Mississippi State Penitentiary
Encyclopedia
Mississippi State Penitentiary (MSP), also known as Parchman Farm
, is the oldest prison
and the only maximum security prison for men in the state of Mississippi
, USA
.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections facility is located on about 18000 acres (7,284.3 ha) in unincorporated
Sunflower County
, and was established in 1901. It is located in the Mississippi Delta
region.
It has beds for 4,840 inmates. Inmates work on the prison farm and in manufacturing workshops. It holds male offenders classified at all custody levels — A and B custody (minimum and medium security) and C and D custody (maximum security). It also houses the male death row — all male offenders sentenced to death in Mississippi are held in MSP's Unit 29. Parchman is not designated to house female offenders - Central Mississippi Correctional Facility
, also the location of the female death row, is the only state prison in Mississippi designated as a place for female prisoners.
. What is now the prison property was located at a railroad spur called "Gordon Station."
The Government of Mississippi purchased land in Sunflower County with the intent of establishing a prison there in January 1901. In 1901 four stockades were constructed, and the state moved prisoners to begin clearing land for crop cultivation. The land was undeveloped Mississippi Delta
forest. The prison was nicknamed "Parchman" after Warden J. M. "Jim" Parchman. Around the time of MSP's opening, Sunflower County residents objected to having executions performed at MSP because they feared that Sunflower County would be stigmatized as a "death county." Therefore the State of Mississippi originally performed executions of condemned criminals in their counties of conviction.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History
said that MSP "was in many ways reminiscent of a gigantic antebellum plantation and operated on the basis of a plan proposed by Governor John M. Stone in 1896." In the fiscal year 1905, Parchman's first year of operations, the State of Mississippi earned $185,000 (over $4.6 million in 2009 dollars) from Parchman's operations.
Originally Parchman was one of two prisons designated for young, black men, with the other prisons housing other racial and gender groups. In 1908 a tornado struck Camp 1, causing no injuries and $10,000 in damages.
In 1909 the State of Mississippi acquired 2000 acres (809.4 ha) adjacent to the MSP territory, resulting in MDOC having 15789 acres (6,389.6 ha) of land in the Mississippi Delta. As time passed, the state began to consolidate most penal operations in Parchman, making other camps hold minor support roles, with Parchman being the main prison. In 1916 MDOC bought the O'Keefs Plantation in Quitman County
, near Lambert
. Originally this plantation was a separate institution, the Lambert Farm. The facility later became Camp B. In 1917 the Parchman property had been fully cleared, and the administration divided the facility into a series of camps, housing black and white prisoners of both genders. By 1917 12 male camps and one female camp were established, and racial segregation was of the institution's highest priorities. The institution became the main hub of activity for Mississippi's prison system.
In 1937 the prison had 1,989 inmates.
Around the 1950s residents of Sunflower County were still opposed to the concept of housing the execution chamber at MSP. In September 1954, Governor Hugh L. White
called for a special session of the Mississippi Legislature
to discuss the application of the death penalty. During that year, a gas chamber
serving as an execution chamber
was installed at MSP. The gas chamber replaced an electric chair
which, between 1940 and February 5, 1952, had been moved from county to county to execute condemned prisoners. The first person to die in the gas chamber was Gearald A. Gallego, who was executed on March 3, 1955.
) went to the American South to test the desegregation
of public facilities. By the end of June, 163 Freedom Riders had been convicted in Jackson
and many were jailed in Parchman. On June 15, 1961 the first set of Freedom Riders were sent from Hinds County Prison to Parchman. The first group sent to the farm were 45 male Freedom Riders, 29 blacks accompanied by 16 whites.
The prison authorities forced the freedom riders to remove their clothing and undergo strip searches. After the strip searches, a man named Deputy Tyson met the freedom riders and began intimidating them. He began by mocking the Freedom Ride, being quoted saying "y’all all a time wanna march someplace. Well y’all gon’ march right now, right t’yo cells. An’ ahm gon’ lead ya. Follow me. Ah’m Martinlutherking." The guards at Parchman Farm were relentless even after all of this mockery.
When taken to the cells and given clothing they were made sure to be kept as uncomfortable as possible. The Freedom Riders were given clothing that did not fit. Along with that, they were not allowed items such as pencils and paper. David Fankhauser, a Freedom Rider at Parchman Farm, was quoted saying, “In our cells, we were given a bible, an aluminum cup and a tooth brush. The cell measured 6 x 8 feet with a toilet and sink on the back wall, and a bunk bed. We were permitted one shower per week, and no mail was allowed. The policy in the maximum security block was to keep lights on 24 hours a day. “. The food was less than desirable as well. Frankhauser said, ": Breakfast every morning was black coffee strongly flavored with chicory, grits, biscuits and blackstrap molasses. Lunch was generally some form of beans or black-eyed peas boiled with pork gristle, served with cornbread. In the evening, it was the same as lunch except it was cold." .
As time wore on the Governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett
, visited the farm a few times. He would give various instructions to the guards to, "break their spirit, not their bones". The Governor took precautionary actions with the Freedom Riders. He made sure they were away from all other inmates and were kept in maximum security cells. With that order given, the Freedom Riders were stuck in the cell for the most part with not a lot to do. Singing was reintroduced, a tactic used in previous jailing situations.
The prisoners sang various songs to irritate Tyson and the other guards. Tyson attempted many types of tactics to stop the singing. They took their mattresses and bug screens to attempt to get the prisoners to stop singing. The guards then took the extreme action of flooding the cells and blowing large fans into the cells creating a draft and freezing temperatures for the Freedom Riders. After they realized these harsh methods were not working they attempted to barter with the Freedom Riders. The warden then apologized to the riders, emotionally wrecked he returned all the belongings that had been taken. The mattresses and screens were returned in an attempt for less singing. This was already a victory for the Freedom Riders.
As the 45 Riders were fighting the battle in the cells many others were coming down to join the men. Winnoh Myers was a woman accompanied by others who took the ride down south and eventually got jailed. She was witness to the treatment first hand. The only main difference was she was a woman being treated just as the men were. She was given bad living quarters and even worse clothing and meals. Most of the Freedom Riders were bailed out after a little over a month. She was the last Freedom Rider left in Parchman Farm. She got visits just due to the fact that she was a Freedom Rider. The Freedom Riders gained credibility in the Civil Rights Movement after undergoing the conditions in Parchman.
lawyer Roy Haber began taking statements from inmates, which eventually ran to fifty pages detailing murder
s, rape
s, beatings and other abuses
suffered by the inmates in Parchman from 1969 to 1971. Four Parchman inmates brought a suit against the prison superintendent in federal district court in 1972, alleging their civil rights
under the United States Constitution
were being violated by the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment
.
In the case, Gates v. Collier
, federal judge William C. Keady found that Parchman Farm violated the Constitution and was an affront to 'modern standards of decency'. Among other reforms, the accommodation was made fit for human habitation and the trusty system
(where lifers
were armed with rifles and set to guard other inmates) was abolished. The state was required to integrate the prison facilities, hire African-American staff members, and construct new prison facilities. In the 1970s Governor of Mississippi William L. Waller organized a blue-ribbon committee to study MSP. The committee decided that the state should abandon MSP's profit farming system and hire a professional penologist to head the prison.
The 1987 BBC Television landmark documentary Fourteen Days in May
, which followed the last two weeks of the life of Edward Earl Johnson
up until just a few minutes before his execution in the prison's gas chamber
, was filmed here.
On July 1, 1984 the Legislature of Mississippi amended §§ 99-19-51 of the Mississippi Code; the new amendment stated that prisoners who committed capital crimes after July 1, 1984 would be executed by lethal injection
.
In the mid-1980s several state law enforcement officials and postal inspectors went to Parchman to end a widespread scam involving forged money orders.
In 1985 area farmers referred to the facility as being the "Parchman Penal Farm," even though the facility was officially named the "Mississippi State Penitentiary." During that year MSP had over 4,000 prisoners, including 200 women in a few of the camps. When the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility
(CMCF) opened in January 1986, all women who were incarcerated at MSP were moved to CMCF.
In 1997 several prison guards were arrested, accused of illegally interfering with prisoner mail. On March 18, 1998 the legislature made another amendment, removing the gas chamber as a method of execution. The lethal injection table was first used in 2002.
On Monday November 17, 2003, Larry Hentz escaped from Unit 24B of MSP; he was believed to have been traveling with his wife. The escapee and his wife were captured in San Diego, California
on December 11, 2003. Hentz is located in Unit 29; previously he was in Unit 32.
In 2005 Tim Climer, the executive director of the Sunflower County Economic Development District, stated that he wanted to develop MSP into a tourist attraction by establishing an interpretive center.
In 2010, the Mississippi State Penitentiary became the first correctional facility in the United States to install a system to prevent contraband cell phone usage by inmates through the installation of a managed access system to prevent the authentication and operation of contraband wireless devices within the prison grounds. Other prisoners, visitors and guards smuggle telephones as whole units or in pieces for later re-assembly and use. MSP worked with vendors Global Tel*Link Corporation, which already provides permitted inmate landline phone service to the prison, and Tecore Networks, the company which designed and developed the Intelligent Network Access Controller or iNAC managed access technology, to install the system with no incurred cost to the prison or the state of Mississippi. The managed access system renders unauthorized devices useless within the prison, without the need to locate or confiscate the devices, but at the same time permits authorized devices to operate unimpeded. The technology does not encounter the legal impediments facing competing cell detection and cell jamming technologies, and has the added benefit of being able to ensure that all emergency 911 calls are permitted to complete, regardless of source. Christopher Epps, Commissioner of MDOC, publicly unveiled the system on September 8, 2010, and identified managed access as a model for other prisons to follow around the country to address the issue of contraband cell phones. Due to the installation of the system, between August 6, 2010 and September 9, 2010, over 216,320 texts and calls were blocked.
"Parchman" appears as a place on highway maps. The "Parchman" dot represents the MSP main entrance and several MSP buildings, with the prison territory located to the west of the main entrance. The main entrance, a metal gate with "Mississippi State Penitentiary" in large letters, is located at the intersection of U.S. Route 49W and Mississippi Highway 32, on the west side of 49W. The Mississippi Blues Trail
marker is located at the Parchman main entrance. Passersby are not permitted to stop to photograph buildings at the Parchman main entrance. The rear entrance is about 10 miles (16.1 km) east of Shelby
, at MS 32. A private portion of Highway 32 extends from the main entrance of MSP to the rear entrance of MSP. U.S. 49W is a major highway used to travel to MSP. The City of Drew
is 8 miles (12.9 km) south of MSP, and Ruleville
is about 15 miles (24.1 km) from MSP. Parchman is south of Tutwiler
, about 90 miles (144.8 km) south of Memphis, Tennessee
, and about 120 miles (193.1 km) north of Jackson
.
Throughout MSP's history, it was referred to as "the prison without walls" due to the dispersed camps within its property. Hugh Ferguson, the director of public affairs of MSP, said that the prison is not like Alcatraz, because it is not centralized in one or several main buildings. Instead MSP consists of several prison camps spread out over a large area, called "units." Each unit serves a specific segment of the prison population, and each unit is surrounded by walls with barbed tape. The perimeter of the overall Parchman property has no fencing. The prison property, located on flat farmland of the Mississippi Delta
, has almost no trees. Ferguson said that a potential escapee would have no place to hide. Richard Rubin, author of Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South, said that MSP's environment is so inhospitable for escape that prisoners working in the fields are not chained to one another, and one overseer supervises each gang. A potential escapee could wander for days without leaving the MSP property. As of 1971 guards patrol MSP on horseback instead of on foot. The rear entrance is protected by a steel barricade and a guard tower. In 1985 Robert Cross of the Chicago Tribune
said "The physical surroundings--cotton and bean fields, the 21 scattered camps, the barbed wire enclosures--suggest that nothing much has changed since the days, early in this century, when outsiders could visit Parchman State Penal Farm only on the fifth Sunday of those rare months containing more than four."
