Stateville Prison Experiment Essay

2. Your overview of the content of your report.
The Stateville Penitentiary inmates were subjects to biomedical experiments that the United States Military sponsored. This prison had a special architectural design that made observation of prisoners unnoticed due to its unique layout. Prisoners were enticed to volunteer to enter the research project as a part of their prison sentence, but promised early release, and some financial compensation. They not only served as research subjects in the two years long experiment, but also had role in the project to work with the researchers regardless being unqualified for this type of work. Participating prisoners received some compensations to participate in the project. Furthermore, risk and side effects of the treatment were not fully disclosed to the subjects. The military did not want to expose their valuable soldiers to such an experiment; therefore, it only seemed logical to use the “useless” members of society to search for a much needed cure for Malaria. Subjects were used to incubate the malaria parasites and feed the infected mosquitos (vectors) with their own blood during the experiments. Knowingly infect a healthy subject with infectious agent is highly unethical. However, it was not the only concern. In order to gain faster knowledge, researchers caused more suffering to the subjects than it was necessary. The drugs that the researchers were administering to

Your intellectual and emotional reaction to what you read.
Regardless of how useful the founding of this experiment was, I found it highly disturbing that these prisoners were practically treated as “lab rats”. The experiments were not carried out on none human subjects before they were introduced to the experiment. Also, I think that experimenting on a highly influencable population is just plain wrong. Knowingly infecting a person with a potentially deadly parasite is absolutely unacceptable to me. It is a crule and heatrless act.
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