Pen. Code, § 3521 · Chapter 4. Prisoners’ Rights as Research Subjects
Pen. Code, § 3521
Text — As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
For the purposes of this title, a prisoner shall be deemed to have given his informed consent only if each of the following conditions are satisfied:
(a) Consent is given without duress, coercion, fraud, or undue influence.
(b) The prisoner is informed in writing of the potential risks or benefits, or both, of the proposed research.
(c) The prisoner is informed orally and in writing in the language in which the subject is fluent of each of the following:
(1) An explanation of the biomedical or behavioral research procedures to be followed and their purposes, including identification of any procedures which are experimental.
(2) A description of all known attendant discomfort and risks reasonably to be expected.
(3) A disclosure of any appropriate alternative biomedical or behavioral research procedures that might be advantageous for the subject.
(4) The nature of the information sought to be gained by the experiment.
(5) The expected recovery time of the subject after completion of the experiment.
(6) An offer to answer any inquiries concerning the applicable biomedical or behavioral research procedures.
(7) An instruction that the person is free to withdraw his consent and to discontinue participation in the research at any time without prejudice to the subject.
Notes and commentary — not statutory text
History
Added by Stats. 1977, Ch. 1250.
Source of truth
- Edition
- As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
- Official file
- https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PEN§ionNum=3521.
- Text hash
- sha256 e449c300e542c09b0fb879f645e773494070aef03ea3c5b4b0983e9bf8017080
- Composed by
- compose_ca.py 2026-10-22: the Legislative Counsel's CAML content files read by a tokenizer (caml_readers.reader_a); an independent xml.etree reading (caml_readers.reader_b) agrees on every section
Cited by 2 provisions
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