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William Freeman & The Birth of Profit Prisons With Dr. Robin Bernstein
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American history, slavery, capitalism, and the origins of America’s prison-for-profit system collide in this powerful episode of the Unsolicited Perspectives Podcast. Bruce Anthony interviews Dr. Robin Bernstein about her book Freeman's Challenge: The Murder that Shook America's Original Prison for Profit. Dr. Bernstein uncovers the true story of William Freeman, revealing how prison for profit, racial control, and mass incarceration grew directly out of slavery. Dr. Bernstein shares the research, family history, and discoveries that led her to William Freeman — a Black man whose wrongful imprisonment, brutal injury, and legal battle expose the roots of the carceral state, Auburn Prison, and early prison capitalism. She breaks down the history schools never taught: indentured servitude, gradual emancipation, white supremacy in law, and the racial dynamics that shaped modern prisons. This conversation connects 19th-century injustice to today’s policies, punishment, and profit — while also pointing toward hope, activism, and teaching a more honest American story.
If you care about Black history, mass incarceration, racial justice, or truthful American history, this is a must-watch.
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Chapters:
00:00 Framing America’s Racial History and Carceral Origins 📜🏛️🔥 00:19 Welcome to Unsolicited Perspectives 🎙️🔥 00:48 Introducing Dr. Robin Bernstein and Her Scholarship 👩🏽🏫📚✨ 02:17 What Sparked a Life Studying Race in America? 🧠📚🌱 03:14 Childhood Clues That Shaped a Historian 🪞📖💡 06:14 Interpreting Roots and Early Understandings of Slavery 📺⚖️📜 08:53 Family Legacy, Progressivism & Moral Courage 🕊️🧬✨ 13:53 Uncovering William Freeman’s Significance in History 🔎🕰️⚖️ 22:02 The Emergence of the Prison-for-Profit Model in Auburn 💰🏛️📉 28:14 Auburn Prison and the Institutionalization of “State Slavery” 🔗🏭📘 32:36 Capitalism’s Structural Role in Early U.S. Incarceration 🏗️💵📚 33:41 A Teenager Enters the System That Broke Him 😔🔒👂 35:35 Indentured Servitude and the Slow End of Northern Slavery 📝⛓️🕰️ 38:38 Violence, Trauma, and the Consequences of Forced Labor ⚒️💥😔 40:56 The Fight for Wages Stolen Behind Prison Walls 💸🚫🗣️ 43:03 White Civic Identity and the Defense of Carceral Capitalism 🏛️🤝📜 46:26 Echoes of the Past in Today’s Justice Debates 🔁🚓⚖️ 58:04 Why Hope Still Lives in the Fight for Change ✊🏽✨🌍 www.unsolictedperspectives.com
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Transcript
Introduction to American History and Incarceration
00:00:00
Speaker
We're talking my favorite subject, American history, specifically the history of race and incarceration. We're going to get into it. Let's get it.
00:00:20
Speaker
Welcome. First of all welcome. This is Unsolicited Perspectives. I'm your host, Bruce Anthony, here to lead the conversation in important events and topics that are shaping today's society. Join the conversation or follow us wherever you get your audio podcasts. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for our video podcasts, YouTube exclusive content, and our YouTube membership.
00:00:39
Speaker
Rate, review, like, comment, share. Share it with your friends, share with your family, hell, even share with your enemies.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Ruben Bernstein
00:00:47
Speaker
On today's episode, my guest is Dr. Ruben Bernstein, Harvard professor, cultural historian, author of Freeman's Challenge, The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit.
00:00:57
Speaker
We're diving into how the 19th century blueprint for mass incarceration was born long before the 1980s and what that means for America right now.
Mass Incarceration and Capitalism
00:01:06
Speaker
but that's enough of the intro. Let's get to the show.
00:01:16
Speaker
My guest today is Dr. Robin Bernstein, the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. She's one of the leading voices examining how race has been constructed in America from the 19th century to today.
00:01:31
Speaker
Her book, Freeman's Challenge, the Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit, explores the story of William Freeman, a young black man whose tragic encounter with the first prison for profit in Auburn, New York exposed the economic machinery that turned incarceration into industry.
00:01:48
Speaker
Bernstein's work reframes what we think we know about the origins of mass incarceration, showing that the system wasn't born in the modern era, but rooted in early capitalism, racial hierarchy, and the violent genius of those who realize crime could be monetized.
00:02:03
Speaker
We're going to talk about the history behind the system, the moral gymnastics we still perform to justify, and the fight for justice that continues
Dr. Bernstein's Background and Influences
00:02:11
Speaker
today. So without further ado, here's Dr. Robin Bernstein.
00:02:16
Speaker
As I said at the top, I'm here with Dr. Robin Bernstein. Dr. Robin, also, ladies and gentlemen, I just found this out before we jumped on and started recording. Dr. Robin also went to the University of Maryland. This is not some scheme for my audience to send their children to the University of Maryland, but it would hurt.
00:02:37
Speaker
Dr. Robin, thank you for joining the show. We're about to have a very important conversation that I know my audience will definitely learn from, and I'm looking forward to it. Thank you so much for having me.
00:02:48
Speaker
Oh, it's it's absolutely my pleasure. And I always like starting off the interviews with, let's go back in time. So you've built your career studying how race has been constructed in the U.S. over centuries.
00:03:01
Speaker
Can you take us back to your own background? What first sparked your interest in history? And what led you specifically into exploring race, performance, and incarceration?
00:03:13
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'll start with the history question. So I think I was always just kind of interested in history, but I do remember there was one influence when I was a little girl.
00:03:23
Speaker
I read this really interesting book about the search for the coelacanth. So the coelacanth is a fish, and it's a fish that everybody thought was extinct.
00:03:36
Speaker
And then it it was it was a small fish. And then this huge fish what got caught somehow. It was giant. It was like six feet long. And it looked exactly like the coelacanth, except that it was so much bigger and the coelacanth was supposedly extinct. So this set off a great big search to find a living coelacanth that had gigantic size, basically.
00:04:00
Speaker
And it was a very exciting book for a kid. But the part of it that really blew my mind was when the scientists finally found a living coelacanth. They found it off the coast of an island off the coast of Africa.