MSP has two main areas, Area I and Area II. Area I includes Unit 29 and the Front Vocational School. Area II includes Units 25-26, Units 30-32, and Unit 42. Seven units house prisoners. As of the 1970s and 1980s the prison grounds had small red houses that were used for conjugal visit
s. As of 2010 the prison still offers conjugal visits.
MDOC classifies 13 units as "closed housing units." All of the units in the prison which formerly housed prisoners and no longer function as inmate housing include:
Residents are zoned to the Drew School District
, and children who live on the grounds of MSP attend A.W. James Elementary School and Drew Hunter High School in Drew
. Prior to the 2010-2011 school year the Drew School District secondary schools were Hunter Middle School and Drew High School. Parchman, along with other areas in Sunflower County, is within the service area of the Mississippi Delta Community College
(MDCC). MDCC has the Drew Center in Drew, while its main campus is in Moorhead
. Sunflower County Library System operates the Drew Public Library in Drew.
; prisoners are buried on-site. A dead prisoner may be buried in one of two of the cemeteries. Hundreds of prisoners had been buried at two of the cemeteries.
The Mississippi State Penitentiary Training Academy and the Thomas O. "Pete" Wilson Adult Basic Education (ABE) facility are located on the MSP grounds. "The Place," a restaurant, is also on the prison property. Parchman has the Rodeo Arena, a venue for a prison rodeo. The Mississippi State Penitentiary POTW (Publicly owned treatment works
) numbers one and two are the institution's sewage treatment
plants.
The United States Postal Service
operates the Parchman Post Office along Parchman Road 12/Mississippi Highway 32 inside the prison property. Mississippi State Penitentiary has a dedicated fire department, (MSP Fire Department) a wastewater treatment plant, road crews, utility crews, a grocery store, and a hospital. The fire department, which utilizes prisoners as firefighters, responds outside of the prison boundaries.
Parchman contains the warden's guest house, used to accommodate guests. As part of a longstanding agreement, the Governor of Mississippi stayed in the house once annually before conducting an inspection of the prison.
By 1906 the state sent the healthy, young black males incarcerated in the Mississippi penal system to MSP and to the Belmont Farm. Other population groups in the Mississippi penal system went to other farms; White men went to the Rankin Farm in Rankin County
, and all women went to the Oakley Farm in Hinds County
. Around 1911 prisoners who developed chronic illnesses were sent from MSP to the Oakley prison. In 1917 the Parchman property had been fully cleared, and the administration divided the facility into a series of camps, housing black and white prisoners of both genders. By that year MSP had 12 male prison camps and one female prison camp. Throughout much of the prison's history, the prison authorities decided not to build fences and walls because of MSP property had a large size and a remote location.
Each camp had 15000 acres (6,070.3 ha) of land assigned to it. Camp One became the administrative and commercial center of Parchman. It was located near the main gate, the railroad depot, and the main road. William B. Taylor and Tyler H. Fletcher, authors of "Profits from convict labor: Reality or myth observations in Mississippi: 1907–1934," said that Camp One, by 1917, appeared like "a little city." Camp One housed the residences of the superintendent and the superintendent's staff, the residences of the camp sergeant and the two assistants of the sergeant, a hospital, a gin, a church, a post office, and a visitor's building. Taylor and Fletcher said that the other camps "amounted to little more than wooden barracks surrounded by cultivated land."
In the 1930s the female camp, mostly African-American, was isolated from the male camps. An enclave within the camp was reserved for white inmates.
Around 1968, Camp B was one of the largest African-American camps of MSP. Camp B was located in unincorporated
Quitman County
, near Lambert
, away from the main Parchman complex. Camp B's buildings have been demolished. Until the post-lawsuit units opened in the 1970s, Parchman's newest unit was the first offender camp, a red brick building that opened in the 1960s. The building had a fence, two guard towers at opposite corners, and a gateshack. Donald Cabana, who became the prison's superintendent and executioner, said that the building was "not physically impressive."
Around 1971, most areas of the prison had no guard towers, no cell blocks, no tiers, and no high walls. Cabana said that the prison was "a throwback to another time and place." Cabana described the employee housing as "by and large drab and in various states of disrepair." During that time Camp 16 served as the Maximum Security Unit (MSU); the building was surrounded by double fences with concertina wire
, and gun towers were located at the four corners of the building. MSU housed death row inmates and inmates put under maximum security, and the camp housed the gas chamber. MSP staff called the building "Little Alcatraz." Cabana, a native of Massachusetts, said that Camp 16 was the only building that resembled the northern U.S. penitentiary that he was familiar with. Around that year MSP had around 2,000 men and less than 100 women in its camps. Most camps were "work camps" which had a quota of acreage to maintain. Some had special functions; for instance the "disability" camp did the laundry, and the "front camp" housed prisoners who worked in the administration building; those inmates worked as clerks, janitors, and maintenance personnel. Each camp usually had no more than 100-200 prisoners. Because the prison population was spread across many units, the population would have difficulty engineering major disturbances. Cabana cited this example to say "In some respects, Parchman was a penologist's dream."
After the 1972 Gates vs. Collier federal judge ruling, the State of Mississippi replaced its previous inmate housing units, called "cages," with barracks buildings surrounded by barbed wire-topped fences. John Buntin of Governing Magazine said that the new units were "hastily built." Several MSP units were built in the 1970s; 3,080 beds were added for a total cost of $25,345,000. In the 1980s Mississippi State Penitentiary had 21 scattered camps. In 1983 Camp 25 served as the female unit, and the unit had no parking facilities. After Central Mississippi Correctional Facility
opened, the women were moved out of Camp 25. In the 1990s MSP had 6,800 prisoners; in 1990 Mississippi had a population of 2,573,216, so about .026% of Mississippi's population was incarcerated in MSP at that time. The prison population had been increasing rapidly over the decade leading to 1995, and the prison officials converted a gymnasium into inmate housing and still faced overcrowding. Many construction projects occurred during that time.
In the early 2000s MSP had five areas. Area I had Unit 29. Area II had units 12, 15-B, 20-, 25-26, and 30. Area III had units 4, 10, 17, 20, 22-24, 27-28, 31, and 42. Area IV had Unit 32. Area V had Central Security. At that time 18 units housed prisoners, with the 1,488-bed Unit 29 being the largest unit in terms of prisoner capacity and the 60-bed Unit 17 being the smallest. At that time the prison's capacity was 5,631. The Internal Audit building, located along Guard Row, was destroyed in a fire in 2002. In the mid-2000s MSP had three areas. Area I had Units 15 and 29 and the Front Vocational School. Area II had units 25-26, 28, 30-31, and 42. Area III had units 4 and 32. At the time 10 units housed the 4,700 prisoners in the facility, with the 1,568 bed Unit 29 being the largest unit and the 54-bed Unit 42 (the hospital unit) being the smallest. At that time the prison's capacity was 4,840.
In 1937, the Parchman community had 250 residents, while the prison held 1,989 inmates. In 1971, the prison employed fewer than 75 free world employees because trusties performed many tasks at Parchman. The free world employees included administrative, medical, and support employees.
land, Parchman served as a working farm. Inmate labor was used for many tasks from raising cotton and other farm food products, to building railroads and extracting turpentine gum from pine trees. Parchman, then as now, was in prime cotton-growing country. Inmates labored there in the fields raising cotton, soybeans and other cash crops, and produced livestock, swine, poultry and milk. Inmates spent much of their time working with crops except the period from mid-November to mid-February, because the weather was too cold for farm work. Donald Cabana, who previously served as a warden and an executioner at Parchman, said that the labor situation was an advantage to the prison because inmates were occupied with it. Cabana added that "idleness" was an issue facing many other prisons.
Throughout MSP's history, most prisoners have worked in the fields. Historically, prisoners worked for ten hours per day, six days per week. In previous eras prisoners lived in long, single-story buildings made of bricks and lumber produced on-site; the inmate housing units were often called "cages." Prison officials selected prisoners they deemed trustworthy and made them into armed guards; the prisoners were named "trusty guards" and "trusty shooters." Most male inmates did farm labor; others worked in the brickyard, cotton gin, prison hospital, and sawmill. Women worked in the sewing room, making clothes, bed sheets, and mattresses. They also canned vegetables and ran the laundry. On Sundays prisoners attended religious services and participated in baseball games, with teams formed on the basis of the camps.
Throughout its history, Parchman Farm had a reputation of being one of the toughest prisons in the United States. This reputation antedated the 1960s arrival of the Freedom Riders.
In the 1930s, most of the crops planted at Parchman were cotton. The facility's brickyard, factories, gin, and machine shop gained the State of Mississippi profits. For most of the day, the female prisoners sewed utilitarian cloth goods, including bedding, curtains, and uniforms for the institution. When sewing labor was not available, women chopped cotton.
For a period in Parchman's history, women lived in Camp 13. Male sergeants and male trusties guarded the women. As a result, sexual intercourse and rape occurred in the women's unit. Women lived in large dormitories. White women usually numbered between zero and five, black women usually numbered 25 to 65. White female prisoners lived in a small brick building, while African-American prisoners lived in what David Oshinsky, author of Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice called a "large shed-like building", with a fence separating the two buildings.
Cabana said that in 1971 the prison environment was "relatively tranquil" because many prisoners worked outside instead of being confined in their cells for long periods of time. The prison was still segregated in the 1970s. Around that time a black leather strap named "Black Annie" was used to punish prisoners who broke rules. Other prisoners who broke rules were forced to stand for hours at a time on up-ended soda crates. During the era, stronger prisoners attacked and raped weaker prisoners, and prison staff provided little to no intervention in these incidents. Some inmates worked as "houseboys," maintaining the residences of prison officials. Some prisoners were allowed to leave the prison grounds to pick up supplies and transport them back to MSP. Karen Feldscher of Northeastern Alumni Magazine stated that the trusty guard system often produced "disastrous results." Cabana said that the trusty system "apparently worked quite well, as there were seldom any disciplinary problems among the shooters." Because trusties performed many tasks, the prison employed relatively few free world employees. Because of the scenario, Cabana said that the prisoners were the people who carried guns and enforced rules, while in Massachusetts the prison guards carried the guns and enforced rules.
In the 1960s, shortly after inmates arrived at Parchman, they received nicknames that reflected personality traits and physical characteristics. For instance, a man named Johnny Lee Thomas was nicknamed "Have Mercy" when he protested a beating of a fellow inmate. Thomas stated that Parchman was, in the words of William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease, "a world of fear in which only the strong and intelligent survive." Ferris added that "Like the trickster rabbit, the black prisoner had to move quickly and think faster than his white boss."
After the Gates decision, the number of murders of prisoners dropped overall. When integration came, prisoners formed gangs based on race to protect one another. In addition, the prison gangs gained the power that trusty shooters had held. In 1990, the prison emergency room treated 1,136 incidents of prisoner on employee assaults and 1,169 prisoner on prisoner assaults.
Cabana said "A life sentence in Parchman is an eternity." Prisoners may receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in Christian Ministry from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
. The Parchman Animal Care & Training (PACT) program, which was established in April 2008, organizes inmate care of livestock.
