Life, death and the surreal at Parchman’s infamous Unit 29

That’s how Derrick Willis, currently serving two life sentences for capital murder and armed robbery, describes the past 24 years of his life on ‘the zone’ at Parchman’s Unit 29. 

Spread across nearly 30 square miles in Sunflower County, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, the state prison was built in 1901 on the grounds of the former Parchman Plantation, and emphasized the incarceration of Black men to clear the surrounding land, and later to work on its farming unit.   

Since then, Parchman, and particularly Unit 29, has developed a reputation as one of the most dangerous prison environments in the Western Hemisphere, let alone the United States. 

But a three week period from late 2019 into 2020 was its worst period yet; five were killed by their fellow inmates in gang violence, dozens more were injured, and many others took their own lives.

In total, Parchman saw 16 violent deaths in that few-month period alone, placing it among the ranks of the world’s most dangerous prisons per capita.

Videos and pictures taken with contraband cell phones were eventually sent to relatives on the outside, depicting men being stabbed and chased around the trash-covered unit floor. In others, a handful of distressed men would describe daily life in the unit without food, power, running water, medical attention or shelter from the elements. 

Weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic swept through prisons across Mississippi, killing dozens more.

It was in that context that Willis and more than 30 other men in Unit 29 began working on an anthology of essays, art and poetry that captured their daily reality on the zone with jarring, personal realism. 

“I knew that trying to write under those conditions, and even convey in the teaching that you want the person to connect with, would create a certain kind of writing that I was trying to get,” said Louis Bourgeois, publisher of Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison, and executive director of the Oxford-based Vox Press.

“There's very little pretense in this book, and that was intentional. I didn't want anything to come off as workshoppy. It's not meant to make a person feel good when they read it; you're trying to see, but also feel, what's actually occurring in this particular situation.” 

When he began working with the men in Unit 29 in late 2021, Parchman itself was not a new environment for Bourgeois. 

Through Vox’s Prison Writes Initiative, which instructs incarcerated Mississippians in creative writing and poetry, the author and poet has previously helped publish two other anthologies of writing from Parchman, albeit from different units lesser known for their violence than in Unit 29. 

But as the worst of the violence and COVID-19 outbreaks began to subside, officials at Parchman asked if Bourgeois would take his program into Unit 29, where dozens of men were still on lockdown, to help mitigate the tension and fear pervading through the unit. 

Without freedom to move between cells, anyone in the zone had to yell to communicate. Smoke from endless fires and cigarettes filled the air, circulated throughout the buildings by box fans but unable to vent outside because windows were blocked by birds nests. 

Between cell bars, some threw feces they'd collected at others, and guards were scarce.

Those conditions, which have become quotidian in Unit 29 over the years, fostered much of the writing in the latest book. 

Many of the the authors write of how the environment that has come to define Unit 29 -- one of rampant drug use, exposure to the elements and wanton violence --  makes it feel like living in a jungle. 

Others describe their fellow inmates as caged animals, and express feelings of dehumanization and isolation so profound that they ask what proof they have that they're human at all, or whether God loves them. 

It’s at that point the anthology goes beyond ‘Mississippi prison realism’, as Bourgeois describes it, and becomes a work of both surreal – and existential – reflection on life inside Parchman’s oppressive walls. 

“As one of my students put it: in this unit, anything can happen at any time, good or bad. There’s no continuity, and things are coming at you at all times,” Bourgeois told MPB News. “You just got the sense of a continuous flux of effluvia of some sort; just a constant stream of chaos.” 

“We could talk all day about what the justice system should be about. But I’m interested in the individual going through what most people would consider an extreme situation, sanctioned by the state government. How does that particular individual, who might have committed the most hideous act you can imagine, but now has to live through this situation, have to say about it?” 

To help the authors channel their daily experiences into writing, Bourgeois introduced them to the works of several published authors, including Mississippi-born poet Etheridge Knight, whose first collection Poems from Prison centered on the redemptive potentiality for both himself and others he was incarcerated with. 

Bourgeois says even those with no prior literary background took quickly to Knight’s poems and reflections on life behind bars, and their work for their own collection followed shortly after. 

“That's actually the people I want to work with, because I don't want pretense; I don't want artifice. To me, that is the most exciting thing: what can you do with a completely blank slate, so to speak, and see where you can go with it?” 

“I've in many ways tried to stay away from poetry because the average person, as soon as they see a poem, they shy away from it. Naturally, I want people to read these guys, but there's always students who just have an inclination toward poetry. I didn't want to stifle that either. This is a book of memoir, but it also sometimes takes the form of poetry. There's no fiction in it. Even the poetry is memoir poetry, you might say.”

The conditions at Parchman, ranging from cruel forms of corporal punishment, deteriorating conditions and racial segregation, have been notorious for decades beyond the sprawling, flatland Delta that it comprises. 