00:04:16
Speaker
And when they finally found a living coelacanth, of course, the people who lived on this island totally knew about the fish. and what they said to the scientists, it that wasn't lost at all.
00:04:30
Speaker
And what they said to the scientists was that the fish didn't taste very good. but its scales were useful for scraping bicycle tires.
00:04:42
Speaker
And I probably read this when I was about 10 years old and it just blew my mind. And a number of things about it blew my mind. One was that things that we thought were true might not be true.
00:04:55
Speaker
That like that this this fish was supposedly extinct, it wasn't extinct. But also that the knowledge we're looking for, somebody already has it. And it is somebody, in this case, it was a ah group of of people who were not defined as scientists.
00:05:12
Speaker
So these quote unquote scientists came in and they were searching and searching for this knowledge. And it turned out ordinary people already had it. And part of what I really loved was the fact that they said it was good for scraping bicycle tires, that these were not people who were somehow outside of the modern world. These were people who had bicycles.
00:05:30
Speaker
They were in the modern world. I had a bicycle. I was 10, you know? And they were they were like me in that they knew bicycles. And so this just really started me thinking about the recovery of history, that things that we think are gone are not necessarily gone. And actually very ordinary people like me might have the key to something amazing.
00:05:53
Speaker
So that was really when it first started, when I first started thinking about history and and knowledge. But where I got interested in African-American studies, again, this is a child's story.
00:06:07
Speaker
I got interested in it really honestly in first grade. Something that happened to me, that happened to a lot of people, was Roots was broadcast on television.
00:06:19
Speaker
and i was in the first grade and my parents framed it in a really interesting way that I think was really smart. So my parents wanted me and my brother to watch Roots. Now we are a white Jewish family and they were very clear that this was not our family history, this was not our racial history, but the way they framed it, this was American history.
00:06:46
Speaker
That all of it, all of Roots, the stories of the Black characters in Roots, the stories of the white characters in Roots, the stories of evil, the stories of violence, the stories of resistance and triumph, all of it, the whole thing of it was American history.
00:07:03
Speaker
And i needed to watch it because I was an American. And I needed to to know that this was informing my life, all of it, all of its complexity.
00:07:14
Speaker
So I watched it. I was a first grader. I watched it and it upset me terribly. The thing that upset me most about it was, that you know, really honestly, this is how I learned what slavery was. I was probably eight.
00:07:27
Speaker
And what upset me so much about it was the idea of slavery itself, the idea that A person could be owned or a person could own another person.
00:07:41
Speaker
And part of what upset me about that so much was that I could not comprehend it. It just made no sense to me. And no matter how much I turned it over and over in my head,
00:07:53
Speaker
I just could not make it make sense. it just It just made no sense. And now, of course, as an adult who has spent 40 years studying slavery, I understand that the reason it made no sense was that slavery makes no sense.
00:08:08
Speaker
that in fact it is not possible for a human to be owned or to own another human. It makes no sense. And what bothered me so much and upset me so much as an eight-year-old is what still bothers me about it, the lie of it, the epistemological violence of it.
00:08:30
Speaker
So that's my answer to how I got interested in history and in particular African-American history. I have two follow-up questions. One is, well, they're both pretty personal.
00:08:43
Speaker
So don't have to answer them if you don't want to, but I'm curious. Seems like your parents were pretty progressive. Now, you come from a Jewish background and Roots was in the 70s. Were your parents connected did your parents have any family members that were connected or had been a part of the Holocaust?
00:09:06
Speaker
In a direct line, no. All of four of my grandparents were born in the United States. And they were all four of my grandparents were born before the Holocaust. Extended family, of course. I mean, there there's, I don't think there's a Jewish family on the planet that doesn't have extended family that died in the Holocaust.
00:09:23
Speaker
Is it because of that? Because... I study in history. I see so many Jewish people. one of the One of the college kids that was killed in Mississippi was Jewish. There's a connection of the Jewish community, specifically in the 50s, 60s, and 70s that are fighting for civil rights.
00:09:41
Speaker
And I've always said, well, because they see the connection here of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, then what happened there. Were your parents just progressive, or was it they saw...
00:09:55
Speaker
Because of history, this is something that you also need to learn. That's a great question. Nobody's asked me that question before. My parents, and thank God they're both still alive, so I'll talk about them in the present tense, even though we're talking about the 70s. My parents are just generally progressive people. They are generally anti-racist people.
00:10:16
Speaker
nice think their own politics came into consciousness through the Vietnam War. My parents were both strongly opposed to the Vietnam war They marched against the war in Vietnam.
00:10:29
Speaker
they were So I think if if they were here, I think that's how they would answer this question. I think they also, i think they cared about racial justice and still care about racial justice among a constellation of issues.
00:10:44
Speaker
But I think what really brought them into a political world for them personally was the Vietnam War. and Okay. And the second part of the question, and I'm always fascinated when I talk to Jewish people because it's a religion, but it's also a grouping of people. You can be Jewish and not practice the faith.
00:11:05
Speaker
And you can also be Jewish and not be ethnically Jewish. Do you consider yourself in American standards white? And if you do, watching Roots as that young child, did you have what they call now white guilt? Or did you look at it just as this? I don't understand this. This is just horrible. In other words, did you take on guilt or was it just this is horrible?
00:11:34
Speaker
I don't think I did take on guilt. I don't think that's what I felt. I think what I, because remember, I was looking at it as a whole and I understood that nobody in my individual family had been in the United States before the Civil War. Actually, that's not true. I recently found out that somebody was, but at the time that I thought that nobody was. right And so my family had no personal connection to enslavement from any perspective.
00:12:01
Speaker
So I wouldn't say that what I felt was guilt. I would say that what I felt was horror. And I would also say that what I felt was a sense of responsibility as an American. And it was a deep sense of responsibility as an American.
00:12:15
Speaker
I understood that what I was looking at was not my people per se, that none of the characters in Roots were were anything like my personal family. I understood that.
00:12:29
Speaker
But I and also understood that all of them were like me and that they were Americans and I was an American. And what i really understood, I wouldn't describe it. I wouldn't say that what I felt was white guilt.
00:12:41
Speaker
What I would say was that I felt a very serious moral sense of responsibility as an American. And that is something I still feel. Okay. All right.
