An Inside Story of African American Imprisonment before Emancipation: Austin Reed's 'The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict' by Caleb Smith

Caleb Smith will discuss the memoir of a free black man from Rochester, New York, who spent most of his early life in the juvenile reformatories and state prisons of the antebellum period. Discovered in 2009 and recently published by Random House, Austin Reed's "The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict," gives an inside account of the origins of the American prison system, providing a link between slavery and mass incarceration.