Professor Robin Bernstein discusses her book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison For Profit. Auburn Prison in Upstate New York was designed to be a factory prison, incorporating the area’s major industry into its walls. Through harsh conditions, solitary and silent confinement, and constant violence, the inmates’ lives were desolate ones of hard labor. Enter William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit. He suffered greatly in Auburn and was rendered deaf and brain damaged after being beaten by a guard. After his release, Freeman committed a murder that terrified white America. The trial the followed helped create the founding myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s unforgettable story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”
Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights.
