Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit

by Robin Bernstein

An award-winning historian tells a gripping, morally complicated story of murder, greed, race, and the true origins of 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 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 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 unforgettable story reveals how the 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.

Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.
 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, United States, Social Justice, Race, Crime, Politics

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2024

Reviews

[Lois · Rating 5 out of 5]

This audiobook was made available for me to listen to and review by Robin Bernstein, Brilliance Audio and NetGalley.

The narrator of this nonfiction history is Shamaan Casey. The narrator added emotion and depth to this sometimes harrowing narrative.

This tackles the unsavory history of the first for profit prison system in the USA. I, like many others, tied for profit prisons to the chain gang system practiced in the post Antebellum south. Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon focuses on the history of incarceration in the south after the fall of the Confederacy. I honestly thought that system was created at that time. I did not realize it was actually a continuation of the Auburn system of for profit prison exploitation. In the early 1800's prisons in the USA in the north were largely run using a Quaker model of solitary confinement known as the Pennsylvania system. Today we understand this system to be torture but at the time it was thought to allow offenders a place of quiet reflection. This system was focused on the idea of Christian based rehabilitation. Labor was part of this system but it was largely for the purpose of rehabilitation. Prison workers often labored for the prison and their own care.
The Auburn system, on the other hand, wasn't concerned with prisoners or rehabilitation, its primary concern was profit. This system basically used solitary confinement to prevent the prison laborers from speaking with the free hired laborers. The prisoners are forced to wear the striped prison uniforms today understood as prison uniforms. To keep prisoners in check and force productivity from them, brutal violence was employed via whipping primarily and water torture known as a shower bath.
The prison system is explained thoroughly to assist the reader with understanding the situation that William Freeman ultimately rebelled against. William Freeman is 15 when he's sent to Auburn for horse thievery which Freeman insisted was untrue. At the prison he loudly complained about not getting paid for his labors. This led to discipline which left him without hearing in one ear and other possible brain damage. William is also tortured in a device known as a shower bath. After this he's deeply not okay and begins to attack other prisons for small or perceived slights. Serving five years, William was released and left with his brother in law. William is most likely suffering from complex PTSD and a closed head injury. He struggles to read, when he was easily able to before incarceration. Furthermore William is incensed at his stolen labor and stolen time. He maintained that he was innocent of all charges and had been badly used. William later murderers a white family in retaliation for his suffering and it caused condemnation of the Auburn system.
This was a fascinating if a bit harrowing read. I learned quite a bit early US prisons and how choices made at this time led directly to today's prison crisis. I am an abolitionists so this was deeply impact full.

Thank you to Robin Bernstein, Brilliance Audio and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook. All opinions and viewpoints expressed in this review are my own.

[The Book Coyote · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and am voluntarily writing an honest review.

Freeman’s Challenge is the story of a young man’s crimes committed after spending five years in a torturous 19th century prison. It is a damning indictment of for-profit prisons both in the 19th century and today, and outlines the beginning of these prisons and their genesis in the 19th century.

This was not an easy book to read. It was incredibly disturbing both because of the racism and the torture that took place in the prison and the crimes that William Freeman committed upon his release. While his treatment doesn’t excuse his crimes, it certainly gives a reason for them - at least partly that he was so severely brain damaged by the beatings he received that he lost his hearing and his family said he was a completely different person.

This is a heartbreaking book. So many people (black and white, but mostly black) were victimized by these prisons that basically became a way to legitimize slavery. This is a book that will make sure that you feel uncomfortable, as anyone should when reading terrible history like this.

I also enjoyed the narrator of this audiobook. He was easy to understand, expressive, and did a good job making this book such a powerful and upsetting history.

[Book Club of One · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who is to benefit from a prison? The incarcerated individual to be 'reformed?' Or the communities where the prisons are located? These questions are not new debates in the American discourse, and Robin Bernstein's Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit demonstrates the history of this debate through the life and experience of William Freeman, an Afro-Native teenager. Freeman was convicted of horse theft and sentenced to hard labor in Auburn's prison. This prison was one of the first in the United States established with the goal to generate as high a profit as possible, requiring those incarcerated to live a brutal solitary life of silence and yet still to be constantly on display to tourists.

Bernstein is focused on Auburn, New York from its establishment at the expense of indigenous peoples, to Freeman's first trial, his incarceration and troubled life following his release, reaching it's tragic climax with a quadruple murder. Bernstein then describes the second trial of Freeman for the murders and the afterlives of Freeman's legacy and ideas that reached the public consciousness through the coverage of the murders.

