Prison Systems

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 […]