In the early 1970’s, only years after hundreds of Freedom Riders were interred at the prison, four men incarcerated at Parchman filed a federal, class action lawsuit alleging that conditions deprived them of their First, Eighth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendment rights. 

The suit, Gates v. Collier, focused on the facility’s use of the so-called ‘Trusty System,’ wherein men serving life sentences – many of them for murder –  were provided with rifles by officials, and the responsibility to mete out punishment and oversee men who worked under them at the prison’s many dispersed labor camps. 

The state government at the time justified their reliance on this system, and the myriad abuses and deaths which it produced, as a way to reduce the facility’s annual budget. In return, those labor camps produced hundreds of thousands, and later millions, of dollars for the state’s budget. 

After the lawsuit was filed, federal judge William Keady for the Northern District Court of Mississippi visited Parchman on numerous occasions, noting its resemblance to conditions under American slavery: 100-120 men sleeping in a single, run-down room, open ditches of raw sewage and medical waste, frequent murders and beatings and the use of its maximum security unit as a torture chamber.  

Years later, after the state of Mississippi appealed Keady’s ruling that Parchman must end all unconstitutional practices immediately, the regional Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed his decision. 

In effect, Gates v. Collier not only ended the use of the Trusty system in Mississippi, but also in neighboring Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. It also marked the first broad-scale intervention by a court in the supervision of prison practices. 

But an essay included in the book, authored by current ‘lifer’ Rufus McFadden titled Know Your Job, shows many of the same issues persist in Unit 29 today: 

I had started brushing my teeth as I walked toward the bathroom area. I had to walk around several people as they scrimmaged throughout the pod. There was so much smoke in the air and the noise was like it was noon time instead of early morning. The pod was still filthy from the day before. I eased past the crowd and made it to the sink. 

As I brushed, I noticed a sudden quietness. The quietness brought about an eeriness inside me as if something very bad was about to happen; the hairs on my arms stood at attention and a violent chill coursed throughout the vicinity in which I stood. Everything in my soul was telling me not to look back. 

Then I slowly looked back. The scene was like it was being played out in slow motion. I'll never forget the sound of wood smashing flesh and hitting bone. The officer had coerced three inmates to assault a guy seeking a legal assistant form. She sat back and watched while the inmate was almost beaten to death. I'll never forget the wicked smirk that was displayed upon her face. I could feel her madness as she enjoyed the brutal beating… 

In this essay, McFadden is describing one of many systemic issues outlined in a 2022 Department of Justice report, which found that amid severe understaffing at Parchman, those incarcerated on Unit 29 are subject to an environment rife with weapons, drugs, gang activity, extortion and violence. 

That same Department of Justice report found numerous violations of both Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment protections, including that in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, those in Unit 29 don't even have air conditioning.  

The investigation which produced those findings was launched in February 2020, shortly after the gang violence and rash of suicides that broke out at Parchman, and outcry from hundreds of Mississippians who demonstrated in front of the state capitol building demanding reform. 

Only months prior, in his first State of the State address, Gov. Tate Reeves said he’d begun instructing Mississippi Department of Corrections officials to shut down Unit 29 for good after touring it personally, later describing it as the ‘tip of the spear’ of Mississippi prison violence.

Between 2014 and 2020, according to comparisons of annual MDOC budgets filed by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee, Mississippi lawmakers cut the corrections department’s budget by a combined total of $215 million. 

“There are many logistical questions that need to be answered…but I have seen enough. We have to turn the page. This is the first step, and I have asked the Department to begin the preparations to make it happen safely, justly, and quickly,” Reeves said from the steps of the Capitol building. 

“I know that we will make progress day by day. It will often be slow, it will often be painful, as we reckon with the mistakes of the past. We will learn from them… we will do better, and work together, to ensure that the safety and dignity of all Mississippians are [sic] respected.” 

But today, the near-mythic Unit 29 remains open despite that pledge. 

During the 2024 state legislative session, Senate Corrections committee chair Juan Barnett, D-Heidelberg, filed a bill that would have phased down the operation of Parchman in its entirety over a four year period, transferring men incarcerated there to a few nearby facilities. But that effort died before even being put to a vote. 

For Rufus McFadden and hundreds of other men in Unit 29, that means daily life inside the zone’s brutal walls, and amid its unsanitary conditions, only continues.

At Vox Press, the work to compile Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison – the publishing house’s fourth book of Mississippi prison writing – presented Louis Bourgeois with an existential question of his own:

“We've done good work, but what are you trying to achieve now? What I wanted to achieve with this book was no kind of censorship, really. This is an extreme situation; what now can this book purport to do, but for society to receive a message that it needs to receive and then question what all this is about?” 

“We all grew up in English departments where writing is almost a luxury thing, or to get tenured. But this one of the few situations where writing actually has almost a matter of life or death thing to it. To them, this was like a last chance to get an utterance heard. It's real stuff, and for some of these guys, it's everything. They put everything into it – what more could you want from a student, from a writer?”