Take an Inside Look at Mississippi's Parchman Prison

By: Angie Nassar

AJ+ producer Angie Nassar (@angienassar) traveled to Parchman prison to find out why prisoners there are dying. She met with former inmates, family members of current inmates, activists and academics.

The drive from Jackson, Mississippi, to Parchman prison is full of wide open spaces and silence.

You can drive for miles and miles on Route 49W and see almost nothing but flat fields and farmland covered in dark, Delta soil and cotton plants. Hidden between the vast spaces are dollar stores, dirt roads and gas stations selling fried chicken. There are dusty pickup trucks. Crumbling porches. A few Confederate flags.

The drive also takes you past Yazoo City, whose population is 83% Black. The town has the lowest median income in the state at around $24,000. Mississippi is the poorest and Blackest state in the nation; a state built on the legacy of slavery and bound by individual and institutional acts of racism. Just next door to Parchman is the town of Drew, where 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered. His death became a rallying point for the civil rights movement.

While I was in Mississippi, I spoke with Betty Turner, the mother of an inmate at Parchman. “It was slavery back then and it's slavery right now. They were whooping us with whips and sticks and bricks and guns then, and if you want to know the truth … they're more so using the [strike] of a pen now … They take that pen and sign in black and white, and [decide which prison] where they want you to go,” she told me.

Black residents — though only 38% of the population — make up well over half of the state and local prison population in Mississippi. Only one other state in the country — Louisiana — locks up more people per capita.

But to really understand Mississippi’s incarceration problem, you need to understand the extreme inequity and isolation Black Mississippians face. For example:

Over 16% of Black babies across the state are born underweight, the worst rate in the U.S.
Black women in Mississippi make 56% of what white men make.
Nearly 33,000 students — almost all of them Black — attend a school district rated as failing. White students make up less than 5% of enrollment in these districts.
The entire state of Mississippi has only one abortion clinic.

During my reporting, I also spoke with Ralph Eubanks, a professor in the English department at the University of Mississippi who teaches classes to inmates at Parchman. “I always say that in Mississippi, if you want to look for a story, look for the things that we're silent about,” he said.

There are people on the ground filling up those silences, both inside and outside the prison walls.