navigate professional obligations within a structured institutional system.

Terry’s overview of deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and principlism further clarifies the competing pressures at work.[13] A deontological approach emphasizes duty to professional standards and institutional policy. A consequentialist lens might prioritize public safety and risk management. Virtue ethics centers on compassionate character. Principlism highlights tensions between autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice, each constrained within prison contexts. These frameworks help make visible that ethical practice in prison is rarely a matter of choosing a single value; it is often the disciplined work of negotiating competing goods within restrictive conditions.

Class discussions reinforced concerns about moral distress, complicity, and the limits of professional autonomy within systems structured primarily around punishment. Canadian chaplaincy research demonstrates that non-judgmental presence is not naïve but a meaningful contribution within correctional institutions—one that caregivers themselves experience as ethically significant, even when it is difficult to quantify or institutionally validate.[14] Integrating these course themes situates Buddhist contemplative care within broader debates about justice, institutional power, and ethical responsibility.

Practicing Buddhist contemplative care within a maximum-security prison requires navigating compassion and accountability, presence and protocol, individual suffering and structural injustice. By engaging multiple ethical perspectives impartially and situating the dilemma within institutional and social contexts, this analysis argues for a form of caregiving that neither withdraws from suffering nor bypasses harm. Ethical Buddhist accompaniment in carceral settings demands sustained reflexivity and the courage to remain present within unresolved moral complexity.

[1] Stephen E. Harris, “Suffering and the Shape of Well-Being in Buddhist Ethics,” Asian Philosophy 24, no. 3 (2014): 242–259, https://doi.org/10.1080/09552367.2014.952931

[2] Harris, “Suffering and the Shape of Well-Being,” 245–249.

[3] Louise Terry, “Ethics and Contemporary Challenges in Health and Social Care,” in Ethics: Contemporary Challenges in Health and Social Care, ed. Audrey Leathard and Susan McLaren (Bristol: Policy Press, 2007), 18–33, https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781861347558.003.0002

[4] Smith, “Heteropatriarchy,” 68–70.

[5] Akca et al., “Joy, Compassion, and Job Satisfaction,” 271–286.

[6] Terry, “Ethics and Contemporary Challenges,” 23–24.

[7] Smith, “Heteropatriarchy,” 70–72.

[8] Terry, “Ethics and Contemporary Challenges,” 24–27.

[9] Akca et al., “Joy, Compassion, and Job Satisfaction,” 282–284.

[10] Smith, “Heteropatriarchy,” 72–73.

[11] Terry, “Ethics and Contemporary Challenges,” 28–33.

[12] Terry, “Ethics and Contemporary Challenges,” 18–19.

[13] Terry, “Ethics and Contemporary Challenges,” 23–27.

[14] Akca et al., “Joy, Compassion, and Job Satisfaction,” 278–284.

[1] Davut Akca et al., “Joy, Compassion, and Job Satisfaction: Insights into the Canadian Prison Chaplaincy,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 70, no. 4 (2026): 271–286, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X231212812

[2] Akca et al., “Joy, Compassion, and Job Satisfaction,” 278–284.

[1] Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” in The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006), 66–73.