Incarceration as a Human Rights Barometer–Prison Labor and Power in Freeman’s Challenge
Robin Bernstein, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit
A society’s true commitment to human rights is not revealed by its legal declarations or moral self-image, but by how it treats those placed beyond the protection of power. Marginalized social groups, persons marked by difference, and above all prisoners—human beings under the total and unmediated control of the state—offer the clearest measure. Where accountability is weakest, systems speak most honestly. Robin Bernstein’s Freeman’s Challenge provides a compelling historical case study of this principle, exposing how American incarceration operated not merely as punishment, but as a system of coerced labor designed to generate profit without reciprocity.
Bernstein reconstructs the life, incarceration, and execution of William Freeman, a young Black man imprisoned at New York’s Auburn Prison in the 1840s. Auburn, often celebrated as a milestone in penal reform, was in fact the nation’s first large-scale experiment in prison labor for profit. Incarcerated men were forced to work in regimented silence, producing goods for the market and revenue for the state and private contractors. Freeman’s eventual act of violence—and the state’s determination to execute him despite serious questions about his mental capacity—cannot be understood apart from this system. Bernstein shows that Freeman was not simply an individual who failed within the prison; Freeman was a human being broken by a system that depended on his degradation.
What makes Freeman’s Challenge especially powerful is Bernstein’s insistence on structural causation (read systems outcomes). The violence inflicted on Freeman emerges not from isolated cruelty or administrative error, but from institutional design. Auburn was a system calibrated to convert confinement into economic value. Discipline, silence, and physical punishment were not unfortunate excesses. Rather, they were functional requirements. In systems terms, the prison achieved precisely what it was designed to do.
Read through a systems thinking framework, Bernstein’s account reveals incarceration as a form of organized work extraction. The prison functioned as a productive system that transformed captive human beings into laboring units over time, using coercion as its primary energy source. Freeman’s resistance, later criminalized as moral failure, appears instead as a predictable outcome of a system that stripped individuals of agency, dignity, and voice. Long ago, Ibn Khaldun reminded us that when systems reach their peak efficiency, they often generate their opposite: breakdown, revolt, or catastrophic violence. Bernstein’s narrative illustrates this principle with devastating clarity.
This history gains additional depth when placed in dialogue with Ibn Khaldun’s economic philosophy. Ibn Khaldun held that all legitimate wealth (kasb) derives from human work, and that any extraction or redistribution of value—especially by the state—requires just compensation (`iwaḍ). Even taxation, in his framework, is only legitimate when it is reciprocal and sustains the social order rather than consuming it. Auburn Prison violated this principle fundamentally. Prisoners performed productive labor, yet received no meaningful compensation, no economic recognition, and no reciprocal benefit. Legal punishment was used to suspend moral economy.
Bernstein’s study thus exposes a central contradiction in modern liberal societies: while human rights discourse affirms dignity and equality, carceral systems operate as zones where reciprocity is systematically denied. The state learned, early on, how to profit from labor without `iwaḍ, and in doing so normalized exploitation as a legitimate function of governance. Freeman’s execution was more than the silencing of an inconvenient individual. It was the enforcement of a system’s legitimacy against a human life that exposed its moral incoherence.
One of the book’s most significant contributions lies in its methodological implications. Freeman’s Challenge confirms that prisoners constitute the most reliable indicator of a society’s human rights commitments. They possess no political leverage, command little public sympathy, and depend entirely on State institutions for survival. How they are treated reveals what a society truly believes about human worth when power is absolute and scrutiny is minimal. Bernstein demonstrates that public tolerance of Auburn’s brutality was not accidental, but socially enabled and economically rewarded.
Although Bernstein does not explicitly frame her analysis in systems theory or comparative moral economy, her empirical work strongly supports both. Her meticulous archival research and compelling narrative make the book a foundational text for scholars of incarceration, labor, race, and human rights. More importantly, it invites readers to confront an uncomfortable truth: systems built on coerced work fail morally, and, importantly, reproduce injustice with mechanical efficiency.
Freeman’s Challenge is ultimately not only a history of one man or one prison. It is a barometer of society’s commitment to human rights. A society that permits the extraction of labor without reciprocity, especially from those it fully controls, reveals the limits of its moral commitments. If human rights are to be understood not as ideals but as systems in operation, then Bernstein’s book forces a reckoning with how modern states continue to benefit from practices whose injustice has long been known. In that sense, William Freeman’s challenge remains unresolved—and urgently contemporary.
Reviewer: Ahmed E. Souaiaia, University of Iowa
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 293 pp. Cloth, $27.50. ISBN: 978-0-226-74423-0.