Biopower in Medical Control of Offenders; Critics on Several Regulations in Criminal Policy of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE and Jordan

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Assistant Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at the Institute for Research and Development of Humanities (SAMT), Iran, Tehran

10.22091/dclic.2026.15748.1169

Abstract

After the decline of the era of exercising political power over the bodies of working men and the objectification of the body in the eyes of the powerful, the era of domination over the human body as a disciplinary power for punishment, with justifications for controlling the health and treating criminals, began, and the mentally ill and delinquents were also expanded into part of the power equation from fundamental rights to criminal rights. The evolution of the forms of government over the bodies and minds of prisoners is the soft violence resorted to by authoritarian criminal policy, which has transformed the legitimate showcase of respect for human rights into a cover for medical control of hordes of criminal convicts, and has made not only criminals, but also the sciences of studying criminals - including health policymaking and criminal policymaking - into tools of the ideology of a penal order that benefits little from criminal justice. This article, using a qualitative method and in the context of critical analysis of legal discourse, based on the expansion of Foucault's critique of criminal discipline, criticizes some criminal and paracriminal regulations of Iran with a comparative look at some Islamic countries (including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates) as forms of misuse of legislative criminal policy for the hegemony of power over the psyche of physically convicted persons (prisoners). t is necessary to amend some Iranian penal regulations based on comparative experiences to prevent the diversion of noble medical goals into penal policy objectives that are inconsistent with the goals and ideals of criminal law, and this is the subject of this article. The article shows that the penal regulations and customs of periodic examinations and medical screenings in Iran's legislative and judicial criminal policy, in comparison with the laws of selected Islamic countries, lack legal guarantees to prohibit instrumentalization in collecting biological and psychological data in the process of assessing the dangerousness of convicts. The lack of clear rules on data confidentiality, informed consent, and limits on the use of medical information also creates the risk that health data will be used against the individual in judicial proceedings, which conflicts with fundamental principles of medical ethics and is part of the larger challenge of the political economy of treatment in prison.

Keywords

References

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Criminal Law Doctrines of Islamic Countries
Volume 3, Issue 3 - Serial Number 11
Autumn 2026
September 2026
Pages 74-106

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