Public utilities provide electric, gas, water or telephone service to customers in a specified area. Utilities have a duty to provide safe and adequate service on reasonable terms to anyone who lives within the service area on without discriminating between customers. Because most utilities operate in near monopolistic conditions, they can be heavily regulated by local, state, and federal authorities. Generally, the local and state agencies are called Public Service Commissions (PSC) or Public Utility Commissions (PUC). Municipal Utilities and Rural Electric Cooperatives may be unregulated though.
Parchman is a small unincorporated town in Sunflower County, Mississippi, United States, in the Mississippi Delta region. Best known as the home of Mississippi State Penitentiary, formerly called Parchman Farm, Parchman is the oldest prison and the only maximum security prison in the state. Parchman also houses inmates who have been sentenced to death in Mississippi on death row. Instead of building a permanent execution chamber there, the state built the first portable electric chair in the United States, carried on a pickup truck and used until 1955, for executions at Parchman.