00:12:52
Speaker
That's really interesting. I love i love getting different perspectives. That's the reason why i started this show, ladies and gentlemen. I love getting different perspectives of people looking at things differently because you see this...
00:13:03
Speaker
push to erase history and we'll get into more of this later in the conversation to erase history and they frame it as, well, we can't teach little kids this because they feel guilty.
William Freeman's Story and Its Significance
00:13:16
Speaker
But when you don't come from it or don't have a direct connection from it like yourself, it's like, i don't have anything to feel guilty about. i don't think anybody should have anything to feel guilty about history. But also, it's just horrific.
00:13:29
Speaker
But that's enough about me pontificating. Let's get to your book. So the latest book, Freeman's Challenge, looks at one man's story to uncover the beginnings of the prison for profit system.
00:13:42
Speaker
How did you first discover this story? And what made you realize it could reveal something foundational about America? I discovered the story by accident, and I think that's how a lot of history books get started. I stumbled across something that I thought should not exist, and it and it did exist, and that made me understand that something that I thought about history was not true.
00:14:08
Speaker
So what I stumbled across was a a reference, it was literally in a footnote, to a stage performance that happened in 1846 in Auburn, New York.
00:14:19
Speaker
I had never heard of Auburn. I didn't know anything about it. And what happened in this stage performance, according to this footnote, was that it showed on stage a Black man murdering a white family.
00:14:33
Speaker
And I immediately, so my background is in history of the 19th century, and in particular, the history of theater. And I said, wait a minute, wait, what? This thing existed on stage in 1846? And I knew that that was and almost impossible.
00:14:49
Speaker
And the reason I knew that was that in the 19th century, and especially in the mid-century, white people absolutely did not want to see representations of black on white violence on stage.
00:15:00
Speaker
And they did not want to see this. They wanted so badly not to see this that they would actually doctor productions of Othello. to remove that imagery.
00:15:12
Speaker
So they were going to enormous lengths to avoid this particular spectacle. And I said, wait a minute, what? people White people were paying for this in Auburn, New York in 1846?
00:15:24
Speaker
So at first I thought it must be a mistake, but then I quickly verified that it was true. wow And so i thought, okay, that means this is so anomalous. Something big must have happened in Auburn, New York in 1846 that would cause white people to behave in a way that was radically different from white people at the same time in other places.
00:15:50
Speaker
And so I thought, what was it? That's so weird. so what i i So I started researching it. I was just so curious. And I knew that that something was very strange. So I started researching it and I found out that the the show was about somebody named William Freeman. I had never heard of William Freeman.
00:16:08
Speaker
And that it was based on true facts. It was based on a real murder. And so I started digging deeper and deeper and deeper. So when I started, I didn't know anything about the Auburn prison.
00:16:19
Speaker
I didn't know. I wasn't thinking about the history of prison for profit. What I was, what what really hooked me was the fact that something happened that caused race to shake.
00:16:33
Speaker
Something race-shaking happened in 1846 to cause this white appetite for this particular kind of spectacle.
00:16:44
Speaker
Now, what we know is that today, That white appetite is enormous. There is an enormous white appetite for spectacles of black on white violence. And but that was not the norm in 1846. So something happened to make people white people in that moment less like their peers and more like us.
00:17:05
Speaker
What could it be? So I started diving in deeper and deeper and deeper. So I learned who William Freeman was. but i'm sure we're going to talk about this this more. But the more I learned about what he about who he was and what he did, that led me to a much bigger story.
00:17:23
Speaker
The big story I realized, and it took me a long time to realize this, the really big story was behind the murder. the The murder was not the story.
00:17:34
Speaker
what was behind the murder, William Freeman had a really important claim. He had ah something very important to say. And what he had to say had been suppressed for almost two centuries.
00:17:48
Speaker
And once I realized that, I knew I had to write the book. Okay. All right. So I was going to this later, but now you've reeled me in. I don't know if you noticed, but leaned in as you started. Just a fantastic storyteller.
00:18:01
Speaker
Can you tell us about William Freeman? Because when I hear that name, I'll automatically think of a former slave that became a free man. Mm-hmm.
00:18:12
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So William Freeman was always free. He was born free. And that's actually really important to the story. So William Freeman was African-American and also Native American on his mother's side. Specifically, he was Stockbridge-Narragansett on his mother's side.
00:18:29
Speaker
He was born just coincidentally in Auburn, New York. And He grew up there. he was the the so His father had been enslaved and his grandparents had been enslaved.
00:18:41
Speaker
So his grandparents were Harry and Kate. They had been forced in 1793 to come to the land that would become Auburn. It was land that had just very recently been stolen from the Cougar people.
00:18:56
Speaker
Harry and Kate were forced by their enslaver to come to this newly empty, well, it was not at all empty, but it was newly available to white ownership land.
00:19:09
Speaker
And they were forced to start building the buildings that would become Auburn. They eventually became free, and when they became free, they chose the name Freeman. So what you said before is exactly right. What they were articulating when they chose that name and when their children chose that same name and their grandchildren inherited that name, what they were saying was what mattered to them.
00:19:34
Speaker
They were saying what they cared about. They were saying who they thought of themselves to be. As, if of course, you know, and I'm sure many of your listeners know, Many people who became free from slavery chose the name of their former enslaver. And Harry and Kate absolutely could have done that, but they didn't. They named themselves Freeman.
00:19:55
Speaker
So what that tells us is what mattered to this family. And William Freeman was born in 1824. So he was born free in New York State. This is all happening in New York State.
00:20:09
Speaker
he was the first He was part of the first fully free generation in his family. So so that's that's who he was. And he grew up in this town of Auburn, which at the time was...
00:20:20
Speaker
a pretty small town, but it was growing.
Auburn, NY: Birthplace of Prison-for-Profit
00:20:22
Speaker
Part of the reason it was growing was because it was the home of the original Prison for Profit. And and I hope we're we're going to talk about that. How Prison for Profit was actually invented in Auburn, New York, the place where William Freeman just happened to be born.
00:20:38
Speaker
So in his childhood, He had a hard childhood in a lot of ways. His father died when he was young. His mother struggled to raise him and his sister and his two sisters, one of whom was probably developmentally disabled, although we'll never really know.
00:20:53
Speaker
She struggled to raise him. He had to work from an early age. But in a lot of ways, his life was happy when he was growing up. He was part of the founding family of Auburn, New York, for the founding Black family.
