The Earliest Memoir by a Black Inmate Reveals the Long Legacy of Mass Incarceration

[demmiblue]

Source: Smithsonian

Austin Reed learned to write as a juvenile prisoner. His handwritten manuscript runs 304 pages. (Robert Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, Yale Collection of American Literature / Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library /Yale University.)


In the fall of 2009, an unusual package arrived at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at Yale University. Inside was a leather-bound journal and two packets of loose-leaf paper, some bearing the stamp of the same Berkshire mill that once produced Herman Melville’s favorite writing stock.

Joined together under the title The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, the documents told the story of an African-American boy named “Rob Reed,” who grew up in Rochester, New York, and had been convicted, in 1833, while still a child, of arson. Reed spent nearly six years in the House of Refuge, a juvenile home in Manhattan; he was released in 1839, but, accused of theft, he was soon behind bars again, this time at New York’s Auburn State Prison.

Reed never denied his guilt. But he was appalled by the conditions at the House of Refuge and especially at Auburn, an early example of the so-called “silent” detention model, which would become the basis for the modern prison system—inmates labored by day and spent their nights cooped up, often alone, in a small cell. In Reed’s day, the slightest infraction was grounds for a lashing or a trip to the “showering bath” (an early take on waterboarding). “The high and noble mind which God had given to me [was] destroyed by hard usage and a heavy club,” Reed laments. His account ends in 1858, with his discharge from Auburn.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/earliest-memoir-black-inmate-reveals-legacy-mass-incarceration-180957683/