. Work chants were used by farm laborers to pace their work. While inmates worked, a leader called the chant, with other inmates following him. One song includes a story of an inmate swimming through the Sunflower River to confuse bloodhounds, verses showcasing prisoners who return hoes to their commanding captain and refuse to continue working, and a story of a beautiful woman named Rosie who waits outside the prison boundary. William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease, said that "for all of these inmates, music was a means to survive within the prison's grim world." The Mississippi Blues Trail
added Parchman to its list of sites at 10 AM on Tuesday September 28, 2010; Parchman received the trail's 113th historical marker.
The folk song collectors John
and Alan Lomax
visited Parchman Farm in 1933, during a recording trip across the Southern states of the US. Lomax wrote that they recorded a prisoner singing:
Reflecting on the significance of the singing he had heard in Parchman, Alan Lomax later wrote: "I had to face that here were the people that everyone else regarded as the dregs of society, dangerous human beings, brutalized and from them came the music which I thought was the finest thing I’d ever hear coming out of my country. They made Walt Whitman
look like a child. They made Carl Sandburg
, who sang these songs, look like a bloody amateur. These people were poetic and musical and they had something terribly important to say."
Formal records stating when conjugal visits began at MSP do not exist; Mississippi was the first state to allow for conjugal visits to occur in prisons. The practice began on an unofficial level around 1918. There was no state control or legal status. Originally only African-American men were allowed to participate, as society believed that the sexual drives of black men were stronger than those of white men. Prison authorities believed that if black men were allowed to have sexual intercourse, they would be more productive in the farming industries in the prison. By the 1930s, the authorities had permitted white men to receive conjugal visits. Because the officials did not want pregnancies to occur, at that time they did not permit female prisoners to have conjugal visits. In 1940 prisoners began building special houses used by prisoners and their families during conjugal visits.
In 1962, Columbus B. Hopper of The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science said that the Mississippi State Penitentiary had the most liberal visitation program in the United States. Rules of visitation and leave, adopted in 1944, allowed inmates to make home visits for other reasons than emergency. According to a 1956 survey, it was the only correctional facility in the country to do so. Inmates were allowed to be visited every Sunday for two hours by their wives. In 1962 each Parchman camp, with the exception of the maximum security camps, housed a five to ten room structure called a red house; each house is near the main gate of the main camp building. In the house, the inmate and his wife may engage in sexual intercourse. Children are encouraged by the prison authorities to visit; as of 1962 one camp houses a play area for children. The Parchman conjugal visit program is designed so that all members of the family may interact with a particular prisoner. In 1962 the prison officials said that the conjugal visits were an important factor in preserving marriages of inmates and reducing prison homosexuality
. During that year, most inmates reported favorable opinions about the conjugal program. David Oshinsky
, author of Worse than Slavery, said that the statements regarding the preservation of marriages were "likely" to be correct and the statements regarding the prison sexuality were "probably" not true. Penologists stated that factors that may have contributed to the development of the system were the strength of family ties in rural areas, Parchman being, in the words of the Dictionary of American Penology, "primarily an agricultural plantation that is a self-contained, sociocultural system functioning much as a culture in and of itself", the emphasis placed on agricultural production, and the small sizes of the camps, since the guards in the camps knew the prisoners on personal bases. The dictionary said that because of the lack of records, it was not possible to tell if the conjugal visit program reduced prison sexuality or recidivism.
In the 1970s, Parchman still did not maintain records on the conjugal visits that occurred at the facility. In 1972 women at Parchman became eligible for conjugal visits. In 1974, prisoners of both sexes were permitted to to have three-day, two-night family visits. In the 1980s guards reported that inmates were more docile if they had periodic sexual access to their wives. Robert Cross of the Chicago Tribune
reported in 1985 that the MSP program received relatively little attention compared to newer and more limited conjugal visit policies in California
, Connecticut
, New Mexico
, New York
, South Carolina
, and Washington. Cross added that "The difference, perhaps, is that in Mississippi, where Parchman serves as the only penitentiary, nobody issued proclamations or opened up the matter for debate." As of 1996 a newly-established Parchman unit used conjugal visits as a reward in a behavioral modification program. As of 1996, a typical married prisoner at Parchman has one conjugal visit every two weeks, and periodically uses the family visits.
's The Mansion referred to MSP as "destination doom." John Buntin of Governing magazine said that MSP "has long cast its shadow over the Mississippi Delta, including my hometown of Greenville, Mississippi
."
The prison is the subject of a number of blues
songs, most notably "Parchman Farm Blues" by Bukka White
, and Mose Allison
's "Parchman Farm (song)
", which was later covered by a number of other artists including John Mayall
, Georgie Fame
and Blue Cheer
.
The prison also served as a major source of material for folklorists such as Alan
and John Lomax
, who visited numerous times to record work song
s, field holler
s, blues, and interviews with prisoners. The Lomaxes in part focused on Parchman at that time because it offered a particular closed society shut off from the outside world. John Lomax, accompanied by his wife Ruby
, toured through the southern states recording blues
work songs and other folk songs for the Library of Congress
as part of a WPA
project in 1939. They recorded work songs and chants while inmates were performing a group task, such as hoeing the fields at Parchman Farm as well as blues songs sung by inmate musicians.
The Coen brothers' film, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, makes reference to Parchman, both directly and by including a song recorded at Parchman in 1959 by Alan Lomax on the soundtrack to the film.
In William Faulkner
's book Old Man, which was also published as part of the book The Wild Palms, the Tall and Fat Convicts were sent from Parchman to rescue folks from the 1927 flood
. In Faulkner's The Mansion
, Mink Snopes was imprisoned in Parchman.
In August Wilson
's The Piano Lesson
, the characters Boy Willie, Lymon, Doaker, and Wining Boy all served time at Parchman.
The theatrical play "The Parchman Hour", by playwright Mike Wiley, is based on the following quote:
“Did you know that at Parchman, to pass the time and to keep our spirits up, we ‘invented’ a radio program? I don’t recall that we named it, but ‘The Parchman Hour’ would have been a good name. Each cell had to contribute a short “act” (singing a song, telling a joke, reading from the Bible—the only book we were allowed) and in between acts we had ‘commercials’ for the products we lived with every day, like the prison soap, the black-and-white striped skirts, the awful food, etc. We did this every evening, as I recall; it gave us something to do during the day, thinking up our cell’s act for the evening.” — Mimi Real, Freedom Rider, 1961
The Parchman Hour The play premiers professionally at PlayMakers Repertory Company
in 2011.
The Chamber
, a best-selling novel by John Grisham
, is set at Parchman. Many of Grisham's other novels make reference to the prison and in his book, Ford County
, the short story "Fetching Raymond" takes place in large part at Parchman. The Chamber
, the movie based on the novel, staring Gene Hackman
and Chris O'Donnell
, was filmed at the penitentiary.
The film Life
, portraying a group of moonshiners from New York who are falsely convicted of murder and are given life sentences, takes place at Parchman. While it is set in Mississippi, filming occurred in California.
Non-death row:
Prison farm
A prison farm is a large correctional facility where penal labor convicts are put to economical use in a 'farm' , usually for manual labour, largely in open air, such as in agriculture, logging, quarrying, etc...
, is the oldest prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...
and the only maximum security prison for men in the state of Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
, USA
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections facility is located on about 18000 acres (7,284.3 ha) in unincorporated
Unincorporated area
In law, an unincorporated area is a region of land that is not a part of any municipality.To "incorporate" in this context means to form a municipal corporation, a city, town, or village with its own government. An unincorporated community is usually not subject to or taxed by a municipal government...
Sunflower County
Sunflower County, Mississippi
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 34,369 people, 9,637 households, and 7,314 families residing in the county. The population density was 50 people per square mile . There were 10,338 housing units at an average density of 15 per square mile...
, and was established in 1901. It is located in the Mississippi Delta
Mississippi Delta
The Mississippi Delta is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth" because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history...
region.
It has beds for 4,840 inmates. Inmates work on the prison farm and in manufacturing workshops. It holds male offenders classified at all custody levels — A and B custody (minimum and medium security) and C and D custody (maximum security). It also houses the male death row — all male offenders sentenced to death in Mississippi are held in MSP's Unit 29. Parchman is not designated to house female offenders - Central Mississippi Correctional Facility
Central Mississippi Correctional Facility
The Central Mississippi Correctional Facility is a Mississippi Department of Corrections prison for men and women located in unincorporated Rankin County, Mississippi, near Pearl. The prison is the only state prison to hold female prisoners in Mississippi, in addition to minimum and medium...
, also the location of the female death row, is the only state prison in Mississippi designated as a place for female prisoners.
History
After December 31, 1894, prisoners sentenced by the State of Mississippi could no longer be hired or leased by third parties. After the convict leasing system ended, the State of Mississippi began to acquire property to build its own correctional facilities. In 1900 the Mississippi State Legislature appropriated US$80,000 for the purchase of the Parchman Plantation, a 3789 acres (1,533.4 ha) property in Sunflower CountySunflower County, Mississippi
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 34,369 people, 9,637 households, and 7,314 families residing in the county. The population density was 50 people per square mile . There were 10,338 housing units at an average density of 15 per square mile...
. What is now the prison property was located at a railroad spur called "Gordon Station."
The Government of Mississippi purchased land in Sunflower County with the intent of establishing a prison there in January 1901. In 1901 four stockades were constructed, and the state moved prisoners to begin clearing land for crop cultivation. The land was undeveloped Mississippi Delta
Mississippi Delta
The Mississippi Delta is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth" because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history...
forest. The prison was nicknamed "Parchman" after Warden J. M. "Jim" Parchman. Around the time of MSP's opening, Sunflower County residents objected to having executions performed at MSP because they feared that Sunflower County would be stigmatized as a "death county." Therefore the State of Mississippi originally performed executions of condemned criminals in their counties of conviction.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History
Mississippi Department of Archives and History
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History is a state agency of Mississippi. The agency has its headquarters in the William F. Winter Archives and History Building in Jackson. The department, founded in 1902, functions as the state's historical agency.-External links:* *...
said that MSP "was in many ways reminiscent of a gigantic antebellum plantation and operated on the basis of a plan proposed by Governor John M. Stone in 1896." In the fiscal year 1905, Parchman's first year of operations, the State of Mississippi earned $185,000 (over $4.6 million in 2009 dollars) from Parchman's operations.
Originally Parchman was one of two prisons designated for young, black men, with the other prisons housing other racial and gender groups. In 1908 a tornado struck Camp 1, causing no injuries and $10,000 in damages.
In 1909 the State of Mississippi acquired 2000 acres (809.4 ha) adjacent to the MSP territory, resulting in MDOC having 15789 acres (6,389.6 ha) of land in the Mississippi Delta. As time passed, the state began to consolidate most penal operations in Parchman, making other camps hold minor support roles, with Parchman being the main prison. In 1916 MDOC bought the O'Keefs Plantation in Quitman County
Quitman County, Mississippi
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 10,117 people, 3,565 households, and 2,506 families residing in the county. The population density was 25 people per square mile . There were 3,923 housing units at an average density of 10 per square mile...
, near Lambert
Lambert, Mississippi
Lambert is a town in Quitman County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 1,967 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Lambert is located at .According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of , all land....
. Originally this plantation was a separate institution, the Lambert Farm. The facility later became Camp B. In 1917 the Parchman property had been fully cleared, and the administration divided the facility into a series of camps, housing black and white prisoners of both genders. By 1917 12 male camps and one female camp were established, and racial segregation was of the institution's highest priorities. The institution became the main hub of activity for Mississippi's prison system.
In 1937 the prison had 1,989 inmates.
