Acres of Skin

Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison

Allen M. Hornblum

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134001644
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Médecine
• Categoría: Déontologie en médecine

At a time of increased interest and renewed shock over the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Acres of Skin sheds light on yet another dark episode of American medical history. In this disturbing expose, Allen M. Hornblum tells the story of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison.

Part One: THE SUBJECTS, THE DOCTORS, AND THE EXPERIMENTS

One: “The Money Was Good and the Money Was Easy.”

They marched six of us, three blacks and three whites, all the same age, late twenties-early thirties, into this one room of the trailer. They told us to strip down and put on these white, cotton pullovers with three-quarter sleeves and elastic bands around the waist. Some of us were getting pretty nervous now, especially when we saw the syringes on the table.

I never did drugs, it wasn’t my thing. I was into chasing women and crime, but no drugs. Good-looking women and nice cars, that’s how I got my high.

The attendants all looked professional in white smocks and stethoscopes. They lined us up and gave us our shots. I learned later that the shot I got was based on my height and weight. One of the doctors told us to go into the rec room and relax. I went in and sat down on some plastic furniture. There was heavy padding under the shag rug on the floor. I felt fine. I picked up a pack of playing cards that was on the table and asked another guy, “Do you want to play some gin rummy?” He said, “Okay,” and as I dealt the cards I could feel it coming on. The room started to spin around. I looked at my hand, and it looked like there were 30 or 40 cards there.

It was only three to five minutes after the shot, but I was on a real trip. I started to see double and triple, and the room was really spinning pretty good. I went back to when I was four or five years old and playing with little kids. Then I was about seven years old and going to school and I was in a classroom with all the other little children I used to know. All the old faces came back to me. Then I went from 7 to 14 or 15 and my first serious girlfriend. We were going to dances, making out in the back seat of the car. It took me right up until my twenties. It was a good trip.¹

I

The year was 1964, the location was Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia, and inmate Al Zabala had just become a test subject for the U.S. Army in one of its tests of chemical agents. Serving a one-year sentence for burglary, the 27-year-old Zabala had originally expressed fear at being part of an experiment, but he gradually overcame his misgivings—for a fee. His personal story is typical of the thousands of American prisoners who decided to sell themselves as experimental subjects during the postwar expansion of medical research. This chapter offers an opportunity for those who contributed their bodies to science, but never achieved fame or fortune, to tell their side of the story: To explain why they chose to be, and what it was like to be, a Holmesburg guinea pig.

Born in South Philadelphia, Al Zabala was raised in New Jersey with his two sisters and three brothers. His parents separated in the mid-1950s, and his mother remarried twice while scratching out a living operating a series of small restaurants. In June 1954, he joined the Navy and got his first taste of life behind bars. While stationed in Pensacola, Florida, Zabala served three months in the brig for theft. For the next ten years he was able to stay clear of prison, but he was far from being a law-abiding citizen. Zabala and his friends stole cars and sold them to chop shops, each car bringing between $500 and $600. After a few years, they stepped up to burglary, starting with smash-and-grabs at fur stores on the Main Line, Philadelphia’s affluent western suburb.

“There were three of us,” he recalls, “a wheelman and two to swing the baseball bats. Smash the store window and grab seven or eight furs before anybody knew what happened. Then we got into jewelry stores. Same deal. Before they put those heavy steel grates on the windows, it was easy.”²

In 1963, Zabala was imprisoned again, this time in Philadelphia. Jobs in jail were rare, competition for them was tough, and the pay was poor. “My first jail job was as a goon in OBS [the Psychological Observation Unit]. I put straight jackets on the patients in Holmesburg’s psych unit. I soon heard about the U of P [University of Pennsylvania] studies and the good pay they offered. They had all kinds of tests—foot powder tests, eye drop tests, face creams, underarm deodorant, toothpaste, liquid diets, and more. It was easy money. You could make $10 to $300 a test depending on how long it lasted.”

Despite the pay, Zabala was still wary of the university’s experiments and decided instead to take an assistant technician job with the unit. “A friend of mine worked for them and he recommended me. They gave me a test to see if I could read and write. There was a reading comprehension test, an interview, and then I was hired.” Zabala was taken to H Block, the cell block where all the tests were administered. There were “freezers, refrigerators, and all kinds of food, real street food. We got a lot of special treatment.”

As an inmate worker for the University of Pennsylvania, Zabala received about $40-$50 a month and the opportunity to be part of any test he wanted. For six months, Zabala watched and decided what to do. “Lots of crazy stuff went on in there.” Everything made him suspicious; samples were labeled by “numbers and codes” and if he asked what a specific cream or lotion was, or who was testing it, the technicians replied “We don’t know” or “We can’t tell you.”

“Lots of men were burned or scarred and wanted to sue, but they had signed releases and waivers and thought they couldn’t,” Zabala says. He, too, came away with a prominent scar, a permanent reminder of his days as a “chemist” in the U of P research unit. His account of that incident is interesting for the light it sheds on the wide latitude given to inmate workers in the clinical research program.

