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Interview

USA: the Holmesburg prison experiments

Allen M. Hornblum investigated how prisoners in a Philadelphia prison were exploited in the pursuit of knowledge and for financial gain.

Allen M. Hornblum has dedicated much of his life to uncovering the truth. He is the author of seven books on topics spanning from prison to espionage and sports. In the criminal justice field, he started out as a prison literacy instructor. He went on to serve in various capacities working with prison monitoring and administrative bodies based in Pennsylvania.

In 1990, he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office, but he resigned in 1994 to fully devote himself to his research on scientific experiments conducted on prisoners. His most famous book, published in 1998, “Acres of Skin”, investigates the experiments conducted at Holmesburg prison from 1951 to 1974.

Since then, he has lectured on his work at several institutions and advocated for a number of policies, such as improving conditions for prisoners and their right to condoms, reproductive rights, and right-to-know environmental campaigns. Today, with over 50 years of experience in the criminal justice field, he continues to pressure actors who played a role in the Holmesburg experiments to acknowledge their involvement and issue public apologies.

Prison Insider met Allen M. Hornblum to take a closer look at this moment in the history of the US prison system. What makes prisoners particularly vulnerable to these forms of abuse? How did these experiments become normalised and go on for so many years? Interview.

It looked like there had been a major gang war, or knife fight, in the exercise yard or cell block.

The scientific journalist Catherine Mary wrote a paper about Hornblum’s investigation, published in Le Monde in October 2022.

Read it

Prison Insider. What led you to investigate Holmesburg prison?

Allen M. Hornblum. From the very first day I walked into the Philadelphia prison system in 1971, one of the most striking things I saw were the scores of inmates whose bodies were covered with medical tape and bandages. I could see them on their arms, chests, shoulders, and backs. It looked like there had been a major gang war, or knife fight, in the exercise yard or cell block. The next day I asked a guard why so many inmates were wearing medical bandages. The guard said, “Oh that’s nothing, that’s just the perfume experiments for the University of Pennsylvania”. I was stunned. They were putting Arpege and Chanel on these inmates. It just didn’t seem realistic that an Ivy League university would do perfume studies on prisoners. It was a deeply embedded part of prison culture that I never expected.

At the time, Holmesburg Prison housed 3,000 inmates. Nearly 9 out of 10 were black and most of the rest were Puerto Rican. The doctors were all white, all wearing white lab coats with MD or PhD after their name.

By the 1990s, I was running the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office as the chief of staff, and I was still coming across some of these former inmates. I started pulling them aside asking about the experiments. They would tell me a little bit about what they knew, but they really didn’t know what they were being exposed to, what they were swallowing or being injected with. Then I started tracking down the medical staff who knew what went on in there, but they didn’t want to talk. They would hang up on me, curse me out or beg me not to use their names. As I did more research on Dr Kligman who ran the program at the University of Pennsylvania, it became a real passion, so much so that I gave up my job at the sheriff’s office to do the research full time for the next five years. The result, in 1998, was my book, “Acres of Skin”, which was named after a phrase Dr Kligman used all the time to describe what he had at his disposal: hundreds, if not thousands, of inmates that he could use for any scientific purpose. He took advantage of that for nearly a quarter of a century.

PI. What makes prisoners particularly vulnerable to this sort of abuse?

AMH. The lack of education of the inmates and their desperation for money is a recipe for abuse if not disaster. When you’re locked up, you’re in a very vulnerable and precarious situation. You’ll do anything to get yourself out of there or to make conditions a bit more forgiving and moderate. The conditions of prisons wherever are so bad that inmates will gravitate towards anything that ameliorates them or helps them earn money. Then they can get out on bail, hire an attorney, or purchase items from the commissary to improve their living conditions, even just basic items like toothbrushes, toothpaste, washcloths, or food. It’s better to have money than not and that goes for in a prison as well.

Inmates were willing to expose themselves to unknown substances knowing it may have negative consequences. But they trusted the doctors. They thought they were working with principled medical professionals from a prestigious university. They were told that no harm would come to them. If something did go awry, they were told that they would be well taken care of, which wasn’t the truth. When I initially came across the experiments at Holmesburg, I kept asking the guard questions because I just couldn’t understand how it was possible. He finally said:

“Look Mr Hornblum, you won’t do it, I won’t do it, but these inmates are crazy and they’re desperate for money. Being a guinea pig through these tests is the only way they can make any money”.

If you were lucky enough to get a job on a cell block pushing a broom, you could make $0.25 to $0.50 a day. But if you’re a guinea pig for Dr Kligman and the University of Pennsylvania, you’re making $1.00 to $1.50 a day. That was serious money by prison standards at that time. The inmates didn’t know how they had been used prior to my book coming out. The doctors never told them anything. It’s possible that in some circumstances they were told the substance was Poison Ivy, a skin cream, or medication, but the doctors never went into detail. I interviewed several dozen inmates, but never found one who knew he had been infected with herpes simplex or wart virus. I never found an inmate who knew that they had been injected with dioxin or radioactive isotopes. A researcher in a lab will never tell a rat or a Guinea pig what they’re testing on them and neither did they tell the inmates. They used them the way you would use a rodent, without bothering to have a conversation or informing the creature what they’re doing. Some prisoners eventually sued but lost the case because of the statute of limitations, two years in Pennsylvania.

The system made it so that there was way more to gain from exploiting prisoners than there was in protecting them.

PI. How could this practice become so widespread and normalised?

AMH. At the end of World War II, the Nuremberg Code1 was drafted, but nobody saw a contradiction with what was going on in prisons. No one saw the unethical nature of it all. They managed to convince themselves that the code applied to Nazi doctors, but not American doctors. Everybody in the scientific community, private and public, wanted to make advances and acquire new knowledge. To do that, they needed test subjects. So they went to those places that basically have throw-away people that aren’t valued. Inmates were considered an intermediate layer between lab rats and normal humans. A lot of academics and doctors got very upset in the 70s when the government started to pull back and say, “no, you can’t use this facility anymore”. They started to argue that it was just going to set back and hurt the advance of science, it was going to thwart knowledge. They had access to a fertile field and now they were being told they can’t use it anymore. The academic and scientific community believed that they were in the right and doing God’s work. These experiments were motivated by both scientific and financial considerations.

Albert Kligman initially arrived at Holmesburg in the early 50s, mostly doing rudimentary dermatological studies on the inmates. As the years went by and his studies became more well known, other scientific entities and pharmaceutical companies came to him asking if he would do phase I drug trials. Kligman was motivated by money, and he could make more doing those studies than whatever he was making as a professor. These trials took place across the country and with like-minded doctors. The university bought into moving from the search for knowledge in the academic arena to making money. They were very successful. The system made it so that there was way more to gain from exploiting prisoners than there was in protecting them. There was more incentive in experimentation. They grew very comfortable using the institutionalized. No one seemed to care. They received millions of dollars for the research they sold to Johnson and Johnson and other pharmaceutical companies.

  1. A set of ethical research principles for human experimentation created by the U.S. Military Tribunal after World War II. ↩

There was a recognition across the board that this practice was unsavoury, unethical, and needed to stop.

PI. How did these practices come to an end?

AMH. In the aftermath of the Tuskegee syphilis study1, there was the great awakening. People started to recognize that they should not be using vulnerable populations as test subjects. Suddenly people in all parts of the country, be it Iowa, California, Minnesota, New York, or Pennsylvania, began recognizing the institutions down the road as places where prisoners were being used as scientific subjects. There was a recognition across the board that this practice was unsavoury, unethical, and needed to stop. Some forms of abuse still take place today, but in no way does it resemble what it looked like 50 or 75 years ago.

In the last year of President Bush’s administration, a group of academics, pharmaceutical industry representatives and government officials tried to reopen the doors to prison experimentation. They were trying to turn back the clock and revisit what was a very dark period in this country’s medical history. However, people like myself and others who were attending the initial conferences opposed these initiatives. The initial media coverage was so dark and critical that the government quickly put an end to those discussions.

  1. A study (1932-1972) conducted by United States public health authorities on a group of roughly 400 African Americans with syphilis. The objective was to observe the effects of the disease when untreated. The men were not informed of the nature of the experiment. More than 100 died. ↩

PI. What is the role of public opinion in promoting accountability?

The University of Pennsylvania is a very powerful force in the city of Philadelphia. It’s a highly acclaimed academic institution that employs more people than any other entity in the city. They did not want to own up to their egregious role in the Holmesburg Experiments. For years after my book came out in 1998, Kligman and the university argued that they weren’t doing anything exceptional because so many other universities and medical schools had the same practices.

As times changed, particularly with the Black Lives Matter protests, schools began to own up to their pasts. They eventually came out with an apology in 2021 admitting that it was wrong. Then we started putting pressure on the city mayor. The City Council came out with their own apology in 2022. We’re working on the College of Physicians which is this old, very eminent bastion of doctors and scientists dating back to the 1700s. They’re going to give us an apology shortly. All these groups should have known at the very beginning that what they were doing was wrong, but they all found it too beneficial to their own interests. Their goal was to make scientific breakthroughs and ignore anything that impeded them.

Interviewed by Mehdi Faiez

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