Bodies for Science, Minds for Reform: The Entanglement of Higher Education with the Carceral State at Stateville

Between the 1930s and 1980s, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois conducted medical experiments on incarcerated people at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, infecting them with malaria, hepatitis, and other diseases. At the same time and in the same prisons, those same institutions were also sponsoring educational programs among the incarcerated population. Scholars have documented the benefits and limitations of different specific kinds of college-in-prison programs, but none have examined how research and education activities of the same universities operated together within the same institution at the same time. This thesis explores these histories to reveal the different ways universities function within the prison system.

Using archival records from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, along with three prison-house publications written by incarcerated people: the Joliet-Stateville Time, The Roundhouse News, and Stateville RAPS, this thesis finds that medical research at Stateville formed a sustained, coercive system lasting over thirty years. For its part, educational programming, though real and valued by participants, was chronically underfunded. Security restrictions barred people from science classrooms even as the institution used their bodies for scientific study and employed them as lab workers. Publications written by incarcerated people exposed the pressure behind nominally voluntary participation, the racial logics shaping research design, and the distance between what institutions claimed and what people inside actually experienced. These findings challenge the ways scholars have understood universities as actors in the prison system and speak directly to debates about contemporary college-in-prison programs.