Plasma, Public Health, and Prisoners in Late 20th-Century Louisiana

Starting in the 1960’s and lasting roughly three decades, thousands of prisoners in the South and Southwestern United States “bled” to produce blood plasma for private pharmaceutical companies which entered into partnerships with states to collect plasma inside of carceral institutions. This paper discusses the expansion and decline of Louisiana’s prison blood plasma industry and the ethical, labor, financial, political, and medical controversies that engulfed the program from the 1970s to the 1990s. By the 1990s, the rise of HIV/AIDS would add another layer of controversy over the program, stigmatizing blood products sourced from prisons, creating new challenges of regulation, and leading to the cessation of these programs. In short, the paper examines how prisoners’ plasma programs went from being cutting edge in the development of new therapeutic treatments offering hope, for example to hemophiliacs, to being the focus of international investigations over tainted blood products spreading disease from US prisons.

This paper is based on my dissertation which situates the history of prison plasma programs in the context of post-World War II biomedical innovation, rising incarceration rates, and the history of biomedical exploitation of captive people and human experimentation. The study draws on prison newspapers The Angolite and The Straight Low, national news coverage, investigative commissions, donor interviews, and court cases. I argue that the history of Louisiana’s prison plasma industry in this era was defined by events such as labor activism, medical consumerism, and health stigmatization of entire populations, making them a microcosm of broader shifts in American society.