Around the 1950s residents of Sunflower County were still opposed to the concept of housing the execution chamber at MSP. In September 1954, Governor Hugh L. White
Hugh L. White
Hugh Lawson White was an American politician from Mississippi and a member of the Democratic Party. He served two non-consecutive terms as Governor of Mississippi .-Biography:...
called for a special session of the Mississippi Legislature
Mississippi Legislature
The Mississippi Legislature is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Mississippi. The bicameral Legislature is composed of the lower Mississippi House of Representatives, with 122 members, and the upper Mississippi Senate, with 52 members. Both Representatives and Senators serve four-year...
to discuss the application of the death penalty. During that year, a gas chamber
Gas chamber
A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used...
serving as an execution chamber
Execution chamber
An execution chamber, or death chamber, is a room or chamber in which a legal execution is carried out. Execution chambers are almost always inside the walls of a maximum-security prison, although not always at the same prison where the death row population is housed...
was installed at MSP. The gas chamber replaced an electric chair
Electric chair
Execution by electrocution, usually performed using an electric chair, is an execution method originating in the United States in which the condemned person is strapped to a specially built wooden chair and electrocuted through electrodes placed on the body...
which, between 1940 and February 5, 1952, had been moved from county to county to execute condemned prisoners. The first person to die in the gas chamber was Gearald A. Gallego, who was executed on March 3, 1955.
Parchman Farm and the freedom riders
In the spring of 1961, Freedom Riders (civil rights activistsAfrican-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)
The African-American Civil Rights Movement refers to the movements in the United States aimed at outlawing racial discrimination against African Americans and restoring voting rights to them. This article covers the phase of the movement between 1955 and 1968, particularly in the South...
) went to the American South to test the desegregation
Desegregation
Desegregation is the process of ending the separation of two groups usually referring to races. This is most commonly used in reference to the United States. Desegregation was long a focus of the American Civil Rights Movement, both before and after the United States Supreme Court's decision in...
of public facilities. By the end of June, 163 Freedom Riders had been convicted in Jackson
Jackson, Mississippi
Jackson is the capital and the most populous city of the US state of Mississippi. It is one of two county seats of Hinds County ,. The population of the city declined from 184,256 at the 2000 census to 173,514 at the 2010 census...
and many were jailed in Parchman. On June 15, 1961 the first set of Freedom Riders were sent from Hinds County Prison to Parchman. The first group sent to the farm were 45 male Freedom Riders, 29 blacks accompanied by 16 whites.
The prison authorities forced the freedom riders to remove their clothing and undergo strip searches. After the strip searches, a man named Deputy Tyson met the freedom riders and began intimidating them. He began by mocking the Freedom Ride, being quoted saying "y’all all a time wanna march someplace. Well y’all gon’ march right now, right t’yo cells. An’ ahm gon’ lead ya. Follow me. Ah’m Martinlutherking." The guards at Parchman Farm were relentless even after all of this mockery.
When taken to the cells and given clothing they were made sure to be kept as uncomfortable as possible. The Freedom Riders were given clothing that did not fit. Along with that, they were not allowed items such as pencils and paper. David Fankhauser, a Freedom Rider at Parchman Farm, was quoted saying, “In our cells, we were given a bible, an aluminum cup and a tooth brush. The cell measured 6 x 8 feet with a toilet and sink on the back wall, and a bunk bed. We were permitted one shower per week, and no mail was allowed. The policy in the maximum security block was to keep lights on 24 hours a day. “. The food was less than desirable as well. Frankhauser said, ": Breakfast every morning was black coffee strongly flavored with chicory, grits, biscuits and blackstrap molasses. Lunch was generally some form of beans or black-eyed peas boiled with pork gristle, served with cornbread. In the evening, it was the same as lunch except it was cold." .
As time wore on the Governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett
Ross Barnett
Ross Robert Barnett was the governor of Mississippi from 1960 to 1964. He was a States' Rights Democrat.- Early life :...
, visited the farm a few times. He would give various instructions to the guards to, "break their spirit, not their bones". The Governor took precautionary actions with the Freedom Riders. He made sure they were away from all other inmates and were kept in maximum security cells. With that order given, the Freedom Riders were stuck in the cell for the most part with not a lot to do. Singing was reintroduced, a tactic used in previous jailing situations.
The prisoners sang various songs to irritate Tyson and the other guards. Tyson attempted many types of tactics to stop the singing. They took their mattresses and bug screens to attempt to get the prisoners to stop singing. The guards then took the extreme action of flooding the cells and blowing large fans into the cells creating a draft and freezing temperatures for the Freedom Riders. After they realized these harsh methods were not working they attempted to barter with the Freedom Riders. The warden then apologized to the riders, emotionally wrecked he returned all the belongings that had been taken. The mattresses and screens were returned in an attempt for less singing. This was already a victory for the Freedom Riders.
As the 45 Riders were fighting the battle in the cells many others were coming down to join the men. Winnoh Myers was a woman accompanied by others who took the ride down south and eventually got jailed. She was witness to the treatment first hand. The only main difference was she was a woman being treated just as the men were. She was given bad living quarters and even worse clothing and meals. Most of the Freedom Riders were bailed out after a little over a month. She was the last Freedom Rider left in Parchman Farm. She got visits just due to the fact that she was a Freedom Rider. The Freedom Riders gained credibility in the Civil Rights Movement after undergoing the conditions in Parchman.
Post Freedom Ride
In 1970 the civil rightsCivil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
lawyer Roy Haber began taking statements from inmates, which eventually ran to fifty pages detailing murder
Murder
Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...
s, rape
Rape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
s, beatings and other abuses
Prisoner abuse
Prisoner abuse is the mistreatment of persons while they are under arrest or incarcerated.Abuse falling into this category includes:* Physical abuse: Needless beating, hitting, or other corporal punishment....
suffered by the inmates in Parchman from 1969 to 1971. Four Parchman inmates brought a suit against the prison superintendent in federal district court in 1972, alleging their civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
under the United States Constitution
United States Constitution
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It is the framework for the organization of the United States government and for the relationship of the federal government with the states, citizens, and all people within the United States.The first three...
were being violated by the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment
Cruel and unusual punishment
Cruel and unusual punishment is a phrase describing criminal punishment which is considered unacceptable due to the suffering or humiliation it inflicts on the condemned person...
.
In the case, Gates v. Collier
Gates v. Collier
Gates v. Collier, 501 F.2d 1291 , was a landmark case decided in U.S. federal court that brought an end to the Trusty system and the flagrant inmate abuse that accompanied it at Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, Mississippi...
, federal judge William C. Keady found that Parchman Farm violated the Constitution and was an affront to 'modern standards of decency'. Among other reforms, the accommodation was made fit for human habitation and the trusty system
Trusty system
The "trusty system" was a strict system of discipline and security in the US made compulsory under Mississippi state law as the method of controlling and working inmates at Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, Mississippi's...
(where lifers
Life imprisonment
Life imprisonment is a sentence of imprisonment for a serious crime under which the convicted person is to remain in jail for the rest of his or her life...
were armed with rifles and set to guard other inmates) was abolished. The state was required to integrate the prison facilities, hire African-American staff members, and construct new prison facilities. In the 1970s Governor of Mississippi William L. Waller organized a blue-ribbon committee to study MSP. The committee decided that the state should abandon MSP's profit farming system and hire a professional penologist to head the prison.
The 1987 BBC Television landmark documentary Fourteen Days in May
Fourteen Days in May
Fourteen Days in May is a documentary directed by Paul Hamann and originally shown on television by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1987. The program recounts the final days before the execution of Edward Earl Johnson, an American prisoner convicted of rape and murder and imprisoned in the...
, which followed the last two weeks of the life of Edward Earl Johnson
Edward Earl Johnson
Edward Earl Johnson was a man convicted and executed by the U.S. state of Mississippi for the murder of a policeman, J.T. Trest and the sexual assault of a 69-year-old woman, Sally Franklin...
up until just a few minutes before his execution in the prison's gas chamber
Gas chamber
A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used...
, was filmed here.
On July 1, 1984 the Legislature of Mississippi amended §§ 99-19-51 of the Mississippi Code; the new amendment stated that prisoners who committed capital crimes after July 1, 1984 would be executed by lethal injection
Lethal injection
Lethal injection is the practice of injecting a person with a fatal dose of drugs for the express purpose of causing the immediate death of the subject. The main application for this procedure is capital punishment, but the term may also be applied in a broad sense to euthanasia and suicide...
.
In the mid-1980s several state law enforcement officials and postal inspectors went to Parchman to end a widespread scam involving forged money orders.
In 1985 area farmers referred to the facility as being the "Parchman Penal Farm," even though the facility was officially named the "Mississippi State Penitentiary." During that year MSP had over 4,000 prisoners, including 200 women in a few of the camps. When the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility
Central Mississippi Correctional Facility
The Central Mississippi Correctional Facility is a Mississippi Department of Corrections prison for men and women located in unincorporated Rankin County, Mississippi, near Pearl. The prison is the only state prison to hold female prisoners in Mississippi, in addition to minimum and medium...
(CMCF) opened in January 1986, all women who were incarcerated at MSP were moved to CMCF.
In 1997 several prison guards were arrested, accused of illegally interfering with prisoner mail. On March 18, 1998 the legislature made another amendment, removing the gas chamber as a method of execution. The lethal injection table was first used in 2002.
On Monday November 17, 2003, Larry Hentz escaped from Unit 24B of MSP; he was believed to have been traveling with his wife. The escapee and his wife were captured in San Diego, California
San Diego, California
San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States and second-largest city in California. The city is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, immediately adjacent to the Mexican border. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round...
on December 11, 2003. Hentz is located in Unit 29; previously he was in Unit 32.
In 2005 Tim Climer, the executive director of the Sunflower County Economic Development District, stated that he wanted to develop MSP into a tourist attraction by establishing an interpretive center.
In 2010, the Mississippi State Penitentiary became the first correctional facility in the United States to install a system to prevent contraband cell phone usage by inmates through the installation of a managed access system to prevent the authentication and operation of contraband wireless devices within the prison grounds. Other prisoners, visitors and guards smuggle telephones as whole units or in pieces for later re-assembly and use. MSP worked with vendors Global Tel*Link Corporation, which already provides permitted inmate landline phone service to the prison, and Tecore Networks, the company which designed and developed the Intelligent Network Access Controller or iNAC managed access technology, to install the system with no incurred cost to the prison or the state of Mississippi. The managed access system renders unauthorized devices useless within the prison, without the need to locate or confiscate the devices, but at the same time permits authorized devices to operate unimpeded. The technology does not encounter the legal impediments facing competing cell detection and cell jamming technologies, and has the added benefit of being able to ensure that all emergency 911 calls are permitted to complete, regardless of source. Christopher Epps, Commissioner of MDOC, publicly unveiled the system on September 8, 2010, and identified managed access as a model for other prisons to follow around the country to address the issue of contraband cell phones. Due to the installation of the system, between August 6, 2010 and September 9, 2010, over 216,320 texts and calls were blocked.
Location and composition
Mississippi State Penitentiary, which occupies 18000 acres (7,284.3 ha) of land, has 53 buildings with a total of 922966 square foot of space. As of 2010 the institution can house 4,536 inmates. 1,109 people, as of 2010, work at MSP. Most of MDOC's agricultural enterprise farming activity occurs at MSP. Mississippi Prison Industries has a work program at MSP, with about 190 inmates participating. The road from the front entrance to the back entrance stretches 5.4 miles (8.7 km). Donald Cabana, who served as the superintendent and executioner of MSP, said that "the sheer magnitude of the place was difficult to comprehend on first viewing.""Parchman" appears as a place on highway maps. The "Parchman" dot represents the MSP main entrance and several MSP buildings, with the prison territory located to the west of the main entrance. The main entrance, a metal gate with "Mississippi State Penitentiary" in large letters, is located at the intersection of U.S. Route 49W and Mississippi Highway 32, on the west side of 49W. The Mississippi Blues Trail
Mississippi Blues Trail
The Mississippi Blues Trail, created by the Mississippi Blues Commission, is a project to place interpretive markers at the most notable historical sites related to the growth of the blues throughout the state of Mississippi. The trail extends from the border of Louisiana in southern Mississippi...
marker is located at the Parchman main entrance. Passersby are not permitted to stop to photograph buildings at the Parchman main entrance. The rear entrance is about 10 miles (16.1 km) east of Shelby
Shelby, Mississippi
Shelby is a city in Bolivar County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 2,926 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Shelby is located at ....
