Panelists will discuss the award-winning exhibition and accompanying book, which traces the roots of the state’s global record of incarceration back to New Orleans’s brutal role in the American enslaved trade. The exhibition, which ran from July 2024 to February 2025, attracted a broad audience, from formerly incarcerated individuals and victims’ advocates, to law enforcement and prosecutors. Beyond that, the roundtable will emphasize community engagement through its sustained partnership with community activists, including formerly incarcerated advisors to the project. The deep engagement with public history allows for a dual conversation about the purposes of public history as iterated in the core exhibition question: “If you could change Louisiana’s incarceration system, where would you begin?” The panel will include Eric Seiferth, curator and historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection; Marianne Fisher-Giorlando, Education committee chair for the Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation; Nick Weldon, director of Publications at the Historic New Orleans Collection ; and Anthony Hingle Jr., Voice of the Experienced (VOTE) and the Visiting Room Project.