THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607300513
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY
LENGTH: 88 lines
WORSE THAN SLAVERY
Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
DAVID M. OSHINSKY
The Free Press. 306 pp. $25.
Ten years after the Civil War, crime and punishment had become the political issues of the day in Mississippi. Of particular concern was ``black lawlessness'' and the growing demands of white residents for tougher laws and longer sentences.
Catering to the hysteria, the Mississippi legislature passed a major crime bill in 1876. Arrests shot up. The state's convict population quadrupled. Not surprisingly, almost all of those imprisoned were former slaves, caught in a dragnet of new laws designed especially for them - laws against everything from stealing livestock to ``mischief'' and ``insulting gestures.''
Post-Civil War Mississippi was an angry, desolate place, writes Rutgers University professor David Oshinsky in his comprehensive and important new book, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. The state's economy was in ruins, its labor force was gone and its surviving white residents were a population of humiliated amputees. They unleashed their fury on the most convenient, vulnerable and available targets: free blacks.
As Oshinsky details, that fury took many forms - from socially sanctioned mob violence to the reinvention of slavery known as ``convict leasing,'' which was used to rebuild and restore the war-ravaged South. But its worst and most destructive aspect was the blatant use of the law to maintain white supremacy and increase the profits of the rich.
Oshinsky's meticulously researched and remarkably accessible book shows just how far we haven't come. Worse Than Slavery, a phrase taken from The History of the Mississippi Penitentiary (1930), should turn on the light for those who have learned to accept the demographics of the current U.S. prison population.
Oshinsky takes the theory of The History of the Mississippi Penitentiary, that post-war convict conditions were far worse than those endured by antebellum slaves, one step further. He painstakingly documents the legalized segregation, lynchings, mob violence, sharecropping and convict leasing that replaced slavery, showing us the context from which those conditions evolved.
Convict leasing - a practice invented in Mississippi and quickly adopted by other Southern states - began in 1868. Convicts were handed over to private contractors, who used them to clear land, grow cotton, mine coal and iron, and fell timber and collect turpentine. The contractors were paid by the states to feed, clothe and guard the prisoners. They also kept all of the profits derived from the convicts' labor.
Mississippi's leasing act, writes Oshinsky, ``was designed for black, not white convicts. It cleverly ensured this distinction by setting aside the old penitentiary in Jackson to house prisoners serving 10 years or more. The intent, said lawmakers, was to keep the most dangerous prisoners behind the well-guarded prison walls. In truth, however, the real issue was race. Though far fewer in number, white convicts received longer sentences than blacks because the courts of Mississippi did not normally punish whites for anything except the most heinous of crimes.''
So it was across the South. While a small number of white inmates languished in prisons, black convicts were worked, often to death, under filthy, dangerous conditions. Hundreds of them were children. The state penal code made no distinction between adults and juveniles. By 1880, Oshinsky writes, at least one convict in four was an adolescent or a child.
In Mississippi, ``not a single leased convict ever lived long enough to serve a sentence of 10 years or more.''
In Alabama, officials reported in 1870 that more than 40 percent of the state's inmates had died, many from corporal punishment.
With so many fatalities, contractors found themselves in constant need of replacements. Local sheriffs were happy to oblige, picking up vagrants, drunks, loiterers, and turning them over by the hundreds.
By the 20th century, even Mississippi began to have second thoughts about convict leasing. Gov. James K. Vardaman replaced the system with Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre plantation on the Yazoo Delta designed to restore what, in Vardaman's view, had been the ``civilizing'' effect of slavery.
The place had the added benefit of making money. By 1917, virtually all of Mississippi's inmates had been sent to Parchman, and their labor was producing more than $1 million a year. The farm continued to fill the state's coffers until 1970, when civil rights legislation put an end to the brutal practices under which the convicts labored.
As present-day politicians vie to outdo each other on issues of crime and punishment, as prison officials contract to supply private industry with cheap inmate labor and as states turn over the management of prisons to large, for-profit corporations, Oshinsky's book gives us many reasons for pause. MEMO: Laura LaFay is a staff writer who covers state prisons. She works
in the Richmond bureau. by CNB