Mississippi State Penitentiary

Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, is a maximum-security prison farm located in the unincorporated community of Parchman in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region. Occupying about of land, Parchman is the only maximum security prison for men in the state of Mississippi, and is the state's oldest prison.
Begun with four stockades in 1901, the Mississippi Department of Corrections facility was constructed largely by state prisoners. It has beds for 4,840 inmates. Inmates work on the prison farm and in manufacturing workshops. It holds male offenders classified at all custody levels—A and B custody and C and D custody. It also houses the male death row—all male offenders sentenced to death in Mississippi state courts are held in MSP's Unit 29—and the state execution chamber. The superintendent of Mississippi State Penitentiary is Marshall Turner. There are two wardens, three deputy wardens, and two associate wardens.
Female prisoners are not usually assigned to MSP; Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, also the location of the female death row, was for a time the only state prison in Mississippi designated as a place for female prisoners.

History

For much of the 1900's after the American Civil War, the state of Mississippi used a convict lease system for its prisoners; lessees paid fees to the state and were responsible for feeding, clothing and housing prisoners who worked for them as laborers.
In 1900 the Mississippi State Legislature appropriated US$80,000 for the purchase of the Parchman Plantation, a property in Sunflower County. What is now the prison property was located at a railroad spur called "Gordon Station".

Founding the Mississippi State Penitentiary (1901)

The state of Mississippi purchased land in Sunflower County in January 1901 to establish a state prison. In 1901 four stockades were constructed, and the state moved prisoners to begin clearing land for crop cultivation. The land was undeveloped Mississippi Delta bottomland and forest, fertile but dense with undergrowth and trees.
Around the time the Mississippi State Penitentiary opened, Sunflower County residents objected to having executions performed at the prison. They feared that the county would be stigmatized as a "death county". Mississippi originally performed executions of condemned criminals in their counties of conviction.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History says that MSP "was in many ways reminiscent of a gigantic antebellum plantation and operated on the basis of a plan proposed by Governor John M. Stone in 1896". Prisoners worked as laborers in its operations. In the fiscal year 1905, Parchman's first year of operations, the State of Mississippi earned $185,000 from Parchman's operations.
Originally, Parchman was one of two prisons designated for black men, with the other prisons housing other racial and gender groups.
In 1909, the State of Mississippi acquired adjacent to the MSP territory, resulting in MDOC having in the Mississippi Delta. As time passed, the state began to consolidate most penal operations in Parchman, making other camps hold minor support roles. In 1916, MDOC bought the O'Keefe Plantation in Quitman County, near Lambert. Originally this plantation was a separate institution, the Lambert Farm. The facility later became Camp B.
By 1917, the Parchman property had been fully cleared. The administration divided the facility into a series of camps, housing black and white prisoners of both genders. By 1917 12 male camps and one female camp were established, with racial segregation maintained throughout. The institution became the main hub of activity for Mississippi's prison system. In 1937, during the Great Depression, the prison had 1,989 inmates.
Around the 1950s, residents of Sunflower County were still opposed to the concept of housing an execution chamber at MSP. In September 1954, Governor Hugh L. White called for a special session of the Mississippi Legislature to discuss the application of the death penalty. During that year, the prison installed a gas chamber for on-site executions. It replaced a mobile electric chair, which, between 1940 and February 5, 1952, had been transported to various counties for executions at prisoner's native grounds. In 1942, the prison saw the end of convict leasing. The first person to be executed in the gas chamber was Gerald Albert Gallego on March 3, 1955.

