Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm, is a maximum-security prison farm located in unincorporated Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region.
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19 Facts About Parchman
2.
Originally Parchman was one of two prisons designated for black men, with the other prisons housing other racial and gender groups.
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3.
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.
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4.
The guards at Parchman Farm were relentless even after all of this mockery.
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5.
Parchman reportedly told the guards to, "break their spirit, not their bones".
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6.
Parchman was treated just as the men were, with bad living quarters and worse clothing and meals.
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7.
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.
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8.
The "Parchman" dot represents the MSP main entrance and several MSP buildings, with the prison territory located to the west of the main entrance.
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9.
Parchman is south of Tutwiler, about 90 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee, and about 120 miles north of Jackson.
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10.
Parchman contains the superintendent's guest house, used to accommodate guests.
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11.
In 1911 what was then "Parchman Place" had ten camps, with each camp holding over 100 prisoners and working on 100 acres.
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12.
In 1917 the Parchman property had been fully cleared, and the administration divided the facility into a series of camps, housing black and white prisoners of both genders.
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13.
In 1937, the Parchman community had 250 residents, while the prison held 1,989 inmates.
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14.
Donald Cabana, who previously served as a superintendent and an executioner at Parchman, said that the labor situation was an advantage to the prison because inmates were occupied with it.
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15.
Thomas stated that Parchman was, in the words of William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease, "a world of fear in which only the strong and intelligent survive".
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16.
Parchman was "primarily an agricultural plantation that is a self-contained, sociocultural system functioning much as a culture in and of itself", the emphasis placed on agricultural production, and the small sizes of the camps.
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17.
In Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, a young boy killed at Parchman Prison comes back to haunt the narrator, Jojo, and his family; nevertheless, they drive upstate to pick-up Michael, the father, who is just freed from the same prison.
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18.
Parchman is mentioned and shown several times in In the Heat of the Night.
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19.
Parchman appears as a plot element in "A Trip Upstate", where Sparta's police chief, Bill Gillespie, visits a death row inmate and witnesses the inmate's execution.
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