Freeman was changed by incarceration, described as smart and witty, he was severally beaten several times, at least once with a wooden board to the head. This particular event irreparably damaged his hearing and according to those who knew him before, changed his personality and temperament. On release he demanded recompense for the years he had served unjustly. He pursued this ideal for the rest of his life, first trying to find legal representation, and after failing to find anyone willing to represent him shifting his goal from back pay to pay back. Incarcerated individuals are still drastically underpaid for their work, if they're paid at all.

Alongside its history as the location of the for profit prison, Auburn was also a an important location for the abolition movement and a stop on the underground railroad, later serving as the post slavery home for Harriet Tubman and her family. It would become a popular location for abolitionists and former slaves to speak.

Freeman refused to be broken, but the popular discourse of the case either ignored or downplayed the role of the prison in his life. Instead the trial and popular accounts focused on his mental status and developed racist and prejudicial ideas about African Americans.

Robin Bernstein was very careful in the construction of this book. We hear from and of Freeman from those who heard or witnessed him, and they are white. She describes this as the archival silences of African Americans, where their lives, thoughts and experiences were purposely not gathered or preserved.

A highly recommended read to historians, readers of American History and any involved in the prison industrial complex.

I received a free print version of this book thanks to the Coriolis Company.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Freeman's Challenge by Robin Bernstein, the story of William Freeman is told in the time before, during, and after his sentence in the Auburn prison. Through chilling details and research drawing on many primary sources, the reader gets a front row seat to the injustice of prison for profit and racism as experienced through the life and ultimately, the death of William Freeman. Bernstein draws special attention to the toll that the prison takes on Freeman, political corruption in prison leadership, and specifically, the economy powered by the forced labor of prisoners.

The narrator of the audiobook highlights the inherent drama of the story without being distracting or overzealous. While the narrator has good pacing as he reads the book, listening to it felt repetitive at times. Had I been reading the book in print, I think I would have just skipped forward a couple pages. Since I was listening in the car while driving, I did not feel confident trying to jump ahead. In the section about Freeman committing the murders and his eventual capture, Bernstein continues to remind the reader: Freeman just wanted to be paid and because he wasn't paid, he made others pay. His actions were a result of unpaid labor not insanity or malice.

Despite feeling fatigued by the description of Freeman's murders and trial, I appreciated how Bernstein connected Freeman's experience with the creation of the Auburn prison and its continued existence to the present day. I wish that Bernstein would have given less detail about the actual murders and more detail on the implications of the murders within the black abolitionist movement and continued expansion of the Auburn prison. While Bernstein did cover this toward the end of the book, I felt that more could have been said. I appreciated Bernstein making the connection to the sensationalization of Freeman's crimes and how he was portrayed. Such description provided food for thought in the ways that we make our own judgments based on the information presented about the offender.

This would be a good book for you if you are interested in American history, the prison system, or black history. It is a story that I had never heard before but one that continues to be relevant today.

Thank you Brilliance Publishing and NetGalley for providing a copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review. All opinions expressed in my review are my own.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Review

The shocking nature not only of the crime but of what drove the young African-American man to that crime instantly grabs the reader's attention. The visceral nature of the life of William Freeman and the heartbreaking events that led to the young man’s incarceration, both the first and second time, was instantly haunting and compelling all at once and captured the sense of frenzy that overtook white America at the time.

The close examination of racial tension and racial profiling during this time was conveyed throughout this book. Not only did the author explore the mindsets that many white Americans took at this time, relegating all members of the Black community to either being savage criminals or a failure of white America to educate the Black community, but showed how these two equally troubling mindsets impacted race relations in the centuries since. The fallout and impact this case had on the treatment and hardship that many Black Americans would feel in the next several years and beyond was shocking yet expertly navigated throughout this book.

The Verdict

Insightful, honest, and engaging author Robin Bernstein’s “Freeman’s Challenge” is a thoughtful and emotional book that examines one man’s heartbreaking case and the terrible reality of how relations between white and black America progressed in the years that followed. The tragic events that occurred to this young man and the conversation this book will spark and get people of all races thinking critically about American history and how we must end the cycle before it begins again made this one book you won’t be able to put down.

[Gail Leondar-wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured Freeman’s Challenge. I think it is a must-read for anyone interested in for-profit prisons, and the roots of racist tropes that inform criminal justice today.

The depth of the research blows me away. First, I was amazed that Robin Bernstein noticed a small reference to an early ninetieth century performance and unpacked a really important story out of that one little footnote. Noticing that it was unusual it was for a white person to show black-on-white crime to a white audience in the early 19th century led Bernstein to a really productive place.

