State penitentiary at Parchman has an interesting past. What will be its future?
Few institutional buildings in Mississippi, whether bastions of higher learning, chambers of government ranging from the Capitol to the courthouse to city hall, citadels of the cultural arts or beloved athletic arenas, have historically captured the public’s attention as much as Parchman Prison.
A nearly 4,000-acre tract of farmland in the Parchman community of north Sunflower County, midway between Rome and Drew on U.S. 49W, became the state prison in 1901.
The maximum-security, mostly-men’s jail has since been the source of constant controversy and countless lawsuits over inmate living conditions. Author William Faulkner, in “The Mansion,” called it “Destination Doom.”
Until a bill to shutter and scrap the joint died in a State Senate committee room during this year’s Legislature, it could have become something else, say, a series of buildings housing a new form of economic development in the bleak Mississippi Delta.
Bill sponsor Sen. Juan Barnett of Heidelberg told the Magnolia Tribune that a closed Parchman Prison could be used to train correctional officers for other prisons or house a workforce training facility for industry.
It could always be a leased-out cotton and soybean farm, which it has been for much of its notorious history. How about movie set? They filmed parts of John Grisham’s “The Chamber” there. (Fellow political reporter Terry Cassreino and I were filmed alongside actor Chris O’Donnell in a scene at the state capitol playing newspaper guys in that 1996 classic. Alas, we were left on the cutting room floor, film career down the tubes.)
Once upon a deplorable time in Mississippi, Parchman was famously utilized to hold legions of freedom riders who invaded Mississippi in the 1960s. County jails were considered too plush to hold the activists, so the mostly college-age volunteers were dispatched to despicable Parchman.
The renowned voting-rights activist Stokely Carmichael was among them. Carmichael, a graduate of Washington, DC’s Howard University, upon learning that some Harvard and Yale grads were among the next crowd of demonstrators to arrive at Parchman, sarcastically told his restless fellow state prisoners/activists, “Hey, guys, hear that? We just need to hold on here until Harvard, Yale and Princeton let out, and then there’s going to be an invasion by rich, white kids. The Ivy League is coming to save us.”
But, let’s be honest and just agree that for countless years Parchman was an “affront to modern standards of decency,” as found by U.S. Judge William C. Keady in the noted “Gates v. Collier” lawsuit in 1972.
Despite some reforms from the lawsuit, Parchman maintained its reputation as a hellhole for Mississippians on a wayward track of life.
This is another story of lore I must tell about Parchman concerning a friend from my hometown who attended Ole Miss, a person of good nature and a storyteller of epic proportions.
At college, the professor of a course he was studying hauled his students to Parchman for a close-up of life behind those desperate walls. Traipsing nauseating hallways and eyeballing hard-core prisoners held by the Great State of Mississippi, my friend heard a squeal from a nearby cell, “Fitzgerald, is that you?”
My friend Fitzgerald knew that voice. He gazed into the cell block and saw an old friend and enthusiastically answered back, “Hell, yes, Smith (a fake name), how you making it, man?” Fitz was speaking to a former and lonesome classmate who’d gone astray. The man was hopeful he’d someday be given another chance at life on the outside. He got one, too.
For others, Parchman will apparently continue chiefly as that hellhole for Mississippians gone wayward.
— Mac Gordon, a retired newspaperman, is a native of McComb. He can be reached at macmarygordon@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: MS State penitentiary at Parchman has an interesting past
