Books That Make You See the True Origins of For-Profit Prisons
The United States has a complicated past. Freeman’s Challenge by Dr. Robin Bernstein—a Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African-American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University—unravels a bit of that past.
A gripping story of murder, greed and race, Freeman’s Challenge tells of a young man sentenced to five years of hard labor at Auburn prison in the early 19th 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.
In the book, an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman is convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit. After demanding fair wages, a series of events leads to violence and aftereffects that reverberate in our society today.