, at MS 32. A private portion of Highway 32 extends from the main entrance of MSP to the rear entrance of MSP. U.S. 49W is a major highway used to travel to MSP. The City of Drew
Drew, Mississippi
Drew is a city in Sunflower County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 2,434 at the 2000 census. Drew, a rural community, is in the vicinity of several plantations and the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a Mississippi Department of Corrections prison for men.-Geography:Drew is located at...
is 8 miles (12.9 km) south of MSP, and Ruleville
Ruleville, Mississippi
Ruleville is a small city in the fertile Mississippi Delta region in Sunflower County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 3,234 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Ruleville is located at ....
is about 15 miles (24.1 km) from MSP. Parchman is south of Tutwiler
Tutwiler, Mississippi
Tutwiler is a town in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 1,364 at the 2000 census.-History:In 1899 Tom Tutwiler, a civil engineer for a local railroad, made his headquarters seven miles northeast of Sumner. The town of Tutwiler was founded and named for him...
, about 90 miles (144.8 km) south of Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis is a city in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of Tennessee, and the county seat of Shelby County. The city is located on the 4th Chickasaw Bluff, south of the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi rivers....
, and about 120 miles (193.1 km) north of Jackson
Jackson, Mississippi
Jackson is the capital and the most populous city of the US state of Mississippi. It is one of two county seats of Hinds County ,. The population of the city declined from 184,256 at the 2000 census to 173,514 at the 2010 census...
.
Throughout MSP's history, it was referred to as "the prison without walls" due to the dispersed camps within its property. Hugh Ferguson, the director of public affairs of MSP, said that the prison is not like Alcatraz, because it is not centralized in one or several main buildings. Instead MSP consists of several prison camps spread out over a large area, called "units." Each unit serves a specific segment of the prison population, and each unit is surrounded by walls with barbed tape. The perimeter of the overall Parchman property has no fencing. The prison property, located on flat farmland of the Mississippi Delta
Mississippi Delta
The Mississippi Delta is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth" because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history...
, has almost no trees. Ferguson said that a potential escapee would have no place to hide. Richard Rubin, author of Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South, said that MSP's environment is so inhospitable for escape that prisoners working in the fields are not chained to one another, and one overseer supervises each gang. A potential escapee could wander for days without leaving the MSP property. As of 1971 guards patrol MSP on horseback instead of on foot. The rear entrance is protected by a steel barricade and a guard tower. In 1985 Robert Cross of the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
said "The physical surroundings--cotton and bean fields, the 21 scattered camps, the barbed wire enclosures--suggest that nothing much has changed since the days, early in this century, when outsiders could visit Parchman State Penal Farm only on the fifth Sunday of those rare months containing more than four."
MSP has two main areas, Area I and Area II. Area I includes Unit 29 and the Front Vocational School. Area II includes Units 25-26, Units 30-32, and Unit 42. Seven units house prisoners. As of the 1970s and 1980s the prison grounds had small red houses that were used for conjugal visit
Conjugal visit
A conjugal visit is a scheduled extended visit during which an inmate of a prison is permitted to spend several hours or days in private, usually with a legal spouse...
s. As of 2010 the prison still offers conjugal visits.
Inmate housing units
Six units currently house prisoners. Units which currently function as inmate housing include:- Unit 25
- In the mid-2000s Unit 25 had the Pre-Release/Job Assistance Alcohol and Drug Therapeutic Community After Care Program, which had 48 beds. The program was for offenders who are about to be released from prison.
- Unit 26
- Units 26, 27, and 28, which in total have a capacity of 388 people, together had a price tag of $3,450,000.
- Unit 29
- Unit 29, a 16-building medium security complex, opened in 1980 and designed by Dale and Associates. Unit 29 houses all male death row inmates in MDOC.
- The building, which was under construction in the 1970s and originally had a capacity of 1,456, had a construction cost of $22,045,000. In 2000 a prisoner riot occurred at Unit 29, leading to some injuries. Renovations occurred in 1998, including the conversion of dormitory units into cell units. Unit 29 is the primary farming support unit of MSP. It has 1,561 beds, which house minimum, medium, and close custody inmates. The unit is the prison's largest in terms of prisoner capacity. In the mid-1990s Unit 29 was the main maximum security camp for the population. Most inmates started their stays in Unit 29, and almost every prisoner went through the unit. Renovations of Unit 29 in the financial year of 2000 added about 240 beds. By 2001 MDOC built a kitchen and had converted half of Unit 29's open bay dormitories to individual cells; together the changed had a price tag of $21,760,284 of U.S. Department of Justice grant money. Unit 29-A houses the A&D Treatment Program for Special Needs program, which is for prisoners with HIVHIVHuman immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...
/AIDSAIDSAcquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
who are more than 6 months and within 30 months of their release dates.
- Unit 30
- Unit 30 is the education and drug treatment facility. It was designed by Dale and Associates. Unit 30, a part of the Alcohol and Drug Therapeutic Community Treatment Centers (ADTC-TC), has 480 beds. Unit 30 has two housing buildings, A and B, and each building has two housing zones, A and B. Each zone houses 108 prisoners. Previously each zone housed 120 prisoners.
- Unit 31
- Unit 31 serves as the unit for inmates with severe disabilities. The unit includes a 12 week alcohol and drug program based on principles of Alcoholics AnonymousAlcoholics AnonymousAlcoholics Anonymous is an international mutual aid movement which says its "primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety." Now claiming more than 2 million members, AA was founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith in Akron, Ohio...
.
- Unit 31 serves as the unit for inmates with severe disabilities. The unit includes a 12 week alcohol and drug program based on principles of Alcoholics Anonymous
- Unit 42
- Unit 42, the prison hospital, has 54 beds. In terms of capacity it is the smallest residential unit. The prison hospital serves female inmates throughout the MDOC system. In December 2009 MDOC opened the Compassionate and Palliative Care Unit, a hospice for dying prisoners, in the hospital.
MDOC classifies 13 units as "closed housing units." All of the units in the prison which formerly housed prisoners and no longer function as inmate housing include:
- Unit 4
- Unit 10
- Units 10, 12, and 20, which together housed 300 people, together had a total cost of $1,000,000.
- Unit 12
- Unit 12 had the pre-release operations.
- Unit 15, Building B
- Unit 16
- The unit, with a capacity of 68 people, was built in the 1970s for $3,000,000.
- Unit 17
- Unit 17 houses the execution chamber for condemned inmates. A condemned prisoner is transferred to a holding cell next to the death chamber 48 hours before the scheduled time of his or her execution. Cell NO. 14 is used to house inmates prior to execution. The execution chamber is a 10 feet (3 m) by 15 feet (4.6 m) room.
- Unit 17's prisoner housing was closed on October 25, 2004. At one time the 56-bed Unit 17 housed the prison's death row.
- K-9
- Unit 20
- Fire House
- Unit 22
- Units 22 and 23 and the prison hospital, which in total have a capacity of 324 people, together had a price tag of $1,850,000.
- Unit 23
- Unit 24
- The unit, with a capacity of 192 people, was built in the 1970s for $2,250,000. Unit 24E and Unit 25 in total had a capacity of 352 people, and they had a total cost of $1,750,000. The total construction cost of all of Unit 24, constructed in 1975, is $3.6 million. The unit had 192 single cell medium security beds. The facility has two stories and three housing zones, each having 64 beds. Zones A and B housed special needs prisoners who were receiving mental health care. Zone C had general population A and B security level prisoners.
- Unit 27
- In the 1990s Unit 27 was the protective custody facility. Richard Rubin, author of Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South, noticed that most of the prisoners in Unit 27 were White, while overall in MSP most prisoners were Black.
- Unit 28
- In the mid-2000s Unit 28 was the facility for the A&D Treatment Program for Special Needs program, which is for prisoners with HIVHIVHuman immunodeficiency virus is a lentivirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome , a condition in humans in which progressive failure of the immune system allows life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive...
/AIDSAIDSAcquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
who are more than 7 months and within 30 months of their release dates. The program began as a therapeutic community in April 2002; previously the program was a 12 week program. Historically Unit 28 was the housing where HIV positive offenders were segregated into. In 2010 the MDOC Commissioner, Christopher B. "Chris" Epps, said that MDOC, beginning in May, would no longer segregate HIV offenders. By August 2010 Unit 28, which had 192 beds, closed.
- In the mid-2000s Unit 28 was the facility for the A&D Treatment Program for Special Needs program, which is for prisoners with HIV
- Unit 32
- Unit 32, a 34.8 acres (14.1 ha) prison unit, was the designated unit of housing for maximum security and death row convicts., and Unit 32 served as MSP's lockdown unit. Unit 32, designed by Dale and Associates, has "SupermaxSupermaxSupermax is the name used to describe "control-unit" prisons, or units within prisons, which represent the most secure levels of custody in the prison systems of certain countries...
" cells. - The U32 housing facility has five two story housing facilities, a recreation building, and external structures such as gun towers. Each housing building has 200 cells and 82 square foot of living space. Each housing building was made of precast concrete, and 6,700 cubic yards of concrete and 500000 pounds (226,796.2 kg) of reinforcing steel were used to build each housing building. Building A (Alpha Building) served as the maximum security area. Building B (Bravo Building) also housed closed custody prisoners. Building C (Charlie Building) served as death row. Unit 32 was intended to reduce maintenance necessities by using durable structure and equipment and to allow prison administrators to establish a high level of control over U32's residents. The 18.8 acres (7.6 ha) Unit 32 Support Facility houses administrative offices, a canteen, medical services, a library, and a visitation area. With Unit 32 closed, Parchman has about 1,000 empty spaces for prisoners. MDOC has continued to maintain Unit 32 so the state can house contract prisoners there.
- The $41 million unit opened in August 1990, increasing MSP's maximum security bed space by over 15 percent; during that year Mississippi officials said that the prison needed more maximum security space after Unit 32's opening. Prior to Unit 32's opening, MSP had 56 "lockdown" cells for difficult prisoners. By 2003 the American Civil Liberties UnionAmerican Civil Liberties UnionThe American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
filed a lawsuit on behalf of six inmates, alleging poor conditions in Unit 32's death row. In 2007 three inmates in Unit 32 were murdered by other inmates in a several month span. During that year a guard at Unit 32 said that under-staffing contributed to the security lapses. In 2010 MDOC and the American Civil Liberties UnionAmerican Civil Liberties UnionThe American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
(ACLU) reached an agreement to close Unit 32 and transfer prisoners to other areas. Mentally ill prisoners in the unit will be transferred to the East Mississippi Correctional FacilityEast Mississippi Correctional FacilityEast Mississippi Correctional Facility is a prison for men located in unincorporated Lauderdale County, Mississippi, near Meridian. It is operated by the GEO Group on behalf of the Mississippi Department of Corrections . The East Mississippi Correctional Facility Authority authorizes the facility...
near Meridian, MississippiMeridian, MississippiMeridian is the county seat of Lauderdale County, Mississippi. It is the sixth largest city in the state and the principal city of the Meridian, Mississippi Micropolitan Statistical Area...
