![]() ![]() Over 20,000 acres and 46 miles, it was intended to be self-sufficient and profitable for the state, and it was.Ĭonvicts, called gunmen, picked cotton under the watch of the most violent offenders, who were given guns and called trusty-shooters, or trusties, Oshinsky said. Parchman was originally comprised of three separate farms: a small farm, which was maintained by white convicts, a smaller one farmed by women (mostly black), and a huge sprawling plantation for the prison’s black convicts. It was massive, remote, and modeled after a traditional southern plantation.Ĭonvicts worked six days a week, lived in barracks with no separation or classification by crime, and were often subject to punishment by a whip referred to as “Black Annie.” Parchman’s first year of operation was in 1905. In 1904, Mississippi elected a new governor – James Kimble Vardaman – who aimed to reform the system, in part to benefit the lower-class whites. Oshinksy writes that between 9 and 16 percent of convicts died yearly in the 1880s.īut poor whites began to resent the system that drove wages down for free workers. Convicts, sometimes including children under age 10, were whipped and beaten, underfed, and rarely given medical treatment. They worked long hours for no pay, were poorly fed, and slept in tents at work sites doing dangerous jobs like dynamiting tunnels for railroad companies and clearing malarial-filled swamps for construction. Under convict leasing, the inmates were essentially slaves again, Oshinsky said. Courtesy of the Archives and Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Prisoners at Parchman Penitentiary hoeing in a field in the early 20th century. ![]() In other words, the work a white worker might not want to do,” Oshinsky said. “The convicts, under convict leasing, would do the kind of work that free labor would not want to do. The state began leasing the prisoners to wealthy contractors, who would further sublease them to companies. Some were legitimate, but many more were fabricated or embellished. Many southern states, including Mississippi, began arresting almost exclusively young, black men on charges ranging from laundering to larceny to murder. In the Reconstructionist south, states’ coffers were empty, prisons destroyed, and their former free labor supply was emancipated. Its creation in 1901 was borne of a statewide shame and frustration at the contemporary system of convict leasing, writes David Oshinsky, historian and author of “Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice.” The history of Mississippi State Penitentiary is a history of failed reforms. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.” And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none,” Richie tells the young narrator, JoJo. In the present-day of the novel, Michael’s character and Richie’s ghost says little has changed. “Pop,” a father and grandfather, and the ghost of a boy named “Richie” both remember a harsh, painful prison farm of the past. Ward writes about two generations of prisoners at Parchman, including two young black inmates in the early part of the century and a white inmate, Michael, who’s just been released. And the danger that I would end up there was a real thing, for me and for people that I know and loved.” “I didn’t know much about it, but I knew it was a place I never wanted to end up. “When I thought about prison, that’s the prison that came to mind,” she said. Growing up on Mississippi’s southern coast, Ward said that Parchman loomed over her childhood. Parchman’s storied history is the basis for the prison farms featured in the movies “Cool Hand Luke” and “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, it’s referred to as “destination doom” in a William Faulkner’s novel “The Mansion,” and it is now a haunted setting in Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning 2017 novel “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” It’s about 30 miles from where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, and surrounded by uninhabitable swampland. Located about 100 miles south of Memphis in the Mississippi River Delta, the birthplace of the blues, Mississippi State Prison in Parchman, Mississippi, has become as much a historical landmark as it is a penitentiary. ![]()
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