There is no law against prisoner organ donation; however, the transplant community has discouraged use of prisoners organs since the early 1990s due to concern over prisons high-risk environment for infectious diseases. Physicians and ethicists also criticize the idea because a prisoner is not able to consent to the procedure in a free and non-coercive environment, especially if given inducements to participate. However, with modern testing advances to more safely rule out infectious disease and by ensuring that there are no incentives offered to participate, some have argued that prisoners can now voluntarily consent to organ donation just as they can now consent to medical procedures in general. With careful safeguards, and with over 2 million prisoners in the U.S., they reason that prisoners can provide a solution for reducing organ shortages in the U.S.While some have argued that prisoner participation would likely be too low to make a difference, one Arizona program started by former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio encourages inmates to voluntarily sign up to donate their heart and other organs. As of 2015, there have been over 16,500 participants. Similar initiatives have been started in other US states. In 2013, Utah became the first state to allow prisoners to sign up for organ donation upon death. Religious viewpoints
There are several different religions that have different perspectives. Islam has a conflicting view regarding the issue, with half believing that it is against the religion.
A major point of contention is whether transplantation should be allowed at all if the patient is not yet fully biologically dead, and if brain death is acceptable, whether the persons whole brain needs to have died, or if the death of a certain part of the brain is enough for legal and ethical and moral purposes. Most organ donation for organ transplantation is done in the setting of brain death. However, in Japan this is a fraught point, and prospective donors may designate either brain death or cardiac death – see organ transplantation in Japan. In some nations such as Belgium, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Singapore and Spain, everyone is automatically an organ donor unless they opt out of the system. Elsewhere, consent from family members or next-of-kin is required for organ donation. The non-living donor is kept on ventilator support until the organs have been surgically removed. If a brain-dead individual is not an organ donor, ventilator and drug support is discontinued and cardiac death is allowed to occur. In the United States, where since the 1980s the Uniform Determination of Death Act has defined death as the irreversible cessation of the function of either the brain or the heart and lungs, the 21st century has seen an order-of-magnitude increase of donation following cardiac death. In 1995, only one out of 100 dead donors in the nation gave their organs following the declaration of cardiac death.