Things have certainly changed at the notorious Parchman Farm state penitentiary in Mississippi since the old blues song was written: these days the cons get to play with computers, and Associated Press reports that an embezzler serving a 30-year sentence at Parchman is accused of tampering with the prison’s computer records, selling about 100,000 pounds of prison-grown cotton and trying to change his own records to get an early release; the suspect got a job as clerk in the prison industries programme and was given his own computer with access to the pen’s main system – and was only found out when the authorities began investigating another scam in which cons were changing the values on small money orders they got.