00:21:06
Speaker
He was part of a beloved and deeply respected family. and he And his family loved him very much. So that that was who William Freeman started out as.
00:21:26
Speaker
Okay, so you brought up the prison for profit. Let's kind of get into that. And most people think that the prison for profit started in the nineteen eighty s and 90s, but through your work at William Freeman, you're finding out Auburn, New York, 1840s.
00:21:42
Speaker
So can you walk us through how early America led the groundwork for a monetization and incarceration? For monetizing incarceration? Yeah. Yeah, thank you. And I love that phrase, monetizing car incarceration.
00:21:55
Speaker
When we think about prison for profit, very often what we're thinking of is private prisons. And you're absolutely right that private prisons, private prisons that are themselves corporations, that is a 20th century invention. That did not exist in the 19th century.
00:22:12
Speaker
The Auburn prison was a public prison. I mean, it was a state prison always. And it was never itself private. But the claim that I'm making in this book is that if you have a prison that exists at its absolute core to monetize, as you said, you have a prison that exists at its absolute core to make money, to make profits,
00:22:37
Speaker
That's a prison for profit. And that's one of the claims that I'm really making in this book. I think we need to redefine prison for profit and not limit it to private prisons, which are actually a very small percentage of prisons today.
00:22:50
Speaker
What we need to do is look at a much larger... entanglement between capitalism and prisons. And when we look at that larger entanglement, we see a much longer and much very different history.
00:23:04
Speaker
So let me tell you the story of how Prison for Profit began in Auburn, New York. And it began before William Freeman was born. It began in 1816. Okay. okay so So basically what you had in Auburn, New York was a group of white businessmen.
00:23:21
Speaker
And these were people who wanted to make money, and that's really all they cared about. They did not care about justice. They did not care about protecting the public.
00:23:33
Speaker
They did not care about reforming criminals and you know helping them to lead better lives. They didn't care about any of that. What they wanted to do was make money. And what happened was that in 1816,
00:23:48
Speaker
The New York state government offered ah contract of $20,000, which was the equivalent of about half a million dollars today. They offered this contract of $20,000 to a vicinity that would build a prison.
00:24:03
Speaker
Now, from the state's perspective, this they were offering money to build a prison because they thought they needed a prison. At the time, New York state had only one prison and it was overrun. So from the governmental perspective, they were just trying to get more prisons.
00:24:18
Speaker
But these white businessmen in Auburn, New York, they had an incredible insight, which to us is obvious, but it's only obvious to us because people in the past came up with it.
00:24:30
Speaker
What they realized, at the time, Auburn was a tiny little village of about 2,000 people. And what they realized was that if they got this a sudden influx of the equivalent of half a million dollars, all of a sudden, it was going to completely transform the economy of Auburn.
00:24:50
Speaker
And remember, then there would be more money coming in every year. So, I mean, you know, think about it If you've got a little tiny village with 2,000 people and you just flood it with half a million dollars, it's going to change everything.
00:25:01
Speaker
And that to us, that's so obvious, but this was a completely original idea at the time. So these white businessmen put together a contract. They bid.
00:25:13
Speaker
And they bid because they wanted to turn Auburn from a village into a city. That was their goal. So that was their first idea. Let's take money from the state to transform our economy. But then they had a second idea.
00:25:29
Speaker
The second idea was to build the prison on the banks of a river. There was a river that goes right through Auburn. It's still there. They built it on the banks of this river for the purpose of harnessing water power.
00:25:45
Speaker
Why did they want water power? Because they wanted to have factories, industrial factories built into the prison.
00:25:56
Speaker
Their second idea, in addition to taking money from the state, was to have prisoners forced to labor to manufacture consumer goods inside the prison.
00:26:11
Speaker
And then they had a third idea. The third idea was to have local businesses, including their own, leasing the prisoners' labor, basically convict leasing. They had this idea of convict leasing.
00:26:26
Speaker
So the structure that they came up with was they built the factories into the prison. They got the prisoners. Local businesses took possession of the factories.
00:26:40
Speaker
They bought the labor of the prisoners. The prisoners got no money, not one cent, nothing. They forced the prisoners to labor to to make things like shoes and animal harnesses and carpets.
00:26:56
Speaker
And the prisoners were making that were making these goods. The companies then sold the goods throughout New York State and also throughout the Northeast. So this was an incredible operation. They were getting money and value from three different directions. They were getting money from the state.
00:27:15
Speaker
They were getting money from these local businesses that were taking the labor of prisoners, and then they were getting the value of the labor of the prisoners. This was ah totally new construction of prisons. This was a new concept of what a prison can be.
00:27:32
Speaker
This is a prison as a factory, basically. The whole prison functioned as one giant factory. This was the Auburn State Prison. And let's be really clear about some of the things that didn't matter to the people who started the prison.
00:27:48
Speaker
Justice did not matter. Punishment did not matter. what They weren't trying to punish the prisoners. Now, the Auburn State Prison was an extremely violent place.
00:28:02
Speaker
And the reason it was so violent was because it is very hard to get people to work for no compensation. And really, the only way you can get people to work for no compensation is through violence.
00:28:16
Speaker
So it was an extremely violent place. But the purpose of the violence was not to punish. The purpose of the violence was to extract labor.
00:28:27
Speaker
So this was a radical new idea about what a prison was. And this is what grew in Auburn, New York. And this is what was up and running at the moment when William Freeman was born less than a mile away.
00:28:42
Speaker
This is 170 years before we get to that 1980s. yeah And they have literally written the blueprint to the very things that we see today.
00:28:54
Speaker
And also during that time where we are 60 years before the Civil War, what where slavery is going to be hotly contested, but there's already kind of murmurs and...
00:29:10
Speaker
in the country. They created a new form of slavery, but getting the state to finance it. why As a businessman, that's, I'm thinking of myself, as a businessman, that's brilliant.
00:29:26
Speaker
As a human being, good God, that is devious. That is Lex Luthor-level evil and brilliant at the same time. I don't mean to marvel at the intellect, the business intellect of these people. But in a capitalist society, they figured out a blueprint that worked. I don't know why we don't understand. well i don't know how what happened to Auburn. I'm sure we'll get into it. But OK, so they had this forced labor. They created a new form of slavery. Yeah. And they use that word, by the way.
