Mississippi State Penitentiary

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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.

1 Description
2 Film
3 Quotation
4 References
5 See also
6 External links
7 Sources

[edit] 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 are 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 William C. Keady found that Parchman Farm violated modern standards of decency.

As a consequence, the prison was renovated in 1972 after the scathing ruling by Judge Keady in which he wrote that the prison violated the Constitution and was an affront to 'modern standards of decency'. 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 _The Wild Palms_

[edit] 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.