It seems remarkable that she went from that reference to a conventional single crime, murder (history is full of murders) to find out not just the first for-profit prison in the US, but also the birth of the twin ideologies of contempt and pity, that both the prosecution and the defense disregarded what Freeman actually said about what had driven him to the crime, and instead made up these stories, making them into an archetype that persists today of black crime.

I was amazed by the sheer volume of the research, the depth of engagement with primary sources. I especially loved author’s note because it gave me a glimpse into a whole fascinating discipline. What is an historian to do when primary sources lack Black voices? What to do when the creators of the archival records are white, and how do scholars deal with those absences?

Freeman’s Challenge is a stunning recovery of an historical incident that resonates meaningfully today.

[Emily Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freeman’s Challenge is fantastic. Through a carefully wrought and sensitively told story about William Freeman, Robin Bernstein illuminates an old but oft-neglected form of labor in America’s early stages of industrial production: prison labor. In doing so, she sheds new light on the intersection between capitalism and coerced labor. Somewhere between enslaved persons and free people, prisoners in the massive Auburn State Prison worked without pay under brutal conditions. Freeman, a mixed Black and Native man in antebellum New York, was, technically, free. He was born free and remained thus until he was convicted of a crime he claimed he did not commit. This book shows that one needn’t have been enslaved, nor even indentured, to have been less than free, if freedom includes at least a degree of control over—and pay for—one’s labor. Indeed, Freeman’s quest to be remunerated for the work he performed while (wrongly) incarcerated previewed the free labor ideology central to much antislavery politics and rhetoric. Bernstein is an economical writer. Her prose is lively and engaging, and here it is based on meticulous scholarship. The endnotes are a testament to her efforts, but the narrative itself never gets bogged down in historiography. It’s a page-turning read, impossible to put down. While the story Bernstein tells hews closely to the events of Freeman’s life, Freeman’s Challenge challenges the reader to think about much broader issues, among them the very meaning of freedom in America. I highly recommend this book for all readers.

[Antoniette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Freeman's Challenge lays out, in great detail, the history of the first for-profit prison system, New York State's Auburn Prison. The author explains how the entire community of Auburn and its prison were wholly codependent on one another. It details the abuse and exploitation of the prisoners, focusing on the case of William Freeman, a young man who entered Auburn as a teen and was brutally abused while imprisoned. When Freeman is tried for murder a few years later, his trial brings to light the abuses taking place at Auburn while also laying the groundwork for some of the prejudices and systemic racism that still plague our country today, which interestingly enough, came mostly from the defense. While the topics of this book make for a bit of a heavy read, the audiobook narrator did an excellent job, adding drama and tension to the read when appropriate.

Thank you NetGalley and Brilliance Publishing for allowing me early access to the ARC audiobook edition of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

[Lorrie Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd give it more stars if I could. I did not know history could be studied like this. William Freeman didn't leave any written records but Bernstein cross-checks countless historical sources and retraces his actual steps to put together events that took place in the 1840s, sometimes hour by hour. Remarkable. The book starts with what amounts to a land acknowledgment, showing that this prison-for-profit started with a violent grab for a prime location. The events are harrowing but the writing beautifully guides the reader to stop and think, once in a while, before going further into the history. I learned about the history uncovered in this book and, at the same time, how historians work. I didn't know prisons for profit started in the north before the Civil War, and it was chilling to realize that inmates at this prison still turn out New York state license plates to this day, for almost no pay.

[Matthew Molinaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

a few weeks ago, my dad and I ventured out to a presbyterian church in the buffalo suburbs to go to a talk. professor robin bernstein was my supervisor's undergrad supervisor at Harvard and I had seen on Twitter that she would be discussing her newest book (on an Afro-Native teenager's resistance against a New York prison for profit) with professor Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a former Toronto-based journalist and food writer. let me say from the get-go that these two know how to work a crowd. we were all hooked.

Bernstein's book is incredible—a rich intervention into 19c history and a complete overturning of our basic ideas of the 13th amendment, prisons, racial capitalism, and abolitionism in the US. all the while, the narrative premises on close and abundant archival attention, offering new ideas of how to do a cultural history of carcerality, unfreedom, and Black and Indigenous life in the period.

Freeman was a rebel. this story is a groundbreaking achievement.

[William Sowka · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was inspired to read this book after attending Robin Bernstein's lecture on the book at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. The book is a finely written and well researched account of of William Freeman's conviction, imprisonment, and fate that exposes the underlying racism, capitalistic violence and exploitation of prisoners in 19th century Auburn, NY- some of which persists to this very day. The book helped me understand the for-profit prison system and consider the effects of racism and violence on a young man's spirit. Very sad indeed but nonetheless a good read.