00:30:03
Speaker
Oh, they actually used the word? Yes, probably. Okay, so they weren't hiding it. Okay. Oh, no, no, no, no. They called the prisoners, quote, slaves of the state, unquote. And let's also put this in context for what was else was happening in New York State at the time.
00:30:19
Speaker
This was at the exact moment when New York State was engaging in what was called gradual emancipation. So basically, Black people in New York State at this exact time were were slowly becoming free. And we can see that in William Freeman's own family.
00:30:35
Speaker
His grandparents became free. His father started out enslaved, but his father became free. And this was this was part of what was happening. New York State was transforming from a slavery-based economy to a state capitalism-based economy.
00:30:53
Speaker
And the prison was absolutely a part of that. So there's nothing coincidental going on here. So at the exact moment when New York was becoming a free state, this new kind of prison is built in Auburn, and they proudly called the prisoners slaves of the state.
00:31:16
Speaker
Now, the prisoners. What was their demographic makeup? Yeah, that's a great question. So, and this also, i this is so interesting to me.
00:31:27
Speaker
The very first group of prisoners, the very first ones to occupy the prison, who also, by the way, were forced to build the prison. They built the prison and then they were forced to occupy it.
00:31:40
Speaker
As far as my research shows, 100% of them were white. So this tells us something really important. This tells us that the prison was not invented to re-enslave black people per se.
00:31:55
Speaker
It was built to enslave people. And this is a really important difference. This interrupts some of the stories that we've received about the origins of capitalism and prisons.
00:32:06
Speaker
what we this The popular story that we've received is that prison for profit was invented in the South, It was invented after the Civil War as a way of re-enslaving Black people.
00:32:19
Speaker
And this is a radically different story. It's 50 years earlier. It's in the North, not the South. And it's a story about absolutely about slavery by another name, but it is a different racial dynamic.
00:32:34
Speaker
It was started not for the purpose of re-enslaving black people. It was started for the purpose of extracting forced labor value for the purpose of serving capitalism.
00:32:49
Speaker
So that was the very, very first group of of prisoners. But as you can guess, it did not stay white. So it starts as a white thing, it does not stay that
Indentured Servitude and Racial Injustice
00:33:00
Speaker
way.
00:33:00
Speaker
It very, very quickly becomes um a disproportionately black population. So by the time William Freeman was incarcerated, and we'll get to this where he was incarcerated.
00:33:15
Speaker
By the time he was incarcerated, approximately one in nine of the prisoners were Black. And to put that in perspective, at the time, this was 1840s, about 2% of New York State was Black. So what that tells us is that Black people were overrepresented by about fourfold.
00:33:35
Speaker
So we go from Black people being not represented at all to being grossly overrepresented in about three decades. And now, of course, in New York State, Black and brown people constitute about 70% of incarcerated people in that state.
00:33:55
Speaker
So just like you said before about how we're seeing a blueprint for today, In this story, in Freeman's Challenge from the 1840s, that's exactly what we're seeing. We're seeing an escalation of racialized incarceration.
00:34:10
Speaker
We're seeing the roots of that. I would love to I don't know if you've done, and don't know if you know the history of it, but I know in Virginia, somewhere in the middle 1700s, they outlawed indentured servitude and they allowed, and most of the indentured servants Irish.
00:34:28
Speaker
most and indentured servants were irish And they got rid of it and allowed them to start to own land and things of that nature. Was there something similar around the same time in New York?
00:34:40
Speaker
And these first white prisoners, did they happen to be Irish? No.
00:34:49
Speaker
So a lot of them were immigrants, actually, of these these first prisoners. But your question about indentured servitude is really important. So indentured servitude was one of the ways that slavery, Black slavery, continued in New York State after the quote unquote official end of slavery.
00:35:07
Speaker
So the way gradual emancipation worked in New York State was that after 1827, everybody born in New York State was free, regardless of race.
00:35:19
Speaker
However, for people who were born of formerly of of enslaved parents, so up before 1827, people who were born of enslaved, of at least an enslaved mother,
00:35:33
Speaker
They were born free, but they were forced into indentured servitude for decades. So what this meant was that two of William Freeman's uncles were born technically free, but they were in they were indentured. They were forced into indenture to their mother's enslaver for decades. so slate so And for for the the term of indenture 21 years.
00:36:00
Speaker
So William Freeman's older uncle, he was technically born free, but became fully free, really free in 1848. So this is a way that that slavery just dragged on and on and on forced labor. And that was a specifically racial anti-black indentured servitude.
00:36:31
Speaker
How does the story of William Freeman and the murder play in all of this? Yeah. so So William Freeman is growing up in Auburn, New York.
00:36:47
Speaker
He's growing up literally a mile away from the original prison for profit, and it's big. Oh, Bruce, this building is so big. It still exists, by the way. it is to the Auburn prison, still exists.
00:36:59
Speaker
It is today the oldest continually operating maximum security prison in the United States. Maximum security. Maximum security. This thing is huge So it's dominating the entire town, which is rapidly becoming a city.
00:37:16
Speaker
So he grows up here. He's working. And he's got, in some ways, a hard life, but in other ways, a good life. But everything changes for William Freeman in 1840.
00:37:29
Speaker
In that year, he's 15 years old. He is accused of stealing a horse. Hmm. There's no hard evidence against him, but it doesn't matter.
00:37:40
Speaker
He's tried, he's convicted, and he's sentenced to five years hard forced labor in the Auburn State Prison. He's a kid.
00:37:51
Speaker
He's 15. He's furious. So he goes into this prison and he immediately begins resisting. He tells his jailers that he does not want to work.
00:38:06
Speaker
He does not want to work for nothing. That was the phrase he used. He said, I don't want to work for nothing. And he meant two things by that. He meant nothing, meaning no crime. He had committed no crime. So he that he didn't want to work for nothing when he had committed no crime.
00:38:22
Speaker
But he also meant... no pay. he He thought of himself as a citizen. He was a citizen. he Remember, he's part of the first fully free generation in his family.
00:38:33
Speaker
He's among the first fully free generation in New York State. He is a citizen.
Freeman's Protest and Aftermath
00:38:38
Speaker
And what part of what's core to that identity is the ability to work and be compensated for the labor, for your own labor.
