- Select a language for the TTS:
- UK English Female
- UK English Male
- US English Female
- US English Male
- Australian Female
- Australian Male
- Language selected: (auto detect) - EN
Play all audios:
In the northeast corner of Philadelphia, an abandoned penitentiary shelters a terrible past. For more than a century, the Holmesburg Prison housed convicts in long, thin cellblocks, with as
many as five inmates occupying a single six-by-eight foot cell. Before it was shut down a decade ago, Holmesburg was notorious for the experiments carried out on prisoners over a 25-year
period. Inmates sometimes earned extra money by volunteering to test everything from skin creams to LSD. Those abandoned cells attracted Thomas Roma, a well-known artist and director of
photography at Columbia University School of the Arts. His new book of photos of some of those now-dilapidated cells, _In Prison Air: The Cells of Holmesburg Prison_, evokes the hopes of the
former inmates amid a hopeless situation. Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
