Mississippi State Penitentiary

Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, is the oldest prison and the only maximum security prison in the state of Mississippi, USA. It is located on 18,000 acres (73 km²) in Parchman, Mississippi, and was built in 1901. It has beds for 4,840 inmates. Inmates work on the prison farm and in manufacturing workshops.

Description

Parchman Farm houses male offenders classified at all custody levels. This includes A and B custody (minimum and medium security) and C and D custody (maximum security). It also houses death row. All male offenders sentenced to death in Mississippi are housed here.^[1]

There have been a number of blues songs written about Parchman Farm and several Blues musicians were imprisoned there, including Bukka White (who wrote "Parchman Farm Blues"), and Eddie 'Son' House. In 1939, folklorist Alan Lomax recorded White and others at Parchman Farm for the Library of Congress. Mose Allison created a much-covered version of "Parchman Farm". (Louisiana's Angola Prison Farm had a similar musical impact.)

Parchman Farm is known for the part it played in the United States Civil Rights Movement. In the spring of 1961, Freedom Riders (civil rights workers) came to the American South to test the desegregation of public facilities. By the end of June, 163 Freedom Riders had been convicted in Jackson, Mississippi. Many were jailed in Parchman.

In 1970 the Civil Rights lawyer Roy Haber began taking statements from inmates, which eventually ran to fifty pages of details of murders, rapes, beatings and other abuses suffered by the inmates from 1969 to 1971. In 1972 in the case of Gates v. Collier decided in federal court, federal judge William C. Keady found that Parchman Farm violated the Constitution and was an affront to 'modern standards of decency'. As a consequence, the prison was renovated. Among other reforms, the accommodation was made fit for human habitation and the system of "trusties" (where lifers were armed with rifles and set to guard other inmates) was abolished.

The father of Elvis Presley was convicted of forgery when Elvis was three and received a three-year sentence at Parchman.^[2]

Parchman was the prison that Mink Snopes was Condemned to in William Faulkner's The Mansion, and it was the prison that the Tall and Fat Convicts were sent from to rescue folks from the 1927 flood in Faulkner's "Old Man," which was also published as part of the book The Wild Palms.

Film

The Chamber, a movie based on the best-selling novel by John Grisham, was filmed at the penitentiary. The movie starred Gene Hackman and Chris O'Donnell. Bo Jackson has a cameo as a prison guard. 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 also filmed here.

The very first photo of Elvis Presley was taken at the prison when Gladys Presley and a 3-year-old Elvis came to visit Vernon, Elvis' father, who was an inmate there in 1938. The photo shows Vernon, Elvis, and Gladys together against a wall inside the prison.

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 White, "Parchman Farm Blues"

References

See also

• Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
• List of Mississippi state prisons
• Yazoo County, Mississippi

External links

• Mississippi State Penitentiary The second entry refers to the Mississippi State Penitentiary and lists its statistics as well as programs.
• History of capital punishment in Mississippi including pictures of how capital punishment took and takes place; it also lists references.

Sources

• Oshinsky, David M. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. Free Press, 1997.

Coordinates: 33.929403° N 90.55275° W

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