Down on Parchman Farm
The Great Prison in the Mississippi Delta
William Banks Taylor
Foreword by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw
“The extraordinary attention devoted to Parchman
by musicians and writers owes perhaps to the power of the old convict farm to
give such a rich image of human beings contending with bad times. The farm
offered a visual manifestation of the blues. Set in the Yazoo Delta of isolated
Sunflower County, it lay in the heart of blues country, and the inmates, always
predominantly black, sang of back-breaking labor and love miseries, themes that
characterize the blues everywhere.” —from
the foreword by Peggy Whitman PrenshawDown on Parchman Farm is a greatly revised edition of William Banks Taylor’s Brokered Justice (1993). While Brokered Justice was a history of the prison system and prison reform in Mississippi, this new edition tells the story of Parchman Farm, from its beginnings as a penal farm at the turn of the century to the 1972 court decision that sealed its fate. Parchman Farm’s story is rich in oral history. Taylor interviewed many former convicts, along with former employees of the penal system and a number of others who had some association with the farm. Their memories and opinions form the heart of his narrative. Their testimonies support Taylor’s assertion that for all its problems, Parchman Farm was for many years a remarkably effective and humane penal institution.
William Banks Taylor is a professor of criminal justice
at the University of Southern Mississippi. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw is Fred
C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University.
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Jul 1999
Criminal Justice/History 256 pp. 6 x 9 33 illustrations |
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| $21.95 paper 978-0-8142-5023-5 | Add paperback to shopping cart |