.
- Unit 32, a 34.8 acres (14.1 ha) prison unit, was the designated unit of housing for maximum security and death row convicts., and Unit 32 served as MSP's lockdown unit. Unit 32, designed by Dale and Associates, has "Supermax
Guard Row
"Guard Row" is the area where employees of MSP and their dependents live. As of the 1970s "Guard Row," a nickname for the main road that bisects the prison, has identical wood frame houses, most of which had been built in the 1930s by the Work Projects Administration. Around 1971 the state charged employees a rent of 10 to 20 dollars per month, a rate described by Donald Cabana, a former warden of MSP, as "nominal." The state provided housing for employees due to the isolation of MSP, and therefore the staff can quickly respond to emergencies such as inmate disturbances or escapes. As of the 1970s multiple generations of families lived and worked at MSP.Residents are zoned to the Drew School District
Drew School District
The Drew School District is a public school district based in Drew, Mississippi . The school district's attendance boundary includes Drew, Rome, and the employee residences of the Mississippi State Penitentiary , located in an unincorporated area....
, and children who live on the grounds of MSP attend A.W. James Elementary School and Drew Hunter High School in Drew
Drew, Mississippi
Drew is a city in Sunflower County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 2,434 at the 2000 census. Drew, a rural community, is in the vicinity of several plantations and the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a Mississippi Department of Corrections prison for men.-Geography:Drew is located at...
. Prior to the 2010-2011 school year the Drew School District secondary schools were Hunter Middle School and Drew High School. Parchman, along with other areas in Sunflower County, is within the service area of the Mississippi Delta Community College
Mississippi Delta Community College
Mississippi Delta Community College is a community college based in Moorhead, Mississippi which is located in Sunflower County. It also offers courses at locations in Drew, Greenville, Greenwood, and Indianola, Mississippi. Its mascot is the Trojan warrior. The college's president is Dr. Larry G....
(MDCC). MDCC has the Drew Center in Drew, while its main campus is in Moorhead
Moorhead, Mississippi
Moorhead is a city in Sunflower County, Mississippi, United States. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 2,573. The city includes the legendary blues crossroads "where the Southern cross the Dog"...
. Sunflower County Library System operates the Drew Public Library in Drew.
Cemeteries
Parchman also has three cemeteriesPrison cemetery
A prison cemetery is a cemetery reserved for prisoners. Generally, the remains of inmates who are not claimed by family or friends are interred in prison cemeteries and include convicts executed for capital crimes.-List of prison cemeteries:...
; prisoners are buried on-site. A dead prisoner may be buried in one of two of the cemeteries. Hundreds of prisoners had been buried at two of the cemeteries.
Other facilities
The prison has a Visitation Center, which serves as a point of entry and as a security checkpoint for visitors to MSP. After security screening, visitors depart the visitation center in buses bound for the specific units.The Mississippi State Penitentiary Training Academy and the Thomas O. "Pete" Wilson Adult Basic Education (ABE) facility are located on the MSP grounds. "The Place," a restaurant, is also on the prison property. Parchman has the Rodeo Arena, a venue for a prison rodeo. The Mississippi State Penitentiary POTW (Publicly owned treatment works
Publicly owned treatment works
A publicly owned treatment works is a term used in the United States for a sewage treatment plant that is owned, and usually operated, by a government agency. In the U.S., POTWs are typically owned by local government agencies, and are usually designed to treat domestic sewage and not industrial...
) numbers one and two are the institution's sewage treatment
Sewage treatment
Sewage treatment, or domestic wastewater treatment, is the process of removing contaminants from wastewater and household sewage, both runoff and domestic. It includes physical, chemical, and biological processes to remove physical, chemical and biological contaminants...
plants.
The United States Postal Service
United States Postal Service
The United States Postal Service is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States...
operates the Parchman Post Office along Parchman Road 12/Mississippi Highway 32 inside the prison property. Mississippi State Penitentiary has a dedicated fire department, (MSP Fire Department) a wastewater treatment plant, road crews, utility crews, a grocery store, and a hospital. The fire department, which utilizes prisoners as firefighters, responds outside of the prison boundaries.
Parchman contains the warden's guest house, used to accommodate guests. As part of a longstanding agreement, the Governor of Mississippi stayed in the house once annually before conducting an inspection of the prison.
History of composition
When the prison farm was first established, forests were cleared and land was put into cultivation. Prisoners "deadened" or circled the trees. A sawmill opened, and the wood was converted into planks used to build the housing in the prison. In 1911 what was then "Parchman Place" had ten camps, with each camp holding over 100 prisoners and working on 100 acres (40.5 ha). The central buildings, including the superintendent's residence, the offices, a hospital with a capacity for 70 patients, the general store, the sawmill, and the brick and tile works, were placed in a location referred to as "Parchman." The post office was located along a railroad. Each camp had a telephone system that was headquartered in the "Parchman" location.By 1906 the state sent the healthy, young black males incarcerated in the Mississippi penal system to MSP and to the Belmont Farm. Other population groups in the Mississippi penal system went to other farms; White men went to the Rankin Farm in Rankin County
Rankin County, Mississippi
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 115,327 people, 42,089 households, and 31,145 families residing in the county. The population density was 149 people per square mile . There were 45,070 housing units at an average density of 58 per square mile...
, and all women went to the Oakley Farm in Hinds County
Hinds County, Mississippi
As of the census of 2000, there were 250,800 people, 91,030 households, and 62,355 families residing in the county. The population density was 288 people per square mile . There were 100,287 housing units at an average density of 115 per square mile...
. Around 1911 prisoners who developed chronic illnesses were sent from MSP to the Oakley prison. In 1917 the Parchman property had been fully cleared, and the administration divided the facility into a series of camps, housing black and white prisoners of both genders. By that year MSP had 12 male prison camps and one female prison camp. Throughout much of the prison's history, the prison authorities decided not to build fences and walls because of MSP property had a large size and a remote location.
Each camp had 15000 acres (6,070.3 ha) of land assigned to it. Camp One became the administrative and commercial center of Parchman. It was located near the main gate, the railroad depot, and the main road. William B. Taylor and Tyler H. Fletcher, authors of "Profits from convict labor: Reality or myth observations in Mississippi: 1907–1934," said that Camp One, by 1917, appeared like "a little city." Camp One housed the residences of the superintendent and the superintendent's staff, the residences of the camp sergeant and the two assistants of the sergeant, a hospital, a gin, a church, a post office, and a visitor's building. Taylor and Fletcher said that the other camps "amounted to little more than wooden barracks surrounded by cultivated land."
In the 1930s the female camp, mostly African-American, was isolated from the male camps. An enclave within the camp was reserved for white inmates.
Around 1968, Camp B was one of the largest African-American camps of MSP. Camp B was located in unincorporated
Unincorporated area
In law, an unincorporated area is a region of land that is not a part of any municipality.To "incorporate" in this context means to form a municipal corporation, a city, town, or village with its own government. An unincorporated community is usually not subject to or taxed by a municipal government...
Quitman County
Quitman County, Mississippi
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 10,117 people, 3,565 households, and 2,506 families residing in the county. The population density was 25 people per square mile . There were 3,923 housing units at an average density of 10 per square mile...
, near Lambert
Lambert, Mississippi
Lambert is a town in Quitman County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 1,967 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Lambert is located at .According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of , all land....
, away from the main Parchman complex. Camp B's buildings have been demolished. Until the post-lawsuit units opened in the 1970s, Parchman's newest unit was the first offender camp, a red brick building that opened in the 1960s. The building had a fence, two guard towers at opposite corners, and a gateshack. Donald Cabana, who became the prison's superintendent and executioner, said that the building was "not physically impressive."
Around 1971, most areas of the prison had no guard towers, no cell blocks, no tiers, and no high walls. Cabana said that the prison was "a throwback to another time and place." Cabana described the employee housing as "by and large drab and in various states of disrepair." During that time Camp 16 served as the Maximum Security Unit (MSU); the building was surrounded by double fences with concertina wire
Concertina wire
Concertina wire or Dannert Wire is a type of barbed wire or razor wire that is formed in large coils which can be expanded like a concertina. In conjunction with plain barbed wire and steel pickets, it is used to form military wire obstacles....
, and gun towers were located at the four corners of the building. MSU housed death row inmates and inmates put under maximum security, and the camp housed the gas chamber. MSP staff called the building "Little Alcatraz." Cabana, a native of Massachusetts, said that Camp 16 was the only building that resembled the northern U.S. penitentiary that he was familiar with. Around that year MSP had around 2,000 men and less than 100 women in its camps. Most camps were "work camps" which had a quota of acreage to maintain. Some had special functions; for instance the "disability" camp did the laundry, and the "front camp" housed prisoners who worked in the administration building; those inmates worked as clerks, janitors, and maintenance personnel. Each camp usually had no more than 100-200 prisoners. Because the prison population was spread across many units, the population would have difficulty engineering major disturbances. Cabana cited this example to say "In some respects, Parchman was a penologist's dream."
After the 1972 Gates vs. Collier federal judge ruling, the State of Mississippi replaced its previous inmate housing units, called "cages," with barracks buildings surrounded by barbed wire-topped fences. John Buntin of Governing Magazine said that the new units were "hastily built." Several MSP units were built in the 1970s; 3,080 beds were added for a total cost of $25,345,000. In the 1980s Mississippi State Penitentiary had 21 scattered camps. In 1983 Camp 25 served as the female unit, and the unit had no parking facilities. After Central Mississippi Correctional Facility
Central Mississippi Correctional Facility
The Central Mississippi Correctional Facility is a Mississippi Department of Corrections prison for men and women located in unincorporated Rankin County, Mississippi, near Pearl. The prison is the only state prison to hold female prisoners in Mississippi, in addition to minimum and medium...
opened, the women were moved out of Camp 25. In the 1990s MSP had 6,800 prisoners; in 1990 Mississippi had a population of 2,573,216, so about .026% of Mississippi's population was incarcerated in MSP at that time. The prison population had been increasing rapidly over the decade leading to 1995, and the prison officials converted a gymnasium into inmate housing and still faced overcrowding. Many construction projects occurred during that time.
In the early 2000s MSP had five areas. Area I had Unit 29. Area II had units 12, 15-B, 20-, 25-26, and 30. Area III had units 4, 10, 17, 20, 22-24, 27-28, 31, and 42. Area IV had Unit 32. Area V had Central Security. At that time 18 units housed prisoners, with the 1,488-bed Unit 29 being the largest unit in terms of prisoner capacity and the 60-bed Unit 17 being the smallest. At that time the prison's capacity was 5,631. The Internal Audit building, located along Guard Row, was destroyed in a fire in 2002. In the mid-2000s MSP had three areas. Area I had Units 15 and 29 and the Front Vocational School. Area II had units 25-26, 28, 30-31, and 42. Area III had units 4 and 32. At the time 10 units housed the 4,700 prisoners in the facility, with the 1,568 bed Unit 29 being the largest unit and the 54-bed Unit 42 (the hospital unit) being the smallest. At that time the prison's capacity was 4,840.
Weather
Karen Feldscher of the Northeastern University Alumni Magazine said that in the region around MSP, "Winters here are brown and stark. In the summer, days hit 90 degrees or hotter; come evening, the humid air buzzes with mosquitoes the size of B-52s."Demographics
As of September 1, 2008, Mississippi State Penitentiary, with a capacity of 4,527, had 4,181 prisoners, comprising a total of 29.04% of people within the Mississippi Department of Corrections-operated prisons, county jails, and community work centers. Of the male inmates at MSP, 3,024 were black, 1,119 were white, 30 Hispanic, six were Asian, and one was Native American. As of 2008, there was one African-American woman confined at MSP. As of November 8, 2010 Parchman has about 998 free world employees.In 1937, the Parchman community had 250 residents, while the prison held 1,989 inmates. In 1971, the prison employed fewer than 75 free world employees because trusties performed many tasks at Parchman. The free world employees included administrative, medical, and support employees.
Prisoner life
Located on fertile Mississippi DeltaMississippi Delta
The Mississippi Delta is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. The region has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth" because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history...
land, Parchman served as a working farm. Inmate labor was used for many tasks from raising cotton and other farm food products, to building railroads and extracting turpentine gum from pine trees. Parchman, then as now, was in prime cotton-growing country. Inmates labored there in the fields raising cotton, soybeans and other cash crops, and produced livestock, swine, poultry and milk. Inmates spent much of their time working with crops except the period from mid-November to mid-February, because the weather was too cold for farm work. Donald Cabana, who previously served as a warden and an executioner at Parchman, said that the labor situation was an advantage to the prison because inmates were occupied with it. Cabana added that "idleness" was an issue facing many other prisons.
Throughout MSP's history, most prisoners have worked in the fields. Historically, prisoners worked for ten hours per day, six days per week. In previous eras prisoners lived in long, single-story buildings made of bricks and lumber produced on-site; the inmate housing units were often called "cages." Prison officials selected prisoners they deemed trustworthy and made them into armed guards; the prisoners were named "trusty guards" and "trusty shooters." Most male inmates did farm labor; others worked in the brickyard, cotton gin, prison hospital, and sawmill. Women worked in the sewing room, making clothes, bed sheets, and mattresses. They also canned vegetables and ran the laundry. On Sundays prisoners attended religious services and participated in baseball games, with teams formed on the basis of the camps.
Throughout its history, Parchman Farm had a reputation of being one of the toughest prisons in the United States. This reputation antedated the 1960s arrival of the Freedom Riders.
In the 1930s, most of the crops planted at Parchman were cotton. The facility's brickyard, factories, gin, and machine shop gained the State of Mississippi profits. For most of the day, the female prisoners sewed utilitarian cloth goods, including bedding, curtains, and uniforms for the institution. When sewing labor was not available, women chopped cotton.
For a period in Parchman's history, women lived in Camp 13. Male sergeants and male trusties guarded the women. As a result, sexual intercourse and rape occurred in the women's unit. Women lived in large dormitories. White women usually numbered between zero and five, black women usually numbered 25 to 65. White female prisoners lived in a small brick building, while African-American prisoners lived in what David Oshinsky, author of Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice called a "large shed-like building", with a fence separating the two buildings.
Cabana said that in 1971 the prison environment was "relatively tranquil" because many prisoners worked outside instead of being confined in their cells for long periods of time. The prison was still segregated in the 1970s. Around that time a black leather strap named "Black Annie" was used to punish prisoners who broke rules. Other prisoners who broke rules were forced to stand for hours at a time on up-ended soda crates. During the era, stronger prisoners attacked and raped weaker prisoners, and prison staff provided little to no intervention in these incidents. Some inmates worked as "houseboys," maintaining the residences of prison officials. Some prisoners were allowed to leave the prison grounds to pick up supplies and transport them back to MSP. Karen Feldscher of Northeastern Alumni Magazine stated that the trusty guard system often produced "disastrous results." Cabana said that the trusty system "apparently worked quite well, as there were seldom any disciplinary problems among the shooters." Because trusties performed many tasks, the prison employed relatively few free world employees. Because of the scenario, Cabana said that the prisoners were the people who carried guns and enforced rules, while in Massachusetts the prison guards carried the guns and enforced rules.
In the 1960s, shortly after inmates arrived at Parchman, they received nicknames that reflected personality traits and physical characteristics. For instance, a man named Johnny Lee Thomas was nicknamed "Have Mercy" when he protested a beating of a fellow inmate. Thomas stated that Parchman was, in the words of William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease, "a world of fear in which only the strong and intelligent survive." Ferris added that "Like the trickster rabbit, the black prisoner had to move quickly and think faster than his white boss."
After the Gates decision, the number of murders of prisoners dropped overall. When integration came, prisoners formed gangs based on race to protect one another. In addition, the prison gangs gained the power that trusty shooters had held. In 1990, the prison emergency room treated 1,136 incidents of prisoner on employee assaults and 1,169 prisoner on prisoner assaults.
Cabana said "A life sentence in Parchman is an eternity." Prisoners may receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in Christian Ministry from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary
The New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary is a private, non-profit institution of higher learning affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, located in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. It was the first institution created as a direct act of the Southern Baptist Convention. Missions...
. The Parchman Animal Care & Training (PACT) program, which was established in April 2008, organizes inmate care of livestock.
Musical traditions
While living at MSP, many African-American inmates sang work chants, a tradition traced to West AfricaWest Africa
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Western Africa includes the following 16 countries and an area of approximately 5 million square km:-Flags of West Africa:...
. Work chants were used by farm laborers to pace their work. While inmates worked, a leader called the chant, with other inmates following him. One song includes a story of an inmate swimming through the Sunflower River to confuse bloodhounds, verses showcasing prisoners who return hoes to their commanding captain and refuse to continue working, and a story of a beautiful woman named Rosie who waits outside the prison boundary. William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease, said that "for all of these inmates, music was a means to survive within the prison's grim world." The Mississippi Blues Trail
Mississippi Blues Trail
The Mississippi Blues Trail, created by the Mississippi Blues Commission, is a project to place interpretive markers at the most notable historical sites related to the growth of the blues throughout the state of Mississippi. The trail extends from the border of Louisiana in southern Mississippi...
added Parchman to its list of sites at 10 AM on Tuesday September 28, 2010; Parchman received the trail's 113th historical marker.
The folk song collectors John
John Lomax
John Avery Lomax was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist and folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk songs...
and Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...
visited Parchman Farm in 1933, during a recording trip across the Southern states of the US. Lomax wrote that they recorded a prisoner singing:
-
-
- Ask my cap’n, how could he stand to see me cry
- He said you low down nigger, I can stand to see you die
-
Reflecting on the significance of the singing he had heard in Parchman, Alan Lomax later wrote: "I had to face that here were the people that everyone else regarded as the dregs of society, dangerous human beings, brutalized and from them came the music which I thought was the finest thing I’d ever hear coming out of my country. They made Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
look like a child. They made Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...
, who sang these songs, look like a bloody amateur. These people were poetic and musical and they had something terribly important to say."
Conjugal visits
Mississippi State Penitentiary permits imprisoned men to engage in conjugal visits with wives; conjugal visits must be with married opposite sex couples, and the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) does not include couples of common law marriages in its definition of marriage that makes a couple eligible for conjugal visits. MSP prisoners of "A" and "B" custody levels are permitted to engage in conjugal visits if they have no rule violation reports in the previous six months leading to each conjugal visit.Formal records stating when conjugal visits began at MSP do not exist; Mississippi was the first state to allow for conjugal visits to occur in prisons. The practice began on an unofficial level around 1918. There was no state control or legal status. Originally only African-American men were allowed to participate, as society believed that the sexual drives of black men were stronger than those of white men. Prison authorities believed that if black men were allowed to have sexual intercourse, they would be more productive in the farming industries in the prison. By the 1930s, the authorities had permitted white men to receive conjugal visits. Because the officials did not want pregnancies to occur, at that time they did not permit female prisoners to have conjugal visits. In 1940 prisoners began building special houses used by prisoners and their families during conjugal visits.
In 1962, Columbus B. Hopper of The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science said that the Mississippi State Penitentiary had the most liberal visitation program in the United States. Rules of visitation and leave, adopted in 1944, allowed inmates to make home visits for other reasons than emergency. According to a 1956 survey, it was the only correctional facility in the country to do so. Inmates were allowed to be visited every Sunday for two hours by their wives. In 1962 each Parchman camp, with the exception of the maximum security camps, housed a five to ten room structure called a red house; each house is near the main gate of the main camp building. In the house, the inmate and his wife may engage in sexual intercourse. Children are encouraged by the prison authorities to visit; as of 1962 one camp houses a play area for children. The Parchman conjugal visit program is designed so that all members of the family may interact with a particular prisoner. In 1962 the prison officials said that the conjugal visits were an important factor in preserving marriages of inmates and reducing prison homosexuality
Prison sexuality
Prison sexuality deals with sexual relationships between confined individuals or those between a prisoner and a prison employee . Since prisons are separated by gender, most sexual activity is conducted with a same-sex partner, often in contradiction to a person's normal social sexual orientation...
. During that year, most inmates reported favorable opinions about the conjugal program. David Oshinsky
David Oshinsky
David M. Oshinsky is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian; he currently holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin and is a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University....
, author of Worse than Slavery, said that the statements regarding the preservation of marriages were "likely" to be correct and the statements regarding the prison sexuality were "probably" not true. Penologists stated that factors that may have contributed to the development of the system were the strength of family ties in rural areas, Parchman being, in the words of the Dictionary of American Penology, "primarily an agricultural plantation that is a self-contained, sociocultural system functioning much as a culture in and of itself", the emphasis placed on agricultural production, and the small sizes of the camps, since the guards in the camps knew the prisoners on personal bases. The dictionary said that because of the lack of records, it was not possible to tell if the conjugal visit program reduced prison sexuality or recidivism.
In the 1970s, Parchman still did not maintain records on the conjugal visits that occurred at the facility. In 1972 women at Parchman became eligible for conjugal visits. In 1974, prisoners of both sexes were permitted to to have three-day, two-night family visits. In the 1980s guards reported that inmates were more docile if they had periodic sexual access to their wives. Robert Cross of the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
reported in 1985 that the MSP program received relatively little attention compared to newer and more limited conjugal visit policies in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, Connecticut
Connecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...
, New Mexico
New Mexico
New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
, and Washington. Cross added that "The difference, perhaps, is that in Mississippi, where Parchman serves as the only penitentiary, nobody issued proclamations or opened up the matter for debate." As of 1996 a newly-established Parchman unit used conjugal visits as a reward in a behavioral modification program. As of 1996, a typical married prisoner at Parchman has one conjugal visit every two weeks, and periodically uses the family visits.
In popular culture
David Oshinsky, a historian, said in 1996 "Throughout the American South, Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality..." A character in William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
's The Mansion referred to MSP as "destination doom." John Buntin of Governing magazine said that MSP "has long cast its shadow over the Mississippi Delta, including my hometown of Greenville, Mississippi
Greenville, Mississippi
Greenville is a city in Washington County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 48,633 at the 2000 census, but according to the 2009 census bureau estimates, it has since declined to 42,764, making it the eighth-largest city in the state. It is the county seat of Washington...
."
The prison is the subject of a number of blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
songs, most notably "Parchman Farm Blues" by Bukka White
Bukka White
Booker T. Washington White , better known as Bukka White, was an American Delta blues guitarist and singer. "Bukka" was not a nickname, but a phonetic misspelling of White's given name Booker, by his second record label .-Biography:Born between Aberdeen and Houston, Mississippi, White was the...
, and Mose Allison
Mose Allison
Mose John Allison, Jr. is an American jazz blues pianist and singer.-Biography:...
's "Parchman Farm (song)
Parchman Farm (song)
"Parchman Farm" is the title of a number of songs about Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm, a hard time prison because of the Trusty system which was later outlawed....
", which was later covered by a number of other artists including John Mayall
John Mayall
John Mayall, OBE is an English blues singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, whose musical career spans over fifty years...
