Robin Bernstein, PhD, author, cultural historian and professor, on the entangled origins of “prisons for profit” and anti-Black racism in America and beyond

Dr. Robin Bernstein tells the morally complicated story of murder, greed, race, and the true origins of prison for profit in her book Freeman’s Challenge: the Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit. In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system.

In Freeman’s Challenge, Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality.

William Freeman’s story reveals how the US North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom.

Robin Bernstein, with sixteen years of teaching experience at Harvard University, specializes in communicating complex ideas effectively to intellectually adept undergraduates, emphasizing accessibility without compromising intellectual rigor. Her guiding principle is to never underestimate students’ intelligence; never overestimate students’ knowledge, a mantra that informs her writing for general audiences.

host/producer/engineer:  Donna Morrow Wolfe

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