This section is intended to provide a brief history of health abuses in prisons. It will focus on the many experiments that medical researchers have done on incarcerated people. There are many ways we will examine health violence in prisons in the coming sections, but this one is intended to give a broader context of a disregard for the health of incarcerated people. This disregard is not only by prison staff, government officials, and corporations but also by well-respected people such as academic researchers.
Above is a documentary that is an extension of the 1988 book Acres of Skin by Allen Hornblum. Both the book and documentary share the horror stories that incarcerated men in Philadelphia experienced in the Holmesburg Prison. During the 1950s-1970s many coercive and nonconsensual medical experiments on incarcerated men traumatized their bodies. This documentary has interviews with the victims who explain what happened and how this changed them.
The book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington is a great resource for learning about the many cases of abuse the medical system has had on Black Americans across history. These stories are important to understanding how biomedicine has and continues to abuse and mistreat Black people in the United States. A discussion of public health in the United States cannot be had without the understanding that Black people have been forced into medicine as research subjects while not benefitting from the medical system at all. Biomedicine and healthcare in the United States cannot safely move forward without a greater dismantling and condemnation of white supremacy. I recommend this book, but do want to warn that this book may be traumatic for Black people to read as it discusses extreme dehumanization and violence against Black people.
This book is a very detailed examination of many different health abuses throughout time, but one chapter in particular details the history of experimentation within prisons. Below I am including examples from Chapter 10, titled Caged Subjects: Research on Black Prisoners, from Washington’s Medical Apartheid book.1 This book and the documentary above show how incarcerated people’s health is ignored and even targeted, even by the medical field. This history is essential to understanding why prisons cannot exist without health violence. Prisons, since inception, are built off the idea and principle that people lose bodily autonomy when they are seen as “criminals” and therefore their health and body become dispensable.
- In 1910, the Journal of the National Medical Association said incarcerated people, especially Black people, are the best people for research experiments (Washington 245). Prisoners’ rights are often neglected and their isolation limits communication with people (family and friends) who could hold the prison and doctors accountable for their abuses. This is why the reporting of prison conditions is so important.
- Jesse Williams, a man who was held at the Philadelphia Holmesburg Prison, talks of his experience being experimented on with chemicals, radiation, acid, and more for a couple of dollars a session sometime between the 1950s and 1970s. These experiments were done throughout the prison and were by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist named Dr.Albert M. Kligman who recruited incarcerated people for experiments. Williams had dead skin implanted in him, was exposed to known poisonous plants, and was injected with illnesses like the flu. Dr.Kligman was known for saying he saw the incarcerated people as no more than “acres of skin”(Washington 244 and 249).
- In Washington State incarcerated people in the 1960s-1970s had their testicles exposed to radiation and cut (Washington 252).
- In a state prison in Ohio in 1952, around 400 incarcerated people were injected with live cancer cells, with almost half of the victims being Black.
- Incarcerated people were used as guinea pigs for the CIA’s research on how to make a “truth drug” that was intended for interrogating competing countries’ intelligence officials. This meant that incarcerated people were drugged with psychoactive drugs that would sometimes cause paralysis and many said they were forever altered after the trials (Washington 251)
- In the late 1960s incarcerated people at the California Medical Facility used succinylcholine, a chemical that paralyzed people to the point that they could not move or breathe. When prisoners refused to participate, the Facility forced them to be injected anyway (Washington 259)
- 1963 Medical Doctor Robert Batterman who was big in pharmaceutical experimentation explained that using the FDA’s trial regulations 90% of drugs do not leave Trial 1 because of safety issues and prisons are the most suitable and used place for running Trial 1’s because incarcerated people are entrapped so they can see the side effects of the drugs easily. (add citation)
- In many prisons in Alabama in the late 1960s incarcerated people were subject to research on plasma transfusions with little care which led to mismatched blood type transfusions and hygiene problems that led many participants to get hepatitis. No consent for this trial (Washington 253).
The health of incarcerated people has never been a priority, in fact, the opposite is true. Incarcerated people’s bodies have been used as experiments to bolster other people’s health. Since the 1970s, more guidelines have been established about how researchers can interact with prisons. This does not erase this history or even stop the health violence in prisons. Instead, it means that corporations have found new ways to exploit incarcerated bodies for the financial and social gain of people on the outside, such as prison labor. The next sections will tackle the specific ways Alabama prisons continue to engage in health violence.
PRISONS ARE A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS: ALABAMA PAVES THE WAY 