Victims Demanding Reparations For Holmesburg Prison Experiments

The late University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Albert Kligman — founder of the lucrative anti-aging ingredient Retin-A and perpetrator of some of the most unethical human experiments at the former Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia — maintained that no prisoner suffered long-term harm, as far as he knew. That isn’t how Adrianne Jones-Alston remembers it. Kligman’s experimentation ruined Jones-Alston’s family life as her father, Leodus Johnson, who participated in the tests in the 1960s, struggled with psychological and physical after-effects, including becoming inexplicably hostile. With her father’s erratic behavior, Jones-Alston’s home life descended into violence and chaos, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Jones-Alston will join other Holmesburg survivors and their descendants at discussions this week sponsored by her Jones Foundation for Returning Citizens. Before Wednesday’s panel discussion, community members will demand reparations from Penn. “It’s time that we bring this issue to the forefront and demand justice,” Jones-Alston said.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the end of the Holmesburg experiments. Kligman’s legacy continues to be both celebrated as a medical genius and reviled as greed-fueled human rights abuser. Kligman conducted the prison experiments at a time it was considered standard procedure to use incarcerated people as test subjects. Throughout the 1960s, at least half of state prison systems hosted medical research. By 1972, an estimated 90% of all drugs were first tested on prisoners. Jones-Alston has become an activist for the thousand who returned from Holmesburg physically and mentally broken by Kligman’s work, which included experiments in dermatology that exposed prisoners to harmful chemicals. This week’s discussions are designed to give the victims and their families a voice. Kligman died in 2010 at 93, convinced he did nothing wrong. “I’m on the medical ethics committee at Penn, and I still don’t see there having been anything wrong with what we were doing,” he told the New York Times in 2006.