00:38:48
Speaker
So he says, i don't want to work for nothing. He says it explicitly over and over again. As I mentioned, the Auburn State Prison is an incredibly violent place.
00:38:59
Speaker
The retribution for his resistance was truly terrible. There was enormous violence against him. And in the worst moment of violence, he us a guard beat him over the head and beat him so severely that he had a ah brain injury.
00:39:18
Speaker
And he also lost hearing in one of his ears and lost all of it in one of his ears and most of it in his other ear. So he's enduring this horrible violence, forced labor, but he keeps resisting. He keeps resisting.
00:39:37
Speaker
After he gets out of prison, it's 1845 now. He's 20 years old. He's deaf. He's horrifically traumatized.
00:39:48
Speaker
He has a brain injury. And He wants what he wants, the single most important thing that he wants is back pay.
00:40:00
Speaker
He wants to be paid for five years of labor. His perspective is that the state has stolen five years of wages from him, and he wants to recover those wages from the state.
00:40:14
Speaker
So he launches a legal campaign. And I can't hear this. This is a 20 year old person who has spent a quarter of his life in prison. And he launches a legal campaign. He goes to the governor and and tries to get the governor to help him and to recover these lost wages.
00:40:35
Speaker
He is laughed at and he's dismissed. He tries for six months to get his back pay.
00:40:46
Speaker
And after six months, he changes his goal. He no longer wants back pay. What he wants is payback. And at that point, William Freeman committed a murder.
00:40:59
Speaker
And when I say that, I'm not giving anything away. It's right there in the title of the book, Freeman's Challenge, the murder that shook America's original prison for profit. He committed a murder that challenged the Auburn State Prison, and it really challenged the very idea of prison for profit.
00:41:19
Speaker
And he made this mighty prison shake.
00:41:26
Speaker
Wow. Okay. I don't want to give... We want people to go get your book, and we don't want people to... We want to give too much away. So go get the book, ladies gentlemen, if you want to hear the continuation. This is to be continued. I want to get more into...
00:41:43
Speaker
this monetized incarceration and more into your research. So your research shows that some of these histories we've known at one time, but got buried or forgotten, which is happening so much right now.
00:41:57
Speaker
Why do you think Americans tend to forget or are encouraged to forget these uncomfortable parts of our history? Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I love that question.
00:42:08
Speaker
um
00:42:10
Speaker
I think that the uncomfortable parts of our history make people uncomfortable, and they especially make people in power uncomfortable. In the pet particular case of Auburn, one of the things that William Freeman challenged was white pride.
00:42:28
Speaker
So the white... people who were running the auburn running running Auburn's businesses, both inside the prison and outside, the prison made Auburn prosperous.
00:42:41
Speaker
The prison was a source of pride because the prison was so evilly innovative. um it was being it It was the identity of Auburn. It made Auburn literally world famous.
00:42:54
Speaker
Famous people were coming from Europe to tour the Auburn State Prison and learn about it and take the model back to Europe. Because by the way, once people figured out that a prison could make money, you better believe that that idea spread.
00:43:09
Speaker
And by the time William Freeman was born, there were prisons for profit built in in in in literal self-conscious imitation of Auburn, were built all over the United States and all over the world.
00:43:22
Speaker
So some of the best-known prisons that we think of today from the 19th century were literally built in Auburn's model. So when we think about San Quentin, for example, or Sing Sing, or Parchman,
00:43:37
Speaker
These were built in the model of Auburn. So white Auburnites were prosperous because of this system of prison for profit.
00:43:47
Speaker
They were proud. This was their identity. Remember also, Auburn was the name of the city. It was the name of the prison. And it was the name of the model of incarceration. The Auburn system meant this system of incarceration.
00:44:04
Speaker
So this was pride. So when William Freeman named it as a form of organized theft, wow.
00:44:15
Speaker
You know, William Freeman was saying I have had my wages stolen from me by the Auburn State Prison. This is not justice. This is organized theft.
00:44:28
Speaker
Well, you better believe white people did not want to hear that. So they didn't want to hear it in 1845 and they don't want to hear it now. So it's not just that people forget things that are uncomfortable.
00:44:41
Speaker
People actively refuse to incorporate knowledge that challenges who they think they are. William Freeman told White Auburn that the city was not what they wanted it to be, that they were not who they thought of themselves as.
00:45:01
Speaker
And you better believe that white people did not take that very well. So I always use this term, moral gymnastics. We all do it. yeah i'm not going to call anybody I'm not going to call out anybody else because I would be a hypocrite. I do the same thing. We all have these moral gymnastics. And I'm sure the people of this town were listening to this man, William Freeman, and not wanting to hear anything about him because it is an attack against
Legacy of Auburn's Prison System
00:45:27
Speaker
them.
00:45:27
Speaker
And I know in their mind, they're thinking, this is a criminal. Because they're saying, well, who cares what's happening to these people? They're criminals. And we are hearing those similar type of arguments today.
00:45:40
Speaker
So when you look at the current debates, you know, whether it's mass incarceration, police reform or calls to abolish private prisons, what echoes from history do you hear most loudly? Yeah.
00:45:51
Speaker
Oh, oh, most loudly. I mean, I hear so many echoes, but you've asked for most loudly. i think what I hear most loudly, you're absolutely right that they wanted to understand William Freeman simply as a criminal.
00:46:06
Speaker
And they also wanted to understand criminal. as an irrational person. So remember, he did have a head injury. He did have a brain injury.
00:46:17
Speaker
And he did have certain difficulties as a result of that brain injury. And also, he was deaf. He was deaf-end, I should say. So what they wanted to do was think of him. Basically, two different ways emerged of thinking about William Freeman in the time.
00:46:33
Speaker
One was that he was this purely vicious person for simply because that's who he was. And of course, they racialized that. So one of the claims I'm making in the book is that William Freeman's trial, which got very big, very fast and got and got publicized nationally, was one of the origins of the racist lie of black criminalization.
00:46:59
Speaker
that this is so so this is a really big echo that we hear today, this idea that this racist idea that there is some sort of necessary inherent magnetism between Blackness and criminality.
00:47:14
Speaker
This is, William Freeman's story is actually one of the points of origin of that story, of that lie. But then the other thing that they wanted to believe was that he was simply 100% irrational, that he was quote unquote a lunatic.
