Holmesburg Prison, given the nickname "The Terrordome," was a prison operated by the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Department of Prisons (PDP) from 1896 to 1995. The facility is located at 8215 Torresdale Avenue in the Holmesburg section of Philadelphia. It was decommissioned in 1995 when it closed. As of today, the structure still stands and is occasionally used for prisoner overflow and work programs.
It was the site of controversial decades-long dermatological, pharmaceutical, and biochemical weapons research projects involving testing on inmates. The experiments and research conducted on prisoners soon influenced ethical standards that are used today in modern research. The creation of the Nuremberg Code with the rule of informed consent was drafted based on this case as well as several others, like the Tuskegee experiments in Alabama. The prison is also notable for several major riots in the early 1970s as well as a report released in 1968, the results of an extensive two-year investigation by the Offices of the Philadelphia Police Commissioner and the District Attorney of Philadelphia documenting hundreds of cases of the rape of inmates. The 1998 book Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison, by Allen M. Hornblum, documents clinical non-therapeutic medical experiments on prison inmates at Holmesburg. In 2022, the city of Philadelphia apologized for the experiments.
, the Philadelphia Department of Prisons's Training Academy still operated near the jail.
History Holmesburg Prison was first opened in 1896 as a response to the overcrowding in Philadelphia's Moyamensing Prison. The prison's original philosophy centered around "separate penal confinement," which featured isolation tactics. However, overpopulation quickly became a problem at this prison as well and as early as 1928 riots occurred from prisoners due, in part, to overcrowding in cells.
On August 20, 1938, 23 prisoners who were on a hunger strike protesting the quality of prison food were placed into an isolation cell known as the Klondike. Due to the steam heat in the cell (where the temperature reached nearly 200 degrees), 4 prisoners died, and the ensuing "bake-oven" death investigations led to the indictment of 10 prison officials, including the superintendent and deputy warden.
The bank robber Willie Sutton, serving a life sentence, escaped from Holmesburg in 1947, with the help of other prisoners (including Frederick Tenuto, who was never recaptured), all dressed as prison guards, by climbing over the walls with ladders.Sutton W, Linn E: Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber. Viking Press (1976), p. 160.
Albert Kligman Dr. Albert Kligman was in charge of experimental research conducted on inmates. Kligman was born in Philadelphia on March 17, 1916, to Jewish immigrant parents. Kligman attended the University of Pennsylvania where he received his bachelor's degree in 1939, and three years later a Doctorate in botany at the same university. In 1947, he received his Medical Degree at the University of Pennsylvania and became a dermatologist to put his fungal studies to use. Kligman is best known for his involvement in the medical experiments on Holmesburg inmates, as well as co-inventing the acne medication Retin-A.
Philadelphia Moyamensing Prison Moyamensing Prison was designed by Thomas Ustick Walter, where it opened October 19, 1835 to remain open for over 100 years. This was considered the prison of the city and county of Philadelphia. This institution was originally three separate facilities, with the additional structures being for females only and the "Debtor's Wing". Famous prisoners at this prison included Tom Hyer, Edgar Allan Poe, Passmore Williamson, and H. H. Holmes. Moyamensing Prison was beginning to overcrowd in year 1896, which is the reason for Holmesburg Prison opening to relieve this issue. While Moyamensing was open until 1963, northeastern Philadelphia Holmesburg prison remained open until 1995.
Experiments on inmates
The Holmesburg Prison was the site of several scientific experiments on the inmates, which raised ethical and moral questions about the extent to which humans can be experimented on. In many cases, inmates chose to undergo several inhumane trials for the sake of small monetary rewards. The prison was viewed as a human laboratory with an inmate population as the subjects. It was an "idle collection of humanity that seemed ideal for dermatologic study," Dr. Albert Kligman famously recounted entering the Holmesburg Prison for the first time as:
Kligman's experimentation was extensive, exposing inmates to "herpes, staphylococcus, cosmetics, skin blistering chemicals, radioactive isotopes, psychoactive drugs, and carcinogenic compounds such as dioxins" and he received financial backing from "33 different sponsors including Johnson & Johnson, Dow Chemicals, and the U.S. Army".
One inmate described experiments involving exposure to microwave radiation, sulfuric, and carbonic acid—solutions which corroded and reduced forearm epidermis to a leather-like substance, and acids which blistered skin in the testicular areas. In addition to exposure to harmful chemical agents, patients were asked to physically exert themselves and were immediately put under the knife to remove sweat glands for examination. In more gruesome accounts, fragments of cadavers were stitched into the backs of inmates to determine if the fragments could grow back into functional organs. A former prisoner and patient recounted how: "They used my body; they did things to me that were inhuman ... I feel less than a woman because of the things they did to me. This brought me pain. A lot of pain." Such experiments did not simply affect the well-being of individual inmates, but also affected the health of entire cell blocks due to experimentation with biological agents including Hong Kong flu, poison ivy and poison oak. So common was the experimentation that in the 1,200-person prison facility, around 80 percent to 90 percent of inmates were experimented on.
