Parchman
From June 5, 2007
After a pleasant and great night out at Po’ Monkey’s, our destination for today was the notorious and depressing Mississippi State Penitentiary called Parchman. Parchman sits on a plot of land measuring roughly 18,000 square acres where it seems to be its own little self-sustaining “community” (with that term being used very loosely). Driving into the gates of the penitentiary, I had very little expectations on a specific level, but I did believe that it would be very difficult and disturbing to witness some of the things that go on in one of the state’s three penitentiaries.
Parchman outnumbers Wake Forest undergraduate students in terms of population by a few hundred people. As an all-male, maximum security prison, I find it very odd and illogical that the majority of the workers are young black females. Not only are these young girls unable to provide the proper level of protection for themselves and the security of the prison, they are just too young to have the proper experience in dealing with hardened criminals in such an institution like Parchman. Issues of liability and accountability begin to arise just from that initial realization as we entered Parchman.
For so many reasons, it seems that the overall status of this penitentiary is to uphold the slave labor system. I think that the history of the Deep South indicates that when slavery was abolished and sharecroppers came to learn of some of their new rights, the whites in the south tried to develop new ways to imprison people and force blacks to provide free labor. The judicial system in the Delta seems to have worked against blacks by creating and upholding laws that they knew were either unjust or too harsh a punishment for the act committed.
There are glaring issues of corruption in Parchman. The first prisoner who spoke with us had so many things to say about the food, the forced farm labor, and the overall lack of protection and humane treatment while in prison. The administrative bodies that control Parchman should be held accountable for their actions, or lack thereof. The overall experience of Parchman was incredibly eye-opening.