00:47:28
Speaker
And if you, you know, he's there critiquing prison for profit. And if you want to defend prison for profit, it is very convenient to say this person is purely irrational. Nothing this person has to say has any validity at all. It's just the ravings of a lunatic.
00:47:48
Speaker
So they they found both ways to to not just dismiss him, but to muffle what he was saying. And his even his own lawyer, he had a lawyer who was actually William Henry Seward, who was at the time the former governor of New York State.
00:48:05
Speaker
William Henry Seward actually defended William Freeman. But he defended him with the insanity defense. His own lawyer was muffling what he had to say.
00:48:18
Speaker
And most scholars since that time have simply taken William Henry Seward's perspective for granted and have said that when people have talked about William Freeman, they have basically thought of him as an irrational person, as as a quote-unquote lunatic.
00:48:35
Speaker
And my big aha is when I was researching this, I'm researching it more and more and more, and I'm coming to this slow realization that what William Freeman was saying was completely rational and actually really important.
00:48:52
Speaker
He had been called irrational, and he did have certain mental problems as a result of his brain injury, but his central ethical moral claim was completely rational.
00:49:06
Speaker
so So going back to your question about what do I see in William Freeman's story today, i see the ongoing and always escalating criminalization of Black people.
00:49:17
Speaker
And I also see the the suppression of the idea that we can critique prison for profit from a moral perspective. a
00:49:28
Speaker
So you obviously have done great work. You've gotten praise for it. But I imagine you also encountered some resistance because you're challenging dominant narratives, kind of like attacking, quote unquote, white pride.
00:49:48
Speaker
Right. ah While people are doing what I love to call moral gymnastics. What kind of pushbacks do you face and how do you navigate that?
00:49:59
Speaker
Yes. I keep doing it. I've occasionally gotten push-up on events in the of the audience was just outraged that I could have any sympathy at all for somebody who did commit a murder.
00:50:17
Speaker
And, I mean, you know, let's be really honest. William Freeman, after he got out prison, he did commit a murder. And what I wanted to do in the book was treat everybody's pain with great seriousness.
00:50:33
Speaker
I did not want to trivialize anybody's pain. I wanted, of course, to take William Freeman's pain enormously seriously. And I also wanted to take seriously the pain of the people he killed and the survivors of that murder.
00:50:50
Speaker
So I took it everybody very seriously. Where I have gotten pushback is on taking William Freeman's pain seriously. So in this one particular event, a woman was just really angry that I could have any, that I could take seriously the pain of somebody who did in fact commit a murder.
00:51:14
Speaker
Okay.
00:51:16
Speaker
You are a professor. You are guiding the young minds of today. I'm trying. What do you notice about the younger generations of students and approaching these types of topics of race, justice, and history?
00:51:33
Speaker
Do you see shifts in how they are thinking compared to when you first started teaching? That's and ah such an interesting question. Yeah, I've seen all kinds of changes. At this point, everything is changing so rapidly, minute to minute. I feel like I can't characterize where my students are right now because they just change so fast.
00:51:57
Speaker
The world is changing so fast. What I will say is that, you know, there was a time when I first started teaching when critiques of prisons were very rare. And most people that I was encountering in the classroom were not thinking critically about the history of prisons at all. They just didn't know very much about the history of prisons.
00:52:16
Speaker
And the prison abolition movement has done a fantastic job of getting the word out into the popular into the popular consciousness that prisons are political, that they are not they do not simply exist to to administer
Abolition and Reform Efforts
00:52:31
Speaker
justice. And in fact, they might work counter to that goal.
00:52:35
Speaker
So the idea that prisons are political, that prisons can be abolished, that that the prison abolition movement exists, that is a big change I've seen in students, that that's pretty common knowledge now among my students.
00:52:50
Speaker
And 20 years ago, it wasn't. So I have a question about abolishing prisons. Now, i look, I'm all for certain things, defunding the police and things of that nature.
00:53:03
Speaker
When people say abolish the police, i'm not I'm not for that because I need to call somebody if my house gets broken into or I have an issue. I need to call somebody. I can't take care of him myself all the time.
00:53:16
Speaker
The abolishing of prisons, what is the alternative? ah Because there though I believe there are ah majority of prisoners that could be rehabilitated, I've seen them.
00:53:30
Speaker
I've met them. I know them. I also know that some people should never be let out. whoop So, like, how do you how does that work with just abolishing prisons?
00:53:42
Speaker
Yeah. Well... Ruth Gilmore, who is one of the thought leaders of the prison abolition movement, has made a really compelling case that there is no simple substitution, like we will abolish prisons and then there will be this new thing instead.
00:53:57
Speaker
That her perspective that she has articulated is that there is a suite of societal changes that would have to come first to make prisons unnecessary.
00:54:11
Speaker
and And we can think about things from reparative justice movements. We can think about we can think about treatment for drug addiction, for example. There are many, many things that when you put them all together and implement them all over a long period of time,
00:54:27
Speaker
prisons would become less and less quote-unquote necessary and eventually could dwindle down to nothing. So that's, to me, that's a really compelling vision.
00:54:38
Speaker
think my own perspective, so that's that's the perspective that is articulated in the prison abolition movement. But now say what I think. and okay What I think is that we know that prisons do not do what they claim to do.
00:54:55
Speaker
What they claim to do is make the world a safer place, or make the United States, for example, a safer place and a more just place. And we have so much evidence that they simply fail to do that.
00:55:10
Speaker
So my question is, if they don't if they fail at what they say they are trying to do, then what is the justification for continuing down this path that we know doesn't work?
00:55:24
Speaker
And by the way, it didn't work even in the 19th century. And there was a huge amount of evidence from the very beginning that prisons were not making communities safer and they were not administering justice.
00:55:38
Speaker
So if we know they're not doing what they say they exist to do, what justification is there to continue them? So I am in favor of safety.
00:55:50
Speaker
I am in favor of justice. And the question that I am asking is, how can we actually have these things? This is heavy, right? This is this is heavy on my soul. This is a heavy topic because I know people who have been incarcerated. i know people who have been wrongfully incarcerated. I know people who have been right... They they were incarcerated rightfully, right?