We were given jars marked A, B, C, D…with percentages of 2%, 8%, 4%…. We had to mix the creams together and then put them on the inmates. This one time, I got the job to mix the chemicals for the test and I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. But I still had the sense to test it on myself [before I used it] and it burned a hole the size of a thumbnail in [the skin of] my right forearm. It hurt like hell. If I [had] put that stuff on an inmate, he would have come back at me with a pipe or a shank.

Despite potential dangers, Zabala could not remain immune to the lures of the testing program. “It was something to do, the best game in town. The money was good and the money was easy.” He first tried a deodorant test. He chose the one he thought had the least chance of harming him, and says it was funny watching other prisoners smell his armpits and look for signs of irritation. He was a bit uneasy that the underarm lotion was unlabeled, but the $25 he received each week smothered his concern. He went on to test hand and body lotions and soon realized the program’s full financial potential. “Three or four tests at a time could mean real easy money. Foot powder tests and deodorants would bring you $100 per month, and hand creams a buck a day. You could be making $300 to $400 a month.” Though meager by outside-world standards, these wages were incredible by ordinary pay scales in prisons of the 1960s. Workers received 15 cents a day to make shoes, knit socks and shirts, sew trousers, and work in the plumbing shop.³ For Zabala, who had had a decent paying job with the psych unit, the appeal of big money was enough to tempt and convert an opponent of human experimentation.

“I was scared of other tests,” recalls Zabala, “medications and eyedrops [with] no labels on them. They looked nasty.” Zabala put aside his reluctance to try anything other than topical ointments when he heard talk around the prison that a special study for the Army was starting and that the pay would dwarf anything the subjects had seen so far. A volunteer could make somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500. Zabala decided to check it out.

He was given “a 15-minute interview [in which] white-coat professionals from the University of Pennsylvania asked questions about his age, place of birth, family history of mental illness, or health problems.” A couple of weeks later he was asked to fill out a three-page questionnaire and was surprised to receive $25. That was followed by a second interview with a psychologist and a psychiatrist, and an additional $50. Zabala felt he was making out pretty well and he hadn’t done anything yet. “They were sucking [me] in with all the money,” he says.

Shortly thereafter, Zabala’s group of six inmates along with three other similarly sized groups were given thorough physical examinations, more exacting than any they had ever received. The day before the actual test, they were given a “talk” that described a test of “experimental stuff,” but nothing too specific. The test subjects were asked to sign a paper, a kind of “release” from any damage claims. In return, they were given $300. “The money closed the deal.”

Al Zabala believes he was given an injection of a substance “ten times stronger than LSD” and remained in the trailer for seven days. Except for the “trip” he has no recollection of his actions during that period. His room was completely padded, walls and floors, and two corners of the ceiling held video and audio equipment. “The microphone was about the size of a pack of cigarettes and the surveillance camera half the size of a shoe box.” A “peep slot” in the door allowed the testing staff to observe the subjects at any time. Toward the end of his stay, the medical staff peppered him with questions: Who are you? Where are you? What are you doing here? Zabala says, “I figured what they gave us was pretty damn potent. I got the impression that [one of the technicians who kept an eye on me] didn’t like the study, didn’t approve of it.”

I wasn’t right for a month after the test. I was real subdued and quiet. I had problems swallowing food and a constantly dry throat. They put me on a liquid diet until I could swallow whole food again. When we finally came back to population, all the guys on the study had to wear badges that said we were not responsible for our actions and if we acted up to get U of P personnel to come and get us. We had to wear these badges for a month and once a week talked to the psychs. They made us take paperwork and association tests to measure our psychological condition.

Some prisoners, according to Zabala, had such bad reactions to the drugs that staff had to restrain them and give them antidotes.

[A few] guys came back to population and didn’t remember their names. Guys would fade in and out of consciousness…. Some guys beat themselves up and punched themselves in the head. Some of the guys told me they had violent, ugly trips— dogs as big as horses, worms like alligators—horrible trips, being eaten by giant spiders, living in the 13th century. One guy said he was hung and killed.

For a few years Al Zabala’s body would periodically break out in “strawberry rashes,” but overall, he felt fine, helped by the fact that he walked out of Holmesburg “$1,500 richer because of the drug study.” Nearly a decade later, however, he began to have second thoughts. Two incidents concerned him and gave rise to troubling questions about the Army study. The first occurred in 1973, when Zabala locked himself in the bedroom of his sister’s house for three days and refused to come out. He did not eat, sleep, or wash during that period and did not respond to his sister’s pleas to unlock the door. When he finally came out he had no recollection of the prior three days. His sister encouraged him to see a doctor, but he refused. He claims never to have had such an incident again, but he may have. According to William Robb, a convicted murderer serving a life term at the State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh, he saw Zabala experience something similar in the mid-1970s.⁴ Robb had escaped from a series of prisons, and before leaving the area, he decided to share a farewell drink with Zabala at a neighborhood bar. As soon as they sat down, Zabala started to behave in an odd manner and fainted. Robb thought Zabala might have a brain tumor, but Zabala passed it off as a weird aftereffect of the tests at Holmesburg. He never took these incidents seriously until the late 1970s, when newspaper “articles began to appear, describing the extent of the Holmesburg medical studies.” Then he began to wonder if the tests had “changed the molecules in [his] body or affected [his] chromosomes.”

