Roy Haber was going to see about a prisoner. It was 1970, and he was driving up Highway 51 through the Yazoo Delta to Parchman Farm: Mississippi’s oldest, biggest and most brutal penitentiary.
“I was going to this prison that was infamous,” Haber said. “And, you know, I was basically a young kid lawyer coming from New York to this wild country.”
By the time Haber left Mississippi, the entire system at Parchman Farm would be transformed — and so would America’s definition of “cruel and unusual punishment.”
In the ninth episode of The Washington’s Post “Constitutional” podcast, we explore the prison’s origins and the pivotal court case, Gates v. Collier, in which Haber brought to light the constitutional violations that permeated Parchman Farm.
This episode features the voices of Haber; Ron Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Criminal Justice Institute; and David Oshinsky, author of “Worse…
