Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice

In this sensitively told tale of suffering, brutality, and inhumanity, Worse Than Slavery is an epic history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the civil rights era—and beyond.

Immortalized in blues songs and movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Defiant Ones, Mississippi’s infamous Parchman State Penitentiary was, in the pre-civil rights south, synonymous with cruelty. Now, noted historian David Oshinsky gives us the true story of the notorious prison, drawing on police records, prison documents, folklore, blues songs, and oral history, from the days of cotton-field chain gangs to the 1960s, when Parchman was used to break the wills of civil rights workers who journeyed south on Freedom Rides.

• Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
• Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
• First Available Cell: Desegregation of the Texas Prison System
• American Corrections: Theory, Research, Policy, and Practice
• Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court
• The Good War: An Oral History of World War II
• Thinking About Crime
• The Murder of Helen Jewett
• From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness