cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31999333
If its okay to harvest organs from prisoners without their consent, even after they're dead, then the state now has a vested interest in sending people to prison.
There's some terrifying speculative fiction based upon this premise by Larry Niven:
"The ultimate danger, when a citizen could live for as long as possible if enough organs were available? The cause of it all was the organ banks. With good doctors and a sufficient flow of material in the organ banks, any taxpayer could hope to live indefinitely. What voter would vote against eternal life? The death penalty was his immortality, and he would vote the death penalty for any crime at all."
The story continues where the need for organs continues to rise and there aren't enough murders to harvest organs from. So lessor crimes are then promoted to the death penalty so that those prisoners organs can be harvested too. Eventually you get down to jaywalking being punishable by death so that others can live longer on your organs. Obviously there's a bit of creative license here in this fiction, but you can easy see where it can go in reality.