The state began leasing the prisoners to wealthy contractors, who would further sublease them to companies. Prisoners at Parchman Penitentiary hoeing in a field in the early 20th century. Under convict leasing, the inmates were essentially slaves again, Oshinsky said.
They worked long hours for no pay, were poorly fed, and slept in tents at work sites doing dangerous jobs like dynamiting tunnels for railroad companies and clearing malarial-filled swamps for construction.
Convicts, sometimes including children under age 10, were whipped and beaten, underfed, and rarely given medical treatment. Oshinksy writes that between 9 and 16 percent of convicts died yearly in the s. But poor whites began to resent the system that drove wages down for free workers. In , Mississippi elected a new governor — James Kimble Vardaman — who aimed to reform the system, in part to benefit the lower-class whites.
It was massive, remote, and modeled after a traditional southern plantation. Over 20, acres and 46 miles, it was intended to be self-sufficient and profitable for the state, and it was. Convicts, called gunmen, picked cotton under the watch of the most violent offenders, who were given guns and called trusty-shooters, or trusties, Oshinsky said. In , The New York Times ran a sprawling spread in the Sunday edition which heaped praise on the prison.
But the reality, says Oshinksy, is that Parchman was nearly uninhabitable. Parchman Farm stayed this way, more or less, for the next 70 years.
Cotton picking became mechanized and the state instituted some small reforms. A relatively impotent parole board deferred to the superintendent, Oshinksy writes, and small vocational and educational programs excluded black prisoners. A maximum security unit with a guard tower, fences, and gates housed individual cells, a gas chamber for executions, and a solitary confinement wing. Otherwise, Parchman remained frozen in time, a segregated, harsh prison farm.
Some of the Freedom Riders, a group of interracial young civil rights activists who boycotted Jim Crow laws, served time at Parchman, although they were segregated from the general population. Claude Liggins, 77, said the racism by the guards at Parchman was mostly directed at the white Freedom Riders. In , a civil rights lawyer named Roy Haber visited a convict at Parchman who was challenging his conviction. While there, Haber heard accounts from other inmates and personally witnessed the conditions, which he described as the last legal vestiges of slavery.
Almost a century earlier, the 13th amendment had abolished slavery in all cases except in penal servitude. Haber represented the inmates in a class action lawsuit against the prison in the now landmark case of Gates v. Why is it still open? Why hasn't it been shut down? On January 27, Governor Tate Reeves announced that he instructed the department of corrections to begin working toward closing Unit 29, with the exception of areas that can hold death row inmates.
Last week, Reeves said that some inmates were transferred to nearby facilities through reclassification, the process of moving some inmates to minimum and medium-security prisons. Those who require stricter supervision will be temporarily moved to the privately-run Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility, he said. The deteriorating conditions in Unit 29 are well-documented. The state's health inspector released a page report last July that revealed unsanitary living conditions.
Many cells had no power or electricity, inoperable toilets and no mattress or pillows. We needed temporary housing to get inmates out of the environment as we work toward a longer-term solution," Reeves said in a news conference this week. Cliff Johnson, a law professor at the University of Mississippi law school and director of the school's justice center, told CBS News the move "cannot happen soon enough. Two of the inmates described holes in their ceilings, where water pours into their cells whenever it rains.
Any time it's raining, there's holes in the ceiling, so every time it's raining, it's raining in here. We've got cardboard boxes to soak up some of the water," one inmate said. The four inmates who spoke with CBS News are serving time for burglary, rape and murder. At Parchman, formal punishment meant a whipping in front of the men. It was done by the sergeant, with the victim stripped to the waist and spread-eagled on the floor. The lash was effective punishment, they insisted, and it did not keep men from the fields.
Armed with rifles, they were expected to use brutal force to maintain order. David Oshinsky. Author of Worse Than Slavery. In the summer of , Freedom Riders, including Stokely Carmichael and Joan Trumpauer, were sent to Parchman for challenging the policy of segregation on public buses. While at the prison, they were kept in horrid conditions, isolated in the supermax unit on death row, and often served inedible food. Mug shots of some of the more than Freedom Riders who were arrested in Mississippi during the summer of In , Parchman inmates filed a class action la suit Gates v.
When federal judge William C. Rats scurried along the floors. Electrical wiring was frayed and exposed; broken windowpanes were stuffed with rags to keep out the cold … he saw filthy bathrooms, rotting mattresses, polluted water supplies and kitchens overrun with insects, rodents and the stench of decay.
Gates v. Author of Sing, Unburied, Sing. Williams, who visited her uncle at Parchman during his wrongful incarceration, prays she never has to return to Parchman again. Williams said even visitors were treated poorly and subjected to invasive searches.
And, on top of that, the indescribable pain of leaving the person you love behind in that place of suffering. Today, incarcerated people at Parchman still work in the same fields that their enslaved ancestors once plowed and tended, only the cotton has been replaced by fruits and vegetables.
Parchman remains a site of forced labor, deadly violence, and unsanitary conditions. Recent videos and photos have exposed inhumane conditions that match those from a century ago: Rat-infested cells without power or mattresses, unusable showers and toilets, and unidentifiable food. Nine deaths were reported in January , including due to stabbings, beatings, and suicide. Left: a shower with damaged walls; top right: a shower with missing ceilings and knobs; bottom right: a backed up shower drain.
One building had a single working shower for more than 50 inmates. Parchman Health Inspection Report. These stories are not limited to Parchman. In , the U. Page after page detailed accounts of beatings, murders, sexual assaults, and drug overdoses. At some point, the assailants appeared to have urinated on the victim. According to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1, people died in local jails in
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