New book details the trends of mass incarceration in Louisiana

NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — A newly published book by The Historic New Orleans Collection details the trends, history and current realities of mass incarceration in Louisiana.

“Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration” was first an exhibition, but the exhibition was so popular, and the data so extensively researched, that it was later decided, long after the exhibition was gone, that the data would live on in a book to inspire change and future research.

Eric Seiferth is a curator and historian at HNOC. He is also one of the authors of the book and says, “The institutions of slavery and mass incarceration are historically linked. They really grew in concert and reinforced each other. New Orleans was the center of the Domestic slave trade in the 1820s, ’30s and ’40s. We know now that it is one of the most incarcerated places in the world. One of the stories we feature is an enslaved woman who is required to wear a 12 to 13-pound lead ball around her ankle for three and a half years.”

Nick Weldon, a senior editor at HNOC, is also one of the book’s authors, and says, “we really wanted to tell the story of how Louisiana came to be. In this book, you go from the Code Noir, the Spanish era, all the way to convict leasing during the 1800s, the Jim Crow constitution of 1898 and the tough on crime laws that started being passed by the state legislature in the 1970s and 1980s.  We highlight people from all 300 years of Louisiana’s history. Louisiana now spends almost a billion dollars on its incarceration system. Three out of four people who go into this system now, are being charged with nonviolent offenses.”

To learn more about the “Captive State” book, visit The Historic New Orleans Collection website.

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