Parchman Farm, Mississippi State Penitentiary

History

Parchman Farm was founded by Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman in 1904. Vardaman conceived the prison as a solution to the convict lease system, under which state authorities hired out black prison inmates to private contractors who employed them as unpaid laborers. The governor believed that the railroad barons and plantation owners had no interest in promoting the reform of prison inmates, but sought only to bolster their profits at the public expense. Parchman Farm was therefore intended to improve the condition of black prisoners by instilling them with the habits of hard work and respect for white authority.

In many respects the new prison proved to be as brutally repressive as the convict lease system it replaced. Parchman was a working plantation on which inmates toiled to produce cotton. Prison authorities pushed their labor force hard in pursuit of profit. Discipline was enforced through the threat of and actual physical punishment. Most inmates formed an intimate acquaintance with “Black Annie,” the leather strap used to whip slow or insubordinate workers. Few prisoners attempted to escape; fewer still succeeded. Many of the guards (or “trusties”) were themselves convicts who stood to gain a complete pardon from the governor should they shoot an attempted escapee.

Race

The overwhelming majority of Parchman's population was black. In 1917, for instance, African Americans constituted 90% of inmates. The racial balance altered during the interwar era. One explanation for this is the increasing migration of African Americans out of Mississippi in search of employment opportunities in the industrialized Northern states. Another is the hard times of the Great Depression, which led to a large increase in economically motivated crimes among whites. As a result, by the 1930s, whites represented almost one-third of the inmate population.

Gender

Women prisoners at Parchman never made up more than 5% of the total population. These women were almost exclusively black. One of the most serious problems women faced was the absence of a female prison staff. White male warders were insensitive to their needs, and women prisoners were exposed to persistent violence and sexual abuse.

Early Reforms and the Civil Rights Movement

The first reforms of conditions at Parchman occurred in the 1940s. Programs in basic education and vocational training were introduced at this time, although they suffered from serious lack of funding. All prisoners served their full sentences until 1944, when a parole system was finally introduced.

Despite the promise of these early reforms, inmates did not experience substantial improvements in their condition until several decades later. The limitations of reform were underlined by the experiences of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders, who were imprisoned at Parchman in the early 1960s. In 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the segregation of terminal facilities used by interstate bus passengers (Boynton v. Virginia, 1960). The following May, the Congress of Racial Equality attempted to test this decision through a directaction campaign known as the Freedom Rides. Black and white activists boarded two buses in Washington, D.C., and traveled south toward New Orleans. Savagely assaulted by segregationist mobs in Alabama, the activists decided to abandon the buses and fly to their destination for a final rally. Black students from Nashville nonetheless resolved to continue the Freedom Rides. Anxious to avert any further violence, the Kennedy administration secured an agreement from Mississippi authorities to secure the peaceful arrest of the protesters when they reached the state capitol of Jackson. More than 300 students were arrested and imprisoned at Parchman Farm, where they were crowded into the cells and exposed to physical mis-treatment by prison warders. By late summer, most of the students had posted bond. The political embarrassment caused by the Freedom Riders led the Justice Department to secure an order from the Interstate Commerce Commission in October 1961 mandating compliance with the Supreme Court decision. However, although the imprisonment of the Freedom Riders publicized the appalling conditions at Parchman Farm, state authorities resisted political pressure to introduce reforms.

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