Down on Parchman Farm

The Great Prison in the Mississippi Delta

William Banks Taylor
Foreword by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw

Down 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. For this volume, 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 narratives remain a historical resource of note and shed much light on life at the prison, even as more current scholarship on the penal system and incarcerated people has come to the fore.

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.