II

William Robb also has a clear recollection of the Holmesburg experiments and describes the different varieties of tests in the following letter:

In 1970 [and] 1971, I participated in three different types of tests…. Two of the[m], nicknamed “The Patch Tests” by inmates, dealt with…the experimentation of new products not yet released to the general public…. The first Patch Test…was one [that] tested lotions, creams, skin moisturizers, and suntan products. The procedure for these tests [was] as follows: A grid, made from thick strips of white hospital tape was fixed to the upper portion of an inmate’s back shoulders. The grid consisted of about 20 squares. In each one of these squares a dab of lotion was applied and the inmate’s back was exposed to different temperatures from a sunlamp. The exposure to the sunlamp lasted anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes, after which each square was inspected for degree of blistering or other adverse reactions…. The grid was then covered with a large solid piece of tape (to prevent tampering by the inmate) and the inmate was returned to his cell. This test lasted about 30 days and once a day…the inmate was called back over to the lab and exposed to the sunlamp. After about five days of the sunlamp, there [were] sections of the…skin that were burnt a deep brown and the skin started to peel, itch, and blister. If a certain square became too damaged it was covered over with a permanent piece of tape and the tests continued on the grid.⁵

According to numerous interviews, the patch test was one of the most common tests performed on the inmates. The resulting patchwork quilt design left on the prisoner’s backs and shoulders remained for years after they had left Holmesburg. “My back is all marked up [with] bad blackheads and scars,” complains Withers Ponton a 79-year-old lifer convicted of homicide in the late 1960s.⁶ An example of someone who repeatedly signed on as a human guinea pig, he went through “over 50 tests” during his “40 months” in the county jail and figures he “made a couple grand” during that period. Ponton took part in “at least 25 biopsy tests” and says he has “about 6 different spots and 24 different marks” on his back that “are still there after 25 years.” He says he got “a needle in the shoulder each week and then a biopsy where they would take a portion out.” He received “$5 for each test site and $30 for all.” Ponton’s ability to endure the pain and suffering from a wide range of tests is remarkable, considering his reaction to his first experiment. “That first test nearly killed me it was so painful. I nearly went through the wall. I had a patch put on my back that covered a large area. It was a 10-day test and I wasn’t allowed to take a shower,” he says. He received $10 or $15.

One of the more unusual experiments that Withers Ponton agreed to was what he calls the “gauze test.” With no anesthetic, he lay on a table while “two young doctors from the University of Pennsylvania” cut two 1-inch incisions on each side of his lower back. They inserted gauze pads into the wounds, and then stitched up the incisions. Ten days later, Ponton returned, the doctors reopened one wound, removed the gauze pad, and restitched the wound. After another 10 days, Ponton was brought back for the same procedure on the other incision. He was never told the purpose of the exercise and accepted $20 for his trouble—“$10 for each cut.” He’s still angry that “now I got these scars all over my back.”

“I looked like a checkerboard with patches and skin discoloration on my arms, back and chest,” says Ron Keenan, a lifer at Graterford Prison, who spent 34 months at Holmesburg in the late 1960s while awaiting trial for the murder of a policeman.⁷ “I was on a lot of suntan tests because I was light-skinned,” but the patch tests “really irritated my back…. I [had] burn blisters for months.” “I was afraid of the patch test, it was like a tattoo,” says Billy Allison, a Graterford inmate.⁸ “One year later I got on one [study] and I was sorry I did.”

Both inmates and guards say you can recognize a Holmesburg inmate decades later by the distinctive scars from skin burns and patch tests. “If you ever saw the guys on the beach,” says Captain James Kinslow, who started working in Holmesburg in 1965, “you would know where the hell they’ve been.”⁹ Joseph Dade, a retired Philadelphia deputy sheriff and former Holmesburg guard, says, “Guys sold themselves for a few bucks. Guys looked like zebras when the patches came off.”¹⁰ Correctional officer Hank Brame uses a different metaphor. For many, the patches became “a symbol of status or achievement, much like stripes on the sleeve of a soldier. Some of those patches took the skin clear off,” but the inmates thought their willingness to subject themselves to such experiments added to their macho status in jail.¹¹

One academic study that examined why prisoners volunteered as subjects for medical research experiments did indeed find that “nearly all the non-volunteers believed that volunteering for such an enterprise was an ‘act of courage.’”¹² With the passage of time, however, the idea of bravery has receded in the minds of many former Holmesburg inmates interviewed. In fact, not one of the inmates—either those who volunteered or those who refused—...