I just sent this text in an email to my state rep. You are welcome to copy it or use a version of it yourself:

>On January 20th, Bill HD.3822 was introduced for consideration by the Massachusetts State legislature. I wish to voice my strident objection to this bill, entitled, "An Act to establish the Massachusetts incarcerated individual bone marrow and organ donation program."
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>Facially, this bill seems to make sense as a way to empower prisoners to do good deeds that benefit their fellow citizens even while the prisoners remain stuck behind bars, as well as a way to spur badly-needed organ and bone marrow donations. However, it results in a number of perverse incentives at every level of the justice system while weakening the foundations of punishment and should by no means be made the law of the land.
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>First and most crucially, this bill puts an enormous amount of pressure on prisoners to become the organ bank of society. If given a choice between giving up a kidney and spending a year in prison, most people in desperate circumstances could hardly say no to the option to get out early, particularly if they have dependents. Even without any explicit promises of time off, prisoners would still feel pressured to give organs in the hopes of preferential treatment from the prison, the guards, and parole boards. This concern is explored in greater depth in this NY Times opinion piece from 2013. Essentially, prisoners do not have a meaningful freedom to refuse, not under such heavy levels of implicit and explicit coercion.
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>Second, the philosophical premise of this bill is an affront to the concept of justice and cannot realistically be limited to organ donation. If prison sentences are meant to be a just punishment befitting the individual's crime, then no amount of extracurricular good deeds could be traded to buy off that punishment. However, if we instead decide that giving up an organ provides sufficient counterbalance to the societal harm that the individual's crime caused, then there would be no reason not to take a sufficiently large check instead. This bill requires us to agree that societal harm and societal benefit are fungible qualities and gives organ donation a specific valuation, but that means we could also assign a particular level of societal benefit to the US dollar and allow prisoners to buy their way out of prison. Imagine a very rich person were to kill someone through reckless driving and received 5 years in prison. Surely $100 million would benefit society vastly more than one individual receiving one kidney, so by the logic of this bill, that rich person could just pay some amount less than $500 million and walk out of jail that same day.
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>Third, this bill creates a perverse incentive for our entire judicial system to imprison more people and for longer sentences. Imprisoning people is a necessary evil, but it ought not be desirable from a societal level. With this bill, however, we encourage the police to arrest more people, DAs to seek harsher sentences, judges to lean in favor of the prosecution, and juries to default to conviction, simply because a larger and more desperate prison population results in a larger store of donated organs. In extreme cases, this could even result in individuals with rare blood types being targeted by crooked police and hospitals. Even if none of these dystopian circumstances were to occur, the public would be eternally suspicious of them happening in hidden backrooms. We do not need even more reasons to distrust our Justice system right now.
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>Fourth, none of this even touches on the extremely problematic macro result: if this bill were to go through and none of the other issues arose, we would still effectively have turned a racial minority population into an organ battery for the White majority of the Commonwealth. For reasons that are complex and multivarried, prison populations tend to be disproportionately BIPOC while White people outside of prison tend to have better access to healthcare than their fellow BIPOC citizens. An organ donor would be more likely than average to be a person of color while an organ recipient would be more likely than average to be White. In a time of increasing racial disharmony, the last thing we need is to turn to such ghoulish measures to feed the longevity of those affluent enough to be able to afford the various costs of organ transplant.
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>Thank you for your time.