October 6, 2006

When Prisoners Are Victims

By ALLEN M. HORNBLUM

As an adult-literacy instructor in the Philadelphia prison system in the early 1970s, I spent many hours in the city's largest lockup, Holmesburg Prison. Typical of most overcrowded urban jails, Holmesburg displayed all the signs of anger, despair, and violence that one would expect. But in addition the prison was probably the nation's largest site of biomedical experiments on human beings.

Scores of desperate, mostly uneducated African-American prisoners offered themselves up as human

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