The rise of testing harmful substances on human subjects first became popularized in the United States when, during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson founded the Chemical Warfare Service (CAWS) . The Armed Forces Medical Policy Council (AFMPC), for moral and ethical reasons, disagreed with the use of testing human patients, arguing that all testing must be done on volunteers who consented to the experiments. In 1959, CAWS was approved to conduct research on chemical warfare agents on human subjects. Despite gaining this approval, the issue that remained was finding consenting participants.
All inmates who were tested on in the trials had consented to the experimentation; however, they mostly agreed due to incentives like monetary compensation. Individuals like Villanova University graduate Allen M. Hornblum stumbled upon the "perfume experiments" of the University of Pennsylvania, where inmates were "renting their bodies for cash". Experiments in the prison often paid around $30 to $50 and even as much as $800. The Holmesburg prison experiments paid an extraordinary amount compared to other prison jobs. In Philadelphia's prisons at the time, inmates were able to end their sentence if they could pay for 10 percent of the set bail amount. In such a system, experiments were an easy means to earn the money for freedom.
Leodus Jones, a former inmate and one of the principals in the planned lawsuits against the Holmesburg prison wrote: "I was in prison with a low bail. I couldn't afford the monies to pay for bail. I knew that I wasn't guilty of what I was being held for. I was being coerced to plea bargain. So, I thought, if I can get out of this, get me enough money to get a lawyer, I can beat this. That was my first thought."Wertz, Marianna. "'Acres of Skin' or human beings? Human rights at stake in America." EIR National 26.31 (1999): 65-67. Web.Experimental research at Holmesburg Prison was run by Dr. Albert Kligman. After finishing medical school, he was interested in human fungal infections and published multiple papers on the topic. His research at Holmesburg Prison began after the prison took an interest in his work. In the 1950s, an outbreak of athlete's foot plagued the inmates, and in trying to find a treatment for the widespread problem, the prison pharmacist discovered one of Kligman's articles. The pharmacist contacted Kligman, asking him to visit the prison, a request to which he agreed. At the time, Kligman was a University of Pennsylvania Medical School professor of dermatology and was designing an experiment researching fingernail fungal infections. It was documented that the experimentation at Holmesburg prison "entailed hair transplants, implantation of foreign bodies, burns and radiation of the skin, exposure to dioxin, application and ingestion of toxic, near lethal doses of tretinoin, inoculation of Staphylococcus aureus, and the yanking out of fingernails." The prison allowed him to use prisoners as part of his research and experimentation "for a modest fee provide us with ideal opportunities."
In an interview, Kligman recounted being amazed by the prison's potential for research. The controlled conditions of the prison appealed to him, as having the inmates' diet and lifestyle standardized would minimize disruptions to his medical research. After this first visit, Kligman determined he would begin conducting his experiments at Holmesburg. "I began to go to the prison regularly, although I had no authorization. It was years before the authorities knew that I was conducting various studies on prisoner volunteers. Things were simpler then. Informed consent was unheard of. No one asked me what I was doing. It was a wonderful time." He then obtained permission to conduct the dermatological experiments from the superintendent of the prison, who agreed with Kligman that the experiments could benefit the medical realm and the prison. However, there were no formal contracts between the prison/city and the University of Pennsylvania. Perceptions of inmates and that they belong to the state reinforced the belief that practicing on people who potentially committed crimes was impartial.
Types of experiments A range of experiments was conducted on the inmates at Holmesburg. While the experiments started with a focus on dermatological research – Kligman's speciality – experiments were also carried out to test commercial pharmaceutical products and biochemical substances. Dermatological experiments included: A study examining the ways a person's feet could be infected with ringworm. "Enormous quantities of fungi were administered to inmates, after which they wore boots for a week." (1957) A study where prisoners were infected with skin viruses, such as herpes simplex and wart virus. (1958) Studies exposing prisoners to long ultraviolet rays and different versions of yeasts such as candida albicans.
Biochemical experiments included a study testing dioxin, the poisonous substance in Agent Orange. The Dow Chemical Company called for these experiments and compensated Kligman with $10,000. The dosages of dioxin which inmates were exposed to were 468 times greater than those detailed in the company protocol. (1965-1966)
The United States Army contracted Kligman to test the effects of certain mind-altering drugs, with these experiments conducted in trailers on the prison grounds. Subjects from this set of experiments say they weren't aware what drugs they were given due to the lack of consent forms. The drugs produced a variety of lasting effects, such as temporary paralysis, and sudden long-term violent behavior, with half of the subjects reporting to have experienced hallucinations for days. Many prisoners stayed away from the Army experiments due to rumors that they involved LSD and resulted in participants going crazy.