We are the children of men who were experimented on in Holmesburg Prison. Where’s our justice?

Last month marked the 50th anniversary of the day our fathers testified before the U.S. Senate.

Though only recently removed from the clutches of Philadelphia’s criminal justice system and Holmesburg Prison’s fierce cell blocks, Allan Lawson and Leodus Jones, leaders of the Prisoners’ Rights Council and the Community Assistance for Prisoners, were on an unprecedented mission.

After suffering through their dehumanizing experience as imprisoned human guinea pigs, they felt compelled to inform Congress that thousands of indigent prison inmates in Philadelphia were being exploited as experimental test subjects. Not only were inmates confronted with unreasonably high bail, horrid conditions, and pervasive sexual violence, they were imprisoned in a bizarre world of medical research. While in prison, they and others had been subjected to unethical tests of viruses, fungus, asbestos, LSD, and a component of Agent Orange, conducted by a University of Pennsylvania faculty member. “All testing” behind the prison system’s razor wire fences and high walls, they demanded to Congress in 1973, “should be stopped.”

Sen. Edward Kennedy and the other members of the Senate’s subcommittee on health, which was looking into the controversial issue of human experimentation in the aftermath of the shocking Tuskegee syphilis study revelations, learned that the country’s vast penal gulag had become the backbone of pharmaceutical development and human research. During the postwar years, thousands of prisoners from Sing Sing to San Quentin had been incorporated in a wide array of clinical trials including testicular biopsies, injections of radioactive materials, studies of typhoid and scurvy, and burns, in which the participants must be burned. And to Philadelphia’s everlasting embarrassment, its county prison system was the site of some of the most extensive experimentation in America.

» READ MORE: Penn must cut ties with Dr. Albert Kligman, who conducted unethical human research on Black men | Opinion

In their testimony, our fathers recounted the chilling jail experiences they and other Philadelphia inmates experienced. Prisoners had shampoo dropped in their eyes for 24 hours and were infected with potentially deadly bacteria, all for just a couple of dollars per day. Jones said he was laid up for two days after taking an unidentified pill, for which he believed he was paid $30. Prisoners may have been given informed consent waivers, they said, but to most prisoners, it was akin to “reading hieroglyphics” — meaning, impossible to understand.

The experiments were often spearheaded by Albert M. Kligman, a dermatologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Over the years, they testified, Kligman conducted several thousand experiments on thousands of prisoners, testing drugs and cosmetics that Kligman (and Penn) then profited from.

As children at the time, we saw our fathers return home with strange scars on their bodies and surly dispositions that forever changed the family dynamic. Once loving and supportive, they now turned grim and abusive. Their marriages failed, and our childhoods turned dark and problem-ridden.

We saw our fathers return home with strange scars on their bodies and surly dispositions.

As our fathers explained at the Senate hearing, these experiments included men and women who had not been found guilty of any crime. Of the nearly 3,000 inmates in the Philly jail population at the time, 85% were pretrial detainees who didn’t have the money to post bail before their trial, so spent an average of nine months in jail awaiting their day in court. Once their trials took place, Jones and Lawson said, two-thirds of these inmates were eventually found not guilty or saw their cases dismissed.

Making bail was a constant goal, so indigent detainees flocked to the only way to earn money in jail: Kligman’s medical experiments. Little did they know what was harmless and what was a potential threat to their health.

This went on for decades, during which no one in Philadelphia seemed to have a problem with the city’s criminal justice system becoming the nation’s largest purveyor of clinical trials. Hence the reason for the recent flurry of apologies from Penn, the city, and the College of Physicians, which recognized Kligman with an award in 2003.

But these apologies — which our fathers needed 50 years ago — are too little, and too late.

We consider ourselves survivors of the horrific, unethical experiments and torture conducted at Holmesburg Prison. We’ve been heartened by the recent action taken by the city of Philadelphia to address social injustice by awarding $9 million to demonstrators for physical and emotional injury during the protests over the killing of George Floyd, as well as providing $500,000 for free mental health counseling. This action gave us a glimmer of hope that our voices may finally be heard and help given to us and our families.

But so far, our pleas have not been answered.

Both of our fathers have since died. Even in cases like ours, where Holmesburg prisoners are no longer alive, families deserve help for the suffering they experienced. They, too, were affected by the physical scarring of their loved ones’ bodies, side effects from the experiments that still affect their everyday lives both mentally and physically, the depression, the nightmares, the inability to provide for their families due to recurring flare-ups of debilitating side effects, withdrawal, and psychological trauma. Divorces became common; fathers became estranged from their children.

We and other survivors and their descendants of the Holmesburg prisoners need mental health therapy so that our families can heal from the social injustice perpetrated by Kligman and his collaborators. Where is our justice? Where is our help? Where is the needed compensation to help us and our families receive the physical and mental services that will help us to heal? Why are you ignoring our cries for help from injuries that have crippled us and our families for life?

Adrianne Jones-Alston and Pam Godwin-Lawson are the daughters of former inmates at Holmesburg Prison, living in Virginia and Philadelphia, respectively. Next Wednesday, they will discuss reparations and the Holmesburg experiments at St. Joseph’s University.