When Allen Hornblum, a criminal justice professor at Temple University, entered the Philadelphia Prison System in Holmesburg, Pennsylvania thirty-five years ago, he felt as though he had stepped onto a battlefield -- inmates throughout the facility were wrapped in bandages and covered with rashes. But what most alarmed Hornblum was that the scene was not the result of prison brawls or gang violence but of scientific tests being performed by the University of Pennsylvania on some of the country's most disenfranchised populations. The majority of the Holmesburg prisoners were black or Puerto Rican, many did not have high school diplomas, a few were illiterate and all were desperate for money. Informed consent forms were signed infrequently, if at all. It was clear to Hornblum that these inmates were undergoing more than the purported perfume tests and that Holmesburg prison eerily reflected the atrocities of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study which was terminated around the same time.

In the thirty years after the whistle was blown on the prison drug trials, regulations were put in place to protect the rights of inmates around the country. But almost thirty years later in August 2006, National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine released a new report advising federal officials to change the current regulations on prisoner drug testing, allowing it so long as the drug is in the late stages of approval by the Food and Drug Administration. In an age of liberty and equality, the haunting memories of Holmesburg and Tuskegee are surfacing again.

According to The New York Times, until the early 1970's, about 90 percent of all pharmaceutical studies were performed on prison inmates. In Holmesburg prison, prisoners were paid hundreds of dollars a month to participate in studies in which they were exposed to radioactive and carcinogenic chemicals. From 1951 to 1974, several federal agencies and more than thirty pharmaceutical companies used Holmesburg inmates to test their products, mostly in laboratories overlooked by the University of Pennsylvania. It was also revealed that other universities and prisons were involved in similar abuses.