During the war, more than seventy thousand American inmates gave blood to the Prisoners’ Blood Bank for Defense.19 For the next two decades, there were enterprising efforts to rehabilitate or coerce or coax prisoners into better behavior by using their blood. In the 1950s, writes Susan E. Lederer in Flesh and Blood, “prisoners in the Virginia State penitentiary received days off their sentence for each pint of blood donated.” Prisons in Massachusetts, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Virginia offered prisoners five days off their sentence for each pint of blood given.20 Prisoners were used to
...more