, Georgie Fame
Georgie Fame
Georgie Fame is a British rhythm and blues and jazz singer and keyboard player. The one-time rock and roll tour musician, who had a string of 1960s hits, is still a popular performer, often working with contemporaries such as Van Morrison and Bill Wyman.-Early life:Fame took piano lessons from the...
and Blue Cheer
Blue Cheer
Blue Cheer was an American psychedelic blues-rock band that initially performed and recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was sporadically active until 2009...
.
The prison also served as a major source of material for folklorists such as Alan
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...
and John Lomax
John Lomax
John Avery Lomax was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist and folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk songs...
, who visited numerous times to record work song
Work song
A work song is a piece of music closely connected to a specific form of work, either sung while conducting a task or a song linked to a task or trade which might be a connected narrative, description, or protest song....
s, field holler
Field holler
Field Hollers as well as work songs were African American styles of music from before the American Civil War, this style of music is closely related to spirituals in the sense that it expressed religious feelings and included subtle hints about ways of escaping slavery, among other things...
s, blues, and interviews with prisoners. The Lomaxes in part focused on Parchman at that time because it offered a particular closed society shut off from the outside world. John Lomax, accompanied by his wife Ruby
Ruby Terrill Lomax
Ruby Terrill Lomax was born and raised in Denton, Texas, just outside of Dallas, Ruby Terrill earned degrees at state colleges, setting a record at the University of Texas at Austin for the highest grade average yet achieved by a woman at the university...
, toured through the southern states recording blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
work songs and other folk songs for the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
as part of a WPA
Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unskilled workers to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads, and operated large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects...
project in 1939. They recorded work songs and chants while inmates were performing a group task, such as hoeing the fields at Parchman Farm as well as blues songs sung by inmate musicians.
The Coen brothers' film, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, makes reference to Parchman, both directly and by including a song recorded at Parchman in 1959 by Alan Lomax on the soundtrack to the film.
In William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
's book Old Man, which was also published as part of the book The Wild Palms, the Tall and Fat Convicts were sent from Parchman to rescue folks from the 1927 flood
Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States.-Events:The flood began when heavy rains pounded the central basin of the Mississippi in the summer of 1926. By September, the Mississippi's tributaries in Kansas and Iowa were swollen to...
. In Faulkner's The Mansion
The Mansion (book)
The Mansion is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, written in 1959. It is the last in a trilogy of books about the fictional Snopes family of Mississippi, following The Hamlet and The Town...
, Mink Snopes was imprisoned in Parchman.
In August Wilson
August Wilson
August Wilson was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama...
's The Piano Lesson
The Piano Lesson
The Piano Lesson is a 1990 play by American playwright August Wilson. The Piano Lesson is the fifth play in Wilson's The Pittsburgh Cycle. Wilson began writing this play by playing with the various answers regarding the possibility of "acquir[ing] a sense of self-worth by denying ones past"...
, the characters Boy Willie, Lymon, Doaker, and Wining Boy all served time at Parchman.
The theatrical play "The Parchman Hour", by playwright Mike Wiley, is based on the following quote:
“Did you know that at Parchman, to pass the time and to keep our spirits up, we ‘invented’ a radio program? I don’t recall that we named it, but ‘The Parchman Hour’ would have been a good name. Each cell had to contribute a short “act” (singing a song, telling a joke, reading from the Bible—the only book we were allowed) and in between acts we had ‘commercials’ for the products we lived with every day, like the prison soap, the black-and-white striped skirts, the awful food, etc. We did this every evening, as I recall; it gave us something to do during the day, thinking up our cell’s act for the evening.” — Mimi Real, Freedom Rider, 1961
The Parchman Hour The play premiers professionally at PlayMakers Repertory Company
PlayMakers Repertory Company
PlayMakers Repertory Company is the professional theater company in residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.-See also:Dramatic and performing arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill...
in 2011.
The Chamber
The Chamber (novel)
The Chamber is a legal thriller written by American author John Grisham.-Plot:The Chamber, set largely in and around the Mississippi State Penitentiary, is the story of Sam Cayhall, a former Klansman who has been convicted of murder and sentenced to death by gas chamber 20 years after his bombing...
, a best-selling novel by John Grisham
John Grisham
John Ray Grisham, Jr. is an American lawyer and author, best known for his popular legal thrillers.John Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University before attending the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981 and practiced criminal law for about a decade...
, is set at Parchman. Many of Grisham's other novels make reference to the prison and in his book, Ford County
Ford County (novel)
Ford County is a collection of novellas by John Grisham. His first collection of stories, it was published by Doubleday in the United States on November 3, 2009.The book contains 7 short stories:* Blood Drive* Fetching Raymond* Fish Files* Casino...
, the short story "Fetching Raymond" takes place in large part at Parchman. The Chamber
The Chamber (film)
The Chamber is a 1996 drama/thriller film based on John Grisham's novel of the same name. The film was directed by James Foley and stars Gene Hackman and Chris O'Donnell.-Plot:...
, the movie based on the novel, staring Gene Hackman
Gene Hackman
Eugene Allen "Gene" Hackman is an American actor and novelist.Nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two, Hackman has also won three Golden Globes and two BAFTAs in a career that spanned five decades. He first came to fame in 1967 with his performance as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde...
and Chris O'Donnell
Chris O'Donnell
Christopher Eugene "Chris" O'Donnell is an American actor. He has played Robin in two Batman films, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, Charlie Simms in Scent of a Woman, Finn Dandridge in Grey's Anatomy, Peter Garrett in Vertical Limit, and more recently, Jack McAuliffe in The Company. O'Donnell...
, was filmed at the penitentiary.
The film Life
Life (film)
Life is a 1999 American comedy-drama film directed by Ted Demme, and starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. The supporting cast includes Obba Babatundé, Bernie Mac, Anthony Anderson, Miguel A. Núñez Jr. and Bokeem Woodbine...
, portraying a group of moonshiners from New York who are falsely convicted of murder and are given life sentences, takes place at Parchman. While it is set in Mississippi, filming occurred in California.
Quotation
- Oh listen you men, I don't mean no harm
- If you wanna do good, you better stay off old Parchman Farm
- We got to work in the mornin', just at dawn of day
- Just at the settin' of the sun, that's when the work is done
-
-
- Bukka WhiteBukka WhiteBooker T. Washington White , better known as Bukka White, was an American Delta blues guitarist and singer. "Bukka" was not a nickname, but a phonetic misspelling of White's given name Booker, by his second record label .-Biography:Born between Aberdeen and Houston, Mississippi, White was the...
, "Parchman Farm Blues"
- Bukka White
-
Notable inmates
Death row:- Cory MayeCory MayeCory Jermaine Maye , is a former prisoner in the U.S. state of Mississippi. He was originally convicted of murder in the 2001 death of Prentiss, Mississippi police officer Ron W. Jones during a drug raid on the other half of Maye's duplex. Maye has said he thought that the intruders were burglars...
(Unit 32)
Non-death row:
- Samuel H. Bowers (Died in the hospital unit)
- Stokely CarmichaelStokely CarmichaelKwame Ture , also known as Stokely Carmichael, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party...
- James FarmerJames L. Farmer, Jr.James Leonard Farmer, Jr. was a civil rights activist and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was the initiator and organizer of the 1961 Freedom Ride, which eventually led to the desegregation of inter-state transportation in the United States.In 1942, Farmer co-founded the Committee...
- Eddie James House (Son HouseSon HouseEddie James "Son" House, Jr. was an American blues singer and guitarist. House pioneered an innovative style featuring strong, repetitive rhythms, often played with the aid of slide guitar, and his singing often incorporated elements of southern gospel and spiritual music...
) - Edgar Ray KillenEdgar Ray KillenEdgar Ray "Preacher" Killen is a former Ku Klux Klan organizer who conspired in the murders of three civil rights activists—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—in 1964....
(Unit 31) - John Lewis
- Vernon Presley, father of Elvis PresleyElvis PresleyElvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....
- Booker T. Washington White (Bukka WhiteBukka WhiteBooker T. Washington White , better known as Bukka White, was an American Delta blues guitarist and singer. "Bukka" was not a nickname, but a phonetic misspelling of White's given name Booker, by his second record label .-Biography:Born between Aberdeen and Houston, Mississippi, White was the...
) - Luke Woodham, perpetrator of the Pearl High School shootingPearl High School shootingThe Pearl High School shooting was a school shooting that took place on October 1, 1997 at Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi. The gunman, 16-year-old Luke Woodham , killed two students and injured seven others at his high school...
(Unit 29)
See also
- Prison farmPrison farmA prison farm is a large correctional facility where penal labor convicts are put to economical use in a 'farm' , usually for manual labour, largely in open air, such as in agriculture, logging, quarrying, etc...
- Trusty systemTrusty systemThe "trusty system" was a strict system of discipline and security in the US made compulsory under Mississippi state law as the method of controlling and working inmates at Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, Mississippi's...
- Capital punishment in MississippiCapital punishment in MississippiCapital punishment in Mississippi uses lethal injection. Currently executions occur at the Mississippi Department of Corrections Mississippi State Penitentiary in Sunflower County, Mississippi...
Further reading
- Taylor, William Banks. "Down on Parchman Farm: The Great Prison in the Mississippi Delta." Ohio State University PressOhio State University PressThe Ohio State University Press, founded in 1957, is a university press and a part of The Ohio State University.-External links:*...
, 1999. ISBN 0814250238, 9780814250235.
External links
- Mississippi State Penitentiary The second entry refers to the Mississippi State Penitentiary and lists its statistics as well as programs.
- "http://clio.lib.olemiss.edu/cdm4/results.php?CISORESTMP=results.php&CISOVIEWTMP=item_viewer.php&CISOMODE=grid&CISOGRID=title,A,1%3Bcontri,A,1%3Bdate,A,0%3Bcovera,200,0%3Bnone,A,0%3B20%3Brelevancy,none,none,none,none&CISOBIB=identi,A,1,N%3Bsubjec,A,0,N%3Btitle,200,0,N%3Bnone,A,0,N%3Bnone,A,0,N%3B20%3Brelevancy,none,none,none,none&CISOTHUMB=20+%284x5%29%3Brelevancy,none,none,none,none&CISOTITLE=20%3Bidenti,none,none,none,none&CISOHIERA=20%3Bsubjec,identi,none,none,none&CISOSUPPRESS=0&CISOOP1=all&CISOFIELD1=covera&CISOROOT=/lomax&CISOBOX1=Mississippi+State+Penitentiary++Camp+B+Digital Collections: Alan Lomax]." University of MississippiUniversity of MississippiThe University of Mississippi, also known as Ole Miss, is a public, coeducational research university located in Oxford, Mississippi. Founded in 1844, the school is composed of the main campus in Oxford, four branch campuses located in Booneville, Grenada, Tupelo, and Southaven as well as the...
. - "Parchman Farm." Mississippi Blues TrailMississippi Blues TrailThe Mississippi Blues Trail, created by the Mississippi Blues Commission, is a project to place interpretive markers at the most notable historical sites related to the growth of the blues throughout the state of Mississippi. The trail extends from the border of Louisiana in southern Mississippi...
- History of capital punishment in Mississippi including pictures of how capital punishment took and takes place; it also lists references.
- Winter, Margaret and Stephen F. Hanlon. "Parchman Farm Blues: Pushing for Prison Reforms at Mississippi State Penitentiary." American Civil Liberties UnionAmerican Civil Liberties UnionThe American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
. - Chain gang songs from Parchman Farm
- Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
- "Penitentiary Farm Pays and Makes Money - The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
- "The Conjugal Visit at Mississippi State Penitentiary." JSTORJSTORJSTOR is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society...
- "Worse Than Slavery." The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...