In the final gallery of the Historic New Orleans Collection’s award-winning exhibition, “Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration,” visitors were asked to reflect and respond to the question, “If you could change Louisiana’s incarceration system, where would you begin?”
Nearly 2,000 visitors wrote an answer to the question and posted it on the wall, creating an evolving space for visitors to envision a brighter future.
Captive State is a groundbreaking public history project. It’s the first public-facing project to present a three-century historical synthesis of incarceration in New Orleans and Louisiana with a focus on the connections between systems of slavery and mass incarceration…