history and understand the prison's roots of former governor of mississippi and open my supra mrs james k. vardaman was instrumental in creating the mississippi state prison he believed that the money made from convict leasing and chain gang should go to the state instead of private entities and thus the mississippi state penitentiary was born the prison itself is a reform so parchment prison comes about at the turn of the last century as a as a way to sort of. undo what some people are see as the problems of the comically system and in particular governor the governor at the time james vardaman who is an unapologetic white supremacist actually runs on the campaign of white supremacy. believes that the problem with comically scene was not really the sort of. human rights abuse that it was but rather that he saw it as sort of lining the pockets of the plantation class that he was a white supremacist populist and believed that this sort of state run plantation style prison would instead be a way of sort of socializing african-americans to their place which he saw as. manual labor the reform that led