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18 Parchman Farm These days, instead of picking cotton, the inmates bag run-over dogs by the roadside, smoke, lift weights. Hurricane fence and razor wire lash the prison’s low buildings to the Delta—floodplain leveed and stripped of trees. Miles of bayous and moccasins, copperheads, redbugs, ticks, and gators, one guard says, between here and any town. A Greyhound idles by the gate, aluminum the pink of hazy sun. This is Mississippi— each released man boards with a Bible, tells how incarceration and the Lord done changed his ways. And at the next stop toward Memphis you can find Bibles by the busload. ...

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