WORSE THAN SLAVERY - DAVID OSHINKSY

I suppose one can’t complain about a book called WORSE THAN SLAVERY  being too dark but it is bleak. The book purports to be largely about Parchman Farm, the state prison in Mississippi, which is justifiably famous for being a slave plantation, but is more generally about crime and punishment in the South, particularly Mississippi. As the quote that opens the book says, “Northerners, provincials that they are, regard the South as one large Mississippi. Southerners, with their eye for distinction, place Mississippi in a class by itself” which I think is basically true, or it certainly was when I was growing up in the upper-South. Parchman might rival Angola as the most famous, operating, American prison. And while naming a slave-plantation turned state prison “Angola,'' seems unstoppable, Oshinksy digs up some facts about Parchman that are staggering. Since the prison was supposed to be a farm, and since farms have to make money, the state made sure that the Parchman not only paid for itself but turned a profit. So, due to capitalism, the system gets squeezed on two ends. First, the “convicts”are brutally driven to pick as much as possible. Here, the scare-quotes around “convict” are important. The incarcerated during this period just seem to be any black person around. Oshinksky finds half a dozen documented incidents of planters giving police a literal list of men they’d like arrested to serve as lease-labor and they pass “pig laws” to ease the process. Remember, if the YTs in Mississippi actually thought a Black man had done something bad, the man would just be lynched. So overall they produced a system where there is no interest or concern about any crime against Black person (including murder), and serious crimes (real or imagined) against YTs is punished viciously and extrajudicial leaving the Black population of Mississippi in an outrageously violent world. Secondly, the state seeks to lower the overhead of the prison in both obvious and dastardly ways. The barracks and the food and the medical care were as bad as it could possibly be while still providing enough support to keep the convicts picking at the prescribed rate. They also employed the biggest, meanest (and, apparently, often developmentally disabled) convicts to watch over the others. As in, they gave these “trustees” guns (the normal prisoners were called “gunmen” since they toiled under the gun) and promised them that they’d get a Governor’s pardon if they killed an escapee. The state shuts this program down a few times before bringing it back when various wardens argue it was essential to the functioning of the prison. It seems like fiction. 

The book benefits from being about more than just Parchman. In fact, the prison itself isn’t built until about 100 pages into the book. The book is mostly about crime and punishment in the South from before the Civil War into the Civil Rights area (and mass incarceration. Tho, Mississippi prison are so famously violent still that Jay-Z is helping fund a class-action lawsuit of the type that closed down the “classic” Parchman era) and about Mississippi’s culture. Mississippi was always wild as fuck. You have to remember that besides being way down south, Mississippi was also the Western frontier for much of the period before the Civil War. As such, it was cut-off and attracted a sort of violent maniac bent on created a fortune in a lawless and through slavery. The beginning sections of the book detail how violent the delta was for YTs in this period. People were dueling all the time, Northerners would visit and they couldn’t believe how fast arguments would turn to stabbings.  Mississippi is also one of the areas where blacks outnumbered YTs, which, ask Haiti or the Spartans, created a brutal-even-by-slavery-standards version of chattel slavery that was unfathomably profitable. After the Civil War, the famous loophole in the 13th amendment meant that there still could be slaves, slavery just couldn’t be an inherited position, it became a condition of being a “criminal”. And, if your master didn’t “own” you, instead was merely “renting” you as a part of the convict lease program, the incentive that he had to not work you to death is now gone; he no longer needs you to last a long time. Apparently, much of western North Carolina’s railway was built by these folks. 

The most famous Southern (although lynching happened everywhere and were also widespread, tho they targeted different groups, in the West) racial control strategy was lynching which this book talks about at some length but is better explored in AT THE HANDS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN which functions as sort of a companion to this book. I’d suggest reading them together. Maybe along with THE NEW JIM CROW to build a sort of American crime/punishment trilogy. 

Finally, the book is filled with some truly insane and interesting facts. For example, Parchman, being totally uninterested in rehabilitation, invented the idea of the conjugal visit. You didn’t even need to be married or have a girlfriend, apparently they’d bus in local prostitutes. Likewise, there’s a very interesting part about YT criminals in Mississippi (who at first did not get conjugal visits), and about how they were celebrated and had songs written about them despite being cop-killers. Plus, the most famous one was named “Hogjaw” which is an amazing criminal name (his appellation was “The South’s Toughest Criminal”). Amazing and sad and interesting, wade into the darkness and read this book. 1 endless plantation.