Parchman Farm: The Prison Built on Plantation Logic

Mississippi established its state penitentiary in nineteen oh one on eighteen thousand acres of Delta land in Sunflower County. The site was not chosen for security. It was chosen because the land was fertile. The prison's purpose was not rehabilitation. It was agriculture.

Mississippi State Penitentiary, known to everyone in the Delta as Parchman Farm, operated on a plantation model: prisoners worked the cotton fields from sunup to sundown under the supervision of armed guards called "shooters," who rode horses along the rows. The prisoners were organized into labor gangs and worked the same calendar as the sharecroppers on the private plantations around them, except that the prisoners received no wages at all. They were housed in long wooden barracks called cages, segregated by race. The food was the food the plantation produced.

The prison drew its population from a criminal code designed to provide it with labor: vagrancy statutes that made unemployment a crime, contract laws that made leaving a plantation before settling a debt a criminal offense, and a legal system in which convictions of Black men required no standard of evidence that would have satisfied any outside observer. The result, which historians Douglas Blackmon and David Oshinsky documented in detail, was a system that historians have described as slavery by another name.

In the summer of nineteen sixty-one, Freedom Riders arriving in Mississippi were sent to Parchman as punishment. The authorities believed that the physical conditions and isolation would break their will. Inside, the guards confiscated the riders' mattresses and clothing to add to the discomfort. The riders responded by singing. They sang freedom songs that could be heard through the barracks walls. The singing, which the guards could not stop without the noise of stopping it, held the riders together.

The Freedom Riders were released in late summer nineteen sixty-one. Several reported that the experience at Parchman had not broken their commitment but deepened it. Parchman Farm remains an active state prison today.