[iris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book lays out a detailed narrative of the American carceral system following William Freeman. It combines a sweeping historical viewpoint of nineteenth-century New York with reference to an array of figures from Harriet Tubman to P. T. Barnum, while also focusing in on the story of a single oppressed man. It lays out a complex system and series of events in a way that is easy to follow and encourages the reader not to cower from the truth. The language is compelling and clear; sometimes humorous. The narrative itself is fascinating– such a story in a book of fiction might be considered trite or heavy-handed, but here it is evidently true and researched. Bernstein tells this story confidently and encourages the reader to read it in the same way. The book is sympathetic to Freeman while not forgiving the murders he committed. It is an excellent balance of historicizing and story-telling. I am not much of a reader of non-fiction, but this book has encouraged me to change that.

[Ed Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book immensely. The author brings exceptional narrative skill to reporting history. This “story” illuminated for me parallel insights into the American fiction by writers like Twain, Melville (per Bartleby), Styron (of course), Harper Lee, and most recently Percival Everett whose book, James, I recently read.

One of my favorite chapters discussed the “performance piece” fashioned out of the material, a fascinating account of nineteenth-century American theatre history. But every chapter is compelling in itself and by implication for understanding the present and the past. Professor Bernstein never seems to overstate or become tendentious. The book is a jewel.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important corrective to the belief that "slavery by another name" was solely pioneered by the South.

Bernstein lays out the history of the origins of for-profit prisons and the exploitation of prison labor in New York State in the 1820s-1840s by exploring the murder trial of William Freeman, a Black and Indigenous young man who insisted he was owed wages for a previous incarceration.

Rigorously researched and copiously documented, this book is nonetheless an accessible and compelling read that has deeply informed my understanding of the origins of our prison system and the continuing need for change.

[Elizabeth Deters · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read different accounts of the beginning of the carceral system in the United States. This account provided a new insight to the system via following the life of Freeman. The author ties in this case to speak about the criminalization of Blackness in the prison system and the community. It also discusses the abuses and atrocities of prison.

I appreciated the perspective and storytelling throughout the book that made a nonfiction read flow well.

Thank you to net galley and the publishers for this advanced copy of the audiobook.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is much to admire in this volume documenting the story of William Freeman and his incarceration in the Auburn Penitentiary in upstate New York in the antebellum era. The writing is lovely, even when describing beastly things. Bernstein's argument about the origins of the prison industrial complex is as timely as it could be. And more than anything, I just admired the doggedness of her research. What emerges is a fully formed character--William Freeman--the village that raised him, and the challenge he posed to all it held dear and profitable.

[Joe Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Blackman Who Reads Aloud

I throughly enjoyed the history that was revealed in this book and the fact that this one man single handily felt he could confront the Auburn Prison System’s injustice with acts of justice only to be turned back and forced to initiate an act of violence to be heard. I read this book cover to cover on the The Blackman Read Aloud Hour Project over 9 one-hour sessions on Facebook Live.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meticulously researched but extremely readable book about a formerly incarcerated Black man who demanded pay for his labor, leading to deadly consequences. The author does a great job setting the history of the area and of the Freemans, leading up to William's false imprisonment and the deadly consequences. What is also fascinating is the area of Auburn, NY, where the prison still is operational but also its rich abolitionist history.

[Arnold T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opened my eyes to the the prison slavery issue as part of the abolition in the New York before the civil war. My only quibble is that while the author did a great job with the prison/industrial complex system and its relation to systemic rascism, he never raised the question about how that system was engendered by the overall capitalistic system it was embedded in. Maybe that would not be appropriate as it was not part of the historical discussion.

[Michael Townsend · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Freeman's Challenge, Robin Bernstein vividly tells a heartbreaking story of unfairness, injustice, and exploitation. By so clearly exposing these problems Bernstein brings hope that society can improve. The story is heart-breaking, yet ultimately beneficial. In this way the book functions as a "social vaccine."

[Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting

[Annie Windholz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Throughout Bernstein's meticulously researched writing you walk through the prison system of the 1800s with William Freeman. Freeman demanded wages for his mandatory prison labor and was tortured for it under the Auburn prison system. The book lays out how the Auburn system set the stage for a relationship between prisons and state funded capitalism that we still see today and how Freeman's story, though brutal, is important in the prison abolition movement. Thanks to publishers for the advanced copy!