by Michael Mills and Norval Morris S tateville Prison in Illinois might have been created by a Hollywood set designer. George Raft and his fellows in the romantic prison movies of the 1940s would recognize its massive walls looming over the empty countryside, the armed guard towers that prickle the horizon and the regimented flower beds at the front gate. Inside, the cells, exercise yards and vast steeltabled dining halls would look familiar, too, although the occupants now are very much of the 1970s: young, mostly black, urban, violent and prone to riot. Not a part of anyone's casual picture of prison life, then or now, is the Malaria Project located in a small research hospital in which Stateville prisoners serve as test subjects for new antimalarial drugs. Although Americans have largely forgotten the disease, save for a brief fever of interest in Vietnam, malaria remains the largest public health problem in the world: 200 million persons suffer each year and 2 million die. At Stateville, no one has died of malaria since the project began during World War II in a search for drugs to protect allied soldiers, but hundreds of prisoners have endured the fevers, chills and aches of the disease and many more have been dosed, measured, probed, punctured, wired and watched in other phases of the work. Stateville is not alone in nurturing medical and other research. Prisoners make splendid laboratory animals. Healthy, relatively free of alcohol and drugs, with regulated diets, they are captives, unlikely to wander off and be lost to both treatment and control groups, and they are under sufficient pressure of adversity to "volunteer." No one knows precisely how many prisoners are sampling drugs, ingesting food additives or swabbing themselves with cosmetics. Reflecting a widespread lack of any but punitive interest in our prison systems, we do not know who or how many or where our guinea pigs are, the risks to which they are exposed, the rewards they receive or the conditions of their consent. Nevertheless our investigations--and those of Walter Rugaber and Jessica Mitford before us--have marked out the range and character of research in prisons. Somewhat unfashionably in disagreement with Mitford and other liberal reformers of the prisons, we are persuaded that research in prisons can with appropriate safeguards make a useful contribution to the prisoner's welfare, to reform of the correctional system and, not least, to medical progress. We found research of four kinds: [] testing methods of treating prisoners to "cure" their criminality, [] testing new drugs for pharmaceutical manufacturers, [] engaging in medical research not related to drugs, [] testing cosmetics, hand lotions, band-aids and the like.