00:56:16
Speaker
And when you're dealing with this and you're and you bring it up in New York State that 70, you said 70% of the roughly 70% are black and brown people.
00:56:27
Speaker
and but And you're doing the research and you're finding out it goes all the way back to the right? What gives you hope?
00:56:38
Speaker
And what can ordinary people do today to better understand and engage with the history that you're uncovering? them me yeah what me hope What gives me hope is activist communities. Activist communities are pushing back against prison for profit in particular.
00:56:58
Speaker
In New York State, there is legislation that is being proposed and is being voted on to do two things that William Freeman was exactly calling for.
00:57:10
Speaker
There is legislation pending in New York State to to make sure that any labor that happens inside prisons benefit the prisoners.
00:57:21
Speaker
And this is really crucial. William Freeman was not against working. William Freeman actually wanted to work. He wanted to be compensated. And this is exactly what people today want. It's the it's the exact same claim.
00:57:37
Speaker
So this one bill called the No Slavery in New York Act will ensure that any labor that happens in prisons is, first of all, freely chosen, that no prisoner can be forced to work against their will.
00:57:51
Speaker
And if they choose to work, that the labor will benefit them in some way, specifically monetarily. And then there's a second bill that is moving through legislation in New York State, which is about about the conditions of labor, basically making sure that labor conditions are safe, that they are that they that they that they support life.
00:58:15
Speaker
And this is also what William Freeman was all about. William Freeman wanted to have a life. He wanted to have a livable life. And that is what the Auburn State Prison deprived him of.
00:58:28
Speaker
So i when I think about these pieces of legislation that are moving forward, I feel a lot of hope. I mean, it also makes me enormously sad that the exact claims that William Freeman made, we still have to make them today because they have not been achieved.
00:58:43
Speaker
But there are a number of states that have added language to their state constitutions, specifically outlawing carceral slavery, specifically countering the exact model that was born in Auburn, New York in 1816.
00:58:59
Speaker
So a number of states have actually already added that language to their constitutions or taken away the language permitting it. Nevada is one example. So we can do this.
00:59:11
Speaker
We can change. that the evil geniuses in Auburn in 1816, you compared them to Lex Luthor, and I think that's actually ah an apt comparison. I think of the the language that I've used to think about them is that they were evil geniuses.
00:59:26
Speaker
They were evil geniuses, but there's a lot of us countering the evil that they created. And there's more of us than there are of them.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:59:36
Speaker
For every Lex Luthor that needs to be a Superman, a Supergirl. So there we go. Dr. Robin, what would you like to leave my audience with?
00:59:46
Speaker
you will Well, I think what I'd like to leave your audience with is a very simple idea. which is the idea that and non-incarcerated person can and should benefit from the labor of an incarcerated person.
01:00:06
Speaker
That's wrong. I am a non-incarcerated person. I do not think I have any right to benefit from the incarceration of another person, including through things like tax benefits.
01:00:20
Speaker
The idea that, you know, ah prison... gives me a tax break because it contributes to the economy. Well, why should I get any kind of break based on the incarceration of other people?
01:00:34
Speaker
So I think that's what I'd like to leave your audience with. And then there this idea that non-incarcerated people have no right to benefit from the labor of incarcerated people.
01:00:45
Speaker
And then finally, i hope people will check out Freeman's Challenge, the murder that shook America's original free original prison for profit. If they do, they're going to meet an incredible teenager from history who was enormously brave.
01:01:02
Speaker
William Freeman was a flawed person, but he was so brave. He stood up against prison for profit at its source.
01:01:13
Speaker
He stood it up against the entire city of Auburn. He stood up against prison guards while they were beating him. He was brave.
01:01:27
Speaker
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Robin Bernstein, thank you so much for coming on the show. ah This has been ah just a delightful conversation. And I know I've definitely learned a lot being a historian, did know, and I know my audience has as well. So thank you for sharing with us.
01:01:48
Speaker
Thank you so much, Bruce. This has been wonderful. It was my pleasure. Man, that was a heavy and powerful conversation. As a historian, I thought I understood the evolution of incarceration in this country, from the war on drugs to mass incarceration, but to hear how it all started in Auburn, New York, who a place I've never heard of before,
01:02:09
Speaker
In the early eighteen hundreds this is absolutely information that has blown my mind. It's wild and sad how these evil geniuses, as Dr. Bernstein called them, created a blueprint that still shapes our systems today.
01:02:23
Speaker
A systems that find a way to turn punishment into profit. And as she reminded us, this isn't just history. It's policy, it's economics, it's morality.
01:02:34
Speaker
Dr. Bernstein's work reminds us that history isn't just in the past, it's in the walls we still build and the people we still can find. And like William Freeman, whose story she so brilliantly resurrects, we have to keep demanding accountability, asking who really benefits when justice becomes a business.
01:02:54
Speaker
If you want to understand where this system came from and what it takes to change it, go pick up Freeman's Challenge, the murder that shook America's original prison for profit. Dr. Robin Bernstein, I want to thank you freedom for your brilliance, your courage, and your scholarship.
01:03:10
Speaker
And for everyone listening and watching, steve stay curious, stay honest, and keep asking the questions that history doesn't want to answer. Thank you for listening.
01:03:21
Speaker
Thank you for watching. And until next time, as always, I'll holla.
01:03:30
Speaker
That was a hell of a show. Thank you for rocking with us here on Unsolicited Perspectives with Bruce Anthony. Now, before you go, don't forget to follow, subscribe, like, comment, and share our podcast wherever you're listening or watching it to it. Pass it along to your friends. If you enjoy it, that means the people that you rock will will enjoy it also. So share the wealth, share the knowledge, share the noise.
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Speaker
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01:04:07
Speaker
After Hours Uncensored and Talking Straight-ish. After Hours Uncensored is another show with my sister. And once again, the key word there is uncensored. Those who exclusively on our Patreon page, jump onto to our website at unsolicitedperspective.com. for all things That's where you can get all of our audio, video, our blogs, and even buy our merch.
01:04:27
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And if you really feel generous and want to help us out, you can donate on our donations page. Donations go strictly to improving our software and hardware so we can keep giving you guys good content that you can share.
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clearly listened to and that you can clearly see. So any donation would be appreciative. Most importantly, I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening and watching and supporting us. And I'll catch you next time.
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Audi 5000. Peace.