Series 2678: Penitentiary Accounting and Administrative Records. 1836-1910, undated.
Auditor (RG 29).

Series 2678: Penitentiary Accounting and Administrative Records. 1836-1910, undated.
Auditor (RG 29).

See also:
      Series 1554: Bookkeeping Records. 1888-1893 (RG 49).
      Series 1575: Correspondence and Office Files. 1840-1913; undated (RG 49).
      Series 2851: Judiciary Receipts - Jailer Account. 1820-1873. (RG 29)

      Historical Note: Mississippi's first state penitentiary, known as The Walls, was built by convict labor on the site of the present State Capitol in Jackson and admitted its first twenty-eight prisoners in April 1840. Modeled on the Auburn system of hard labor by day and solitary confidement by night, the penitentiary housed a cotton and wool factory, wood shop, blacksmith, weaver and tailor, wheelwright, and brickyard where convicts manufactured goods for sale in the outside world. Its profits, after paying penitentiary expenses, were refunded to the state treasury. At the onset of the Civil War, the penitentiary was converted to a munitions plant run by convict labor. Later, when Union forces under General Sherman threatened Jackson in 1863, the prison was empited, with its worst offenders sent to Alabama, another forty men pardoned and drafted into the Confederate Army, and some proportion of the remainder released without pardon. When Sherman's forces entered Jackson in May 1863, the eastern wing of the prison was razed, and the remainder was destroyed by Union forces in mid-July after their victory at Vicksburg.
      Although the penitentiary was partially rebuilt in 1865 with a $30,000 appropriation from the Legislature, the costs of fully rebuilding the penitentiary proved too high for the post-Civil War state government. Consequently, in January 1867, the state signed its first convict lease agreement with J.W. Young and Company, ushering in a thirty year period of convict leasing during which The Walls was used as a holding pen for convicts who were sick, physically or mentally disabled or otherwise unable to be leased out. After steadily building public and legislative outcry against the leasing system's pervasive cruelty through the 1880s and 1890s, in 1900, the state purchased the first 14,000 acres of land in Sunflower County that would become Parchman Farm. That same year, The Walls was torn down to make room for the new State Capitol building, which was completed in 1903.