Desperate Freedom

He yearned for escape with a desire that was near to insanity; awake and asleep it was his obsession; and he thought his heart had stopped when Squad-Leader Aras Dilley muttered to him, as Doremus was scrubbing a lavatory floor, “Say! Listen, Mr. Jessup! Mis’ Pike is fixin’ it up and I’m going to help you escape jus’ soon as things is right!”
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
  • Biography from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

Nazi vs American Medical Experimentation

Quote 1:

n 1947, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg charged Nazi doctors with war crimes, including experimentation upon prisoners of war. The Germans’ ably conducted defense hinged upon Dr. Gerhard Rose’s contention that U.S. doctors were guilty of exactly the same abuses—regularly subjecting prisoners to dangerous, painful involuntary experiments. The trials culminated not only in the conviction and execution of many accused physicians but also in the Nuremberg Code, which was devised to govern future medical experimentation.

In The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code,24 George Annas and Michael Grodin analyze how U.S. investigators rejected Nuremberg and replaced it with naught but hollow assurances that American medical researchers needed no such constraints.

Quote 2:

Poverty, not criminal behavior, is the most common feature of the imprisoned. Jails are full of people, both guilty and innocent, who are there only because they are too poor to make bail. By the 1970s, most prisoners in Holmesburg, for example, were legally innocent men awaiting trial. Between the 1940s and 1970s, bail bondsmen typically would spring an inmate for a down payment of 10 percent of his bail, so that a man jailed in lieu of a five-hundred-dollar bond could buy his freedom within weeks with the fifty dollars he earned from a single medical experiment.

Quote 3:

Most people don’t realize that prison medical research, which all but died out in the 1970s, is enjoying a quiet renaissance. Since the late 1980s, investigators in Arkansas, Maryland, South Carolina, Texas, Florida, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have been conducting and proposing research in prisons.

Most of these researchers are funded by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which, for example, supports the Yale School of Medicine with $178.7 million and the University of Miami Medical Center with $191 million….Dr. Joseph Zwishenberger’s radical new approach to lung cancer, which is to heat the subjects’ blood to a temperature where the errant cancer cells theoretically would not thrive. To test his theory, he sedates inmates and connects them to a machine called the BioLogic HT System, which removes blood via venous and cervical tubes. The blood is heated, then returned to the inmate’s body, which is kept at a very dangerous elevated temperature of 108.5 degrees. Any adult taken to a hospital with a temperature of 105 degrees would be considered an emergency case and cooling strategies would immediately be undertaken, but in Zwishenberger’s protocol, inmates’ 108.5 temperatures are sustained for two hours.

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington

It Hurt to Look

After the fourth time reading it, I folded the letter up and stuck it under my pillow. It felt like something was missing. I’d expected to cry, laugh, or maybe a little of both. I couldn’t muster anything. All I really thought was that it might be the last time I ever heard from my mother. And I wasn’t sure what to think. I sat in bed for a time. With no Callista or sprites in my room, I wasn’t sure what to do with my morning. As the sun rose, my bedroom windows paled and the vast woodland beyond the glass came into focus. I hadn’t really paid attention to the fact that winter had settled over the mountains. The deep greens and dark umbers were gone, replaced by armies of leafless, skeletal trees standing on battlefields of snow. It was so unlike our valley outside Donva. It didn’t matter. I still thought it was beautiful. Maybe I suspected I’d never see home again, or maybe I dreamed of escaping into the deep, dark forest, but either way it hurt to look out the windows and know I’d probably never go outside.

Darkness Between the Stars (Eaters of the Light Book 1) by J Edward Neill

Children in Prison

Quote

Amazon.com

By 2010, Florida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without parole for non-homicide offenses, several of whom were thirteen years old at the time of the crime. All of the youngest condemned children—thirteen or fourteen years of age—were black or Latino. Florida had the largest population in the world of children condemned to die in prison for non-homicides.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson