Mississippi County Penal Farm

This Works Progress Administration marker stands at the site of the Mississippi County Penal Farm, one of the county work farms that defined Arkansas justice for generations. People sentenced for petty offenses were sent here not to a jail cell but to a field, put to labor on county public works. In nineteen seventy-one that practice landed in federal court.

In the case of Howerton versus Mississippi County, prisoners argued that forcing those convicted of misdemeanors to work on public projects for no pay was unconstitutional. The case carried the name of James Arthur Howerton and the estate of Nathan Smith. In nineteen seventy-three a federal judge dismissed their claims, leaving the system intact for the time being.

The penal farm is a reminder that in much of the rural South, punishment meant unpaid agricultural labor, a system whose long shadow reached deep into the twentieth century.