D.A. McCall, Secretary of the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board, Baptizes Convicts on a Prison Farm near Parchman on 18 August 1946

views updated

D.A. McCall, Secretary of the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board, Baptizes Convicts on a Prison Farm near Parchman on 18 August 1946

Photograph

By: Anonymous

Date: August 18, 1946

Source: "D.A. McCall, Secretary of the Mississippi Baptist Convention Board, Baptizes Convicts on a Prison Farm near Parchman on 18 August 1946." Alamy Images, August 18, 1946.

About the Photographer: This image is part of the stock collection of Alamy Images. The photographer is unknown.

INTRODUCTION

Parchman Farm began in 1907 as one of Mississippi's penal farms. The subject of numerous blues songs and a central character in such novels as William Faulkner's 1948 Old Man and Eudora Welty's 1970 Losing Battles, it became the best-known of all the penal farms in the United States.

Parchman was a prison operated on an agricultural system. Set in the Yazoo Delta in isolated Sunflower County, the farm benefited from exceptionally rich Delta soil. It was a typical Delta plantation, consisting of 15,500 acres (6,270 hectares) planted in cotton, corn, and assorted vegetables, with cotton as the leading crop. Parchman usually had fewer than two thousand convicts. The prisoners, separated into small groups, lived in camps and were largely self-supporting. A brickyard, a machine shop, a gin, and a storage plant were operated by convict labor. From the beginning, the prison made enough money to be self-supporting. For the first fifty years of its existence, Parchman's agricultural yield provided Mississippi with its greatest sources of income other than tax revenue.

The inmates toiled under conditions that shocked most people. The cages were unfit for human habitation, especially the showers, where convicts often stood ankle-deep in raw sewage. Within the rat-infested barracks, a convict hierarchy reigned supreme, reportedly inflicting atrocities at will. In the cotton rows, "trusty-shooters" guarded convict field hands with 30-30 Winchester rifles, and stories of slaughter had filtered out of the penitentiary for years. At "Little Alcatraz," the prison's maximum security unit, naked men were confined in darkness, knocked about by water propelled through high-pressure hoses, and deprived of adequate food for days on end.

With its vast cotton acreage, black field hands, and white overseers, the plantation would have been quite at home in the Mississippi of 1860. The brutality also seemed like something out of the antebellum era. Both media accounts and gossipy tales told of the punishments inflicted to keep the long line of convicts chopping and picking in the cotton fields. Guards maintained control through the notorious strap, "Black Annie," bloodhounds and German shepherds, and the fabled "trusty-shooters," convicted murderers who were assigned to guard and sometimes shoot dead convicts in the fields.

In 1972, District Judge William C. Keady held in Gates v. Collier that Mississippi violated the First, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments as well as several provisions of its own state law mandating minimal standards at Parchman Farm. The court subsequently issued 150 orders for relief. By 1976, Parchman Farm had been fully dismantled.

PRIMARY SOURCE

D.A. MCCALL, SECRETARY OF THE MISSISSIPPI BAPTIST CONVENTION BOARD, BAPTIZES CONVICTS ON A PRISON FARM NEAR PARCHMAN ON 18 AUGUST 1946

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

Parchman Farm was the product of a prison movement that began in the United States in the 1820s. Prior to this time, Americans of the colonial and early national periods viewed crime as a normal part of life. They did not attempt to eliminate crime since sin was a predictable and inevitable result of the corruption of humans. This religious perspective did not lead to humane treatment of offenders. Harsh corporal and capital punishments were common in this early era.

The direction of American punishment took a new and sudden turn during the presidency of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. The rise of the market economy and the extension of the vote to all white men created a world that was dramatically and disturbingly different from previous eras. Traditional forms of social control were now believed to be inadequate in a complex society threatened by imminent social disorder. Crime was suddenly viewed as a social problem instead of a religious one.

In response to growing fears, penitentiaries were constructed as institutions for criminals. The penitentiary, with its emphasis on architecture, internal arrangement, and daily routine, reflected the American vision of what a well-ordered society should be. In contrast to colonial Americans, who used institutions only as a last resort, Jacksonians viewed prisons as a first resort to combat social problems.

Jacksonians developed two systems of prison discipline. Both the Pennsylvania and Auburn models enforced silence, attempted spiritual reform, and emphasized societal obedience. Only the Auburn system included work programs and striped suits. Inmates worked side by side in silence. The impressive rate of productivity made the Auburn model popular. No one questioned the institutional incarceration as primary strategy for crime control.

By the late twentieth century, the Auburn model had become barbaric to many influential Americans. Prisons that emphasized work programs and incarceration instead of reform came under very heavy attack. A number of influential scholars theorized that the ruling class used the criminal justice system to oppress, regulate, and coerce the working class. The existence of Parchman Farm, a predominantly black labor camp that financially profited the state of Alabama, gave support to this argument. The prison had to change because it no longer fit American ideas about social control. It had become the most famous example of primitive justice and a place out of step with the nation's evolving sense of decency.