Penn’s Imprisoned Black “Guinea Pigs” Deserve an Apology and Reparations

“Upon my father’s return, I was shocked by the change in his appearance. His arms and back were a series of scars and discolored blotches.”

My father, Leodus Jones, was a businessman, community activist, and leader in the prison reform movement in Philadelphia. He was also a human guinea pig who endured both mental and physical assaults at the hands of a prominent dermatologist and prestigious university, while incarcerated in the Philadelphia Prison System in the 1960s. The experience proved catastrophic both for him and my family.

My father’s subsequent commitment to inform the public about the city jail’s experimentation program and improve conditions in Philadelphia’s prison system led him to testify before Congress about the rampant medical abuses that occur behind bars. It also led him to file lawsuits against those who had grown comfortable using our nation’s cellblocks as an endless pool for test subjects for scientific research.

Although I was a child at the time, it has taken me some time to recognize the damage that was done by his incarceration and repeated use as a test subject in unethical and dangerous experiments; I now believe that the University of Pennsylvania and the many pharmaceutical companies and government entities that exploited imprisoned African Americans as cheap and available research material should apologize and pay reparations to the families that were harmed by the practice.

As historian Allen M. Hornblum has cataloged in his well-documented books, Acres of Skin and Sentenced to Science, Dr. Albert Kligman and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine turned a city jail into a busy commercial enterprise that made millions for themselves and the many contractors who knew where to go when in need of “research material.” Philadelphia’s three prisons—Holmesburg, House of Correction, and Detention Center—became commercial laboratories testing everything from hair dyes, soap, and athlete’s foot medications to a dizzying array of Phase I drug studies. Worse yet, black prisoners were injected with radioactive isotopes, smeared with dioxin, and they swallowed an assortment of chemical warfare agents. The Philadelphia Prison System, as Hornblum has said, became “the largest human experimentation factory in American history, a virtual K-Mart of investigative opportunity” that probably tested “more drugs and concoctions on more people, for more years, than any place else in the country.”