Parchman Farm and the Freedom Riders (1961)

In the spring of 1961, Freedom Riders went to the American South to work for desegregation of public facilities serving interstate transportation, as segregation of such facilities and buses had been declared unconstitutional. Violence engulfed the Riders in Alabama, and the federal government intervened. Finally the governors of Alabama and Mississippi agreed to protect the riders, in exchange for being allowed to arrest them. The Governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, did not permit violence against the protesters, but arrested the riders when they reached Jackson, Mississippi. By the end of June, 163 Freedom Riders had been convicted in Jackson and many were jailed in Parchman. On June 15, 1961, the state government sent the first set of Freedom Riders from Hinds County Prison to Parchman; to make the protesters as uncomfortable as possible, they were put to work on chain gangs. The first group sent to the farm were 45 male Freedom Riders, 29 blacks and 16 whites. A call went out across the country to keep the Freedom Rides going and "fill the jails" of Mississippi. At one time, 300 Freedom Riders were imprisoned at Parchman Farm. The prison authorities forced the freedom riders to remove their clothing and undergo strip searches. After the strip searches, Deputy Tyson met the freedom riders and began intimidating them. He began by mocking the Freedom Riders, telling them since they wanted to march all the time, they could march right to their cells, and he would lead them. "When they arrived from Jackson, they were stripped of their clothing, and given a tee shirt and loose-fitting boxer shorts... no more. It was the beginning of many steps to try to intimidate and humiliate the Freedom Riders. They were denied most basic items, such as pencils and paper or books." David Fankhauser, a Freedom Rider at Parchman Farm, said,

In our cells, we were given a Bible, an aluminum cup and a tooth brush. The cell measured 6 × 8 feet with a toilet and sink on the back wall, and a bunk bed. We were permitted one shower per week, and no mail was allowed. The policy in the maximum security block was to keep lights on 24 hours a day.

Fankhauser described the meals:

Breakfast every morning was black coffee strongly flavored with chicory, grits, biscuits and blackstrap molasses. Lunch was generally some form of beans or black-eyed peas boiled with pork gristle, served with cornbread. In the evening, it was the same as lunch except it was cold.

The Governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, visited the farm a few times to check on the activists. He reportedly told the guards to "break their spirit, not their bones". The governor ordered the activists to be kept away from all other inmates and in maximum security cells. With that order given, the Freedom Riders were stuck in their cells for the most part with little to do. They reportedly enthusiastically sang Freedom Songs, mostly direct descendants of slave spirituals. They made up songs to fit their new place.
As the 45 Riders struggled in prison, many others were heading South to join the Freedom Rides. Winonah Myers was one of the women who went South and was eventually jailed for her activism. She witnessed the treatment first hand. She was treated just as the men were, with bad living quarters and worse clothing and meals. Although most of the Freedom Riders were bailed out after a month, Myers was the last to leave. The riders' experiences at Parchman gave the Freedom Riders credibility in the Civil Rights Movement.

1970s–1990s

In 1970, civil rights lawyer Roy Haber began taking statements from inmates, which eventually ran to 50 pages detailing murders, rapes, beatings and other abuses they had suffered in Parchman from 1969 to 1971. Four Parchman inmates brought a suit against the prison superintendent in federal district court in 1972, alleging their civil rights under the United States Constitution were being violated by the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment. In the case, Gates v. Collier, the federal judge William C. Keady found that Parchman Farm 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 trusty system,, was abolished. The state was required to integrate the prison facilities, hire African-American staff members, and construct new prison facilities.
In the 1970s, the Governor of Mississippi William L. Waller organized a blue-ribbon committee to study MSP. The committee decided that the state should abandon MSP's for-profit farming system and hire a professional penologist to head the prison. On July 1, 1984, the Legislature of Mississippi amended §§ 99-19-51 of the Mississippi Code; the new amendment stated that prisoners who committed capital crimes after July 1, 1984 would be executed by lethal injection.
In the mid-1980s, several state law enforcement officials and postal inspectors went to Parchman to end a widespread scam involving forged money orders.
In 1985, area farmers still referred to the facility as being the "Parchman Penal Farm", even though the facility was officially named the "Mississippi State Penitentiary". During that year MSP had over 4,000 prisoners, including 200 women in a few of the camps. When the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility opened in January 1986, all women who were incarcerated at MSP were moved to the new facility.
The BBC filmed Fourteen Days in May at Parchman. The documentary followed the last two weeks of the life of Edward Earl Johnson, who was executed in the prison's gas chamber.
In 1997, several prison guards were arrested, accused of illegally interfering with prisoner mail. On March 18, 1998, the legislature made another amendment: removing the gas chamber as a method of execution.