Those affected by Holmesburg Prison experiments are still seeking justice, 50 years later

Up to his death in 2010, University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Albert M. Kligman — founder of the highly lucrative anti-aging ingredient Retin-A and perpetrator of some of the country’s most unethical human experiments at the former Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia — maintained that no prisoner suffered long-term harm, as far as he knew.

But 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 while in Holmesburg in the 1960s, struggled with the 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, and her adolescent years became evermore turbulent

“My damage came from my home. My father’s came from Holmesburg,” said Jones-Alston.

» READ MORE: A brief timeline of the Holmesburg Prison experiments

Jones-Alston will join other Holmesburg survivors and their descendants at two discussions sponsored by her Jones Foundation for Returning Citizens, at the University of Pennsylvania on Oct. 23 and at St. Joseph’s University on Oct. 24.

Before Wednesday’s panel discussion, a press conference is planned for 5 p.m. at 34th and Sansom Streets, where 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 event at the University of Pennsylvania is not just a conversation; it’s a call to action.”

Attempts to reach a Penn spokesperson for comment were not immediately successful.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the end of the Holmesburg experiments, but 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, FDA officials estimated that over 90% of all investigational drugs were first tested on prisoners.

Following in her father’s footsteps, 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.

The Wednesday event, from 6 to 8 p.m. at 3501 Sansom St., will include Jones-Alston, writer and historian Allen Hornblum, Holmesburg survivor Herbert Rice and his grandson Ja’ir Rice, medical anthropologist Michelle Munyikwa, and Penn law student Malea Hayles. The panel discussion — “The Holmesburg Prison Experiments and the Call for Restorative Justice” — will be moderated by Penn law professor and 2024 MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts, whose work focuses on racial inequities in health and social service systems.

On Thursday at 11 a.m., a smaller event featuring Jones-Alston, Hornblum, and Rice will take place at St. Joe’s President’s Lounge in the Campion Student Center, 5600 City Ave.

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.

Hornblum has always seen it differently.

Hornblum was a 23-year-old newly hired adult literacy instructor at the Philadelphia Detention Center in 1971 when he first entered Holmesburg, which opened in 1896 and closed in 1995. Because so many of those incarcerated were patched with bandages, he thought the Detention Center was extremely violent.

Instead, they were the willing subjects of dermatological testing under Kligman’s auspices, which lasted from 1951 though 1974. Where Kligman saw research at its best, Hornblum saw abuse, moral indifference, and greed, which he documented in his 1998 book, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison.

He spared little in describing the physical suffering and psychological horror that came along with what the participants thought of as easy work and easy pay on H-block, the prison area for the Holmesburg experiments. They volunteered for the dermatological testing because they could make upward of $1 or $2 a day, compared to 15 cents a day, at most, in a prison job.

I always felt something was wrong. White men in white lab coats and all the test subjects were Black.

“I always felt something was wrong. White men in white lab coats and all the test subjects were Black,” recalled Hornblum.

Herbert Rice was also 23 when he entered Holmesburg, in 1968. “When I went in Holmesburg, I was on E-block, and a buddy told me about H-Block,” Rice said. “It was a way to make money.” The pay helped him override concerns about test safety.

Kligman’s long list of clients included pharmaceutical companies Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, cigarette manufacturer R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, cosmetics company Helena Rubinstein, and even the U.S. Army. In 1966, Dow Chemical asked him to test dioxin, a highly poisonous component of Agent Orange, applying doses to the foreheads and backs of incarcerated men. A contract with the U.S. Army sought to test hallucinogenic and psychotropic drugs on people to the point of mental incapacitation.

Hornblum said that Kligman’s experiments exposed the incarcerated participants to “herpes, staphylococcus, skin-blistering chemicals, radioactive isotopes, psychoactive drugs, and carcinogenic compounds such as dioxins.”

Many of the participants, most with low literacy levels, weren’t certain of what was being tested. Rice, who stayed at Holmesburg for a year, recalled doing a toothpaste study. There was also a detergent study where they left his hand soaking in a latex glove of detergent mixed with water for 24 hours. Like many others, he had little idea of a test’s purpose.

There was a radiation study that left his back scarred and discolored that he thinks was to test a salve to return the pigmentation. There was the milkshake study where he was required to drink a milkshake and eat a waffle for every meal for three weeks, which Rice thinks was part of developing protein shakes.

He also recalls downing a pill for a metabolic study that he said had something “foreign in it” that he believes left him with permanent mental scarring.

For Rice, his first inkling of trouble was a day he was talking to a Holmesburg guard, a man he knew from his life on the outside. All of a sudden, Rice said, he “snapped.”

“I could hear myself ask myself, ‘Herb, what are you doing?’”

That incident ended with Rice in solitary confinement and was the start of a lifetime of mental health problems.

Leodus Johnson was once a happy-go-lucky man who worked at a clothing factory and supported his family. And Jones-Alston was daddy’s girl, sitting daily on the steps of her North Philadelphia apartment, awaiting his arrival from work for a ride on his shoulders.

But the factory shuttered in the ’60s. Johnson was laid off and, after a desperate but failed attempt to make money, he found himself at Holmesburg for receiving stolen goods. It was his first prison stay, but it wouldn’t be his last.

Wanting to make bail, he did what about 90% of those incarcerated at Holmesburg did: He signed up for Kligman’s experiments. “My mother begged him not to, but he wouldn’t listen,” said Jones-Alston.

“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,” Johnson said in a 1999 interview. He died in 2018.

Like Rice, Johnson changed after the testing.

Jones-Alston said she was about 5 years old when she experienced her first glimpse of the white scars on her father’s back. The sight left her shaken, thinking her father’s disfigurement and increasingly erratic behavior was evidence that he had become a monster. Eventually her father’s violent eruptions destroyed the family. At the time no one understood what was wrong, but Jones-Alston said her father’s spiraling mental health also started her own downward path.

It began with running away from home, which lead to homelessness, violence, and mental health challenges. Ultimately it led to her own incarceration on drug-related charges. In short, her crime life paralleled her father’s, including becoming a justice advocate like him.

Johnson founded the Community Assistance for Prisoners in Philadelphia, helping those experiencing reentry find jobs and fighting against police brutality.

After a year of experiments, Rice was eventually moved to Graterford (which closed in 2018) and then Rockview prisons.

Once released, he was able to work but found it difficult to maintain relationships. He married three times, and two of his best friends from Holmesburg, who shared his experiences, died by suicide.

Even today, 52 years later, he can still have terrifying nightmares of men in white coats chasing him down H-block with needles. His story is tragic but a common one among survivors of the Holmesburg experiments.

Rice added: “I lost my kids. I lost my wife. I lost my friends.”