REVIEW: Freeman’s Challenge by Robin Bernstein
Early 1800s prison systems that set the course for the current prison industrial complex
While working a mandatory and unpaid factory job in prison in the 1840s, 16 year old William Freeman asked for payment for his work. For this he was severely tortured and suffered brain injury, hearing loss and disability. When he was released from prison years later he sought legal recourse for lost wages in prison. When legal attempts failed, Freeman, who was Black and Native American, killed an uninvolved white family in a killing spree that gained national attention. After he was caught and asked why he committed the murders, Freeman, who always maintained he was unjustly incarcerated, stated that he “had been five years in prison, and somebody must pay for it.” When he was asked “Who brought you up to kill?” Freeman answered: “The State.”
Throughout Bernstein’s writing, you walk through the prison system with Freeman:
“The turnkey opened Freeman’s cell… Inside, Freeman saw a pocket of space: three and a half feet wide, seven feet long, and seven feet high. A man could wedge his shoulder against one wall and flatten his palm against the opposite one… In four days, William Freeman would turn sixteen. He was alone among five hundred forty-nine others in the belly of a ship sailing into the unknown.”
The visceral writing of this book lands you right along Freeman and into the cultural shock waves that went around the country at the time in mainstream and abolitionist circles. Bernstein argues that Freeman “exposed profit-driven incarceration as a form of organized labor-theft, criminality disguised as justice”.
“William Freeman challenged the triangulation of incarceration, cap-
italism, and slavery by insisting he was a worker who deserved to ben-
efit from his labor. Today, these values comprise a vital part of the prison abolition movement.”
The Auburn System
Quakers and other reformers created the “Pennsylvania System” (also called the “solitary” or “separate” system),” in a backward attempt to create space for “reform”. Years later the Auburn prison warden, Elam Lynds, took the elements of solitary confinement and added “a relationship between prisons and state funded capitalism.” Lynds “rejected the goal of reforming prisoners… and he believed that no amount of punishment could diminish criminality. Instead, Lynds aimed for profit. To him, a prisoner was like a slave, a machine, or a river: a resource to be exploited.”
Auburn State Prison opened in 1817 and the set up soon became a model for prisons around the country. During the day prisoners were required to work silently in factories with threat of torture and at night each inmate went to solitary confinement. The prison itself took a cut of the factory earnings and the prisoners took nothing for their labor. The system was organized to leave little room for building relationships and organizing with fellow inmates, and tourists visited the incarcerated factory workers during the day as a way for white business owners to showcase aims to “stimulate economic development” while also “reforming” prisoners. Bernstein asks: “If the Auburn System could not function without torture, might the system itself be immoral?”
The prison was able to justify the withholding of wages from incarcerated workers because the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed in 1865, which posits that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” shall exist in the United States — “except as a punishment for crime.”
The book goes on to show that the prison and white business owners weren’t the only ones to benefit from the Auburn system, but “were but one aspect of a much larger system involving state-funded capitalism, businesses outside the physical boundaries of the prison, reform societies, churches, intellectuals, political parties, and more.”
Since 1699 practices of paying incarcerated people were established, but Auburn prison refused to provide payment during Freeman’s time there “because wages, no matter how small, would have contradicted the Auburn System’s founding principle that prisoners, like slaves or machines, had no right to benefit from their labor.” In 1846 when Freeman was in prison, [wages] were available to incarcerated people in Connecticut, Vermont, Maryland, Massachusetts, and other states.
Today Auburn State Prison still exists, and factory labor is still its defining feature as for many other prisons in the U.S. today. Today Auburn prison produces all New York State license plates (2.5 million pairs) annually. Bernstein details: “Unlike William Freeman, these [current Auburn prison] workers receive compensation. But at $.65 per hour [in 2024], they do not earn the life-supporting wage Freeman demanded.”
Abolitionists Gather
Freeman was set to be executed right before he turned 22, but a retrial was declared. In the years following the trial, Black abolitionist began gathering in Auburn. There was a retrial, and Freeman died at 22 while awaiting the decision.
Bernstein discusses the larger debate within the abolitionist community at the time about whether to oppose carceral slavery or not. Harriet Tubman and others made the the choice not to oppose it, to focus on other issues. She then ties the conversation into today’s abolitionists such as Angela Davis who posted the question in 1998 about why abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass were “consistently silent” about postbellum Southern convict leasing”.
“Frederick Douglass and his colleagues never explained why Auburn suddenly became a priority for Black abolitionists. What is certain, however, is that shortly after Auburn’s courthouse resounded with stories about Freeman as a vicious savage or a helpless lunatic, Frederick Douglass
and other Black abolitionists chose Auburn as a site in which to tell
their own stories.”“In the decade following Freeman’s trial, Black abolitionist energy
transformed Auburn into a publishing hub for an emerging form of
literature: the slave narrative. Frederick Douglass published the first
edition of My Bondage and My Freedom simultaneously in Auburn and
New York City in 1855.”
Of the few at the time that felt comfortable speaking out about carceral slavery was the poet Walt Whitman:
Whitman identified and criticized three hallmarks
of the Auburn System: unpaid factory labor, silence, and isolation (he
gestured, too, toward Auburn’s iconic and humiliating prison stripes).”
Then and Now
Bernstein details the public opinions of the time, and the racist thoughts promoted that “Black criminality was as dangerous as Indian savagery, but the Indians were extinct, their weapons safely behind museum glass, and in parallel, Black criminality could — must — be contained, controlled, by the criminal justice system.” Bernstein also notes how the prison reform movement is as old as prisons itself:
“By fall 1845, the prison had accustomed itself to permanent flux… Prisoners tactically reduced the value of their labor by stalling, stealing, or befouling their work, and officers retaliated. Tourists came, ogled, spent money, then hopped back on trains to Niagara Falls. One mode of punishment was declared inhumane so a new one supplanted it, and few asked whether a system that depended on torture might be fundamentally flawed…Factories made money, lost it, adjusted, and regrew. Corruption was discovered and investigated; reports were written; agents were fired and new ones hired.”
Bernstein makes clear to me in this book that what is needed is not a continuation of prison reform, but prison abolition. Bernstein argues that Freeman contributed to the prison abolition movement in advocating for himself and his pay in the face of torture, before he perpetrated the same hate that was put toward him in the prison system.
Though this reads like a narrative story at times, it is painstakingly academic in its making. In writing this book Bernstein pored over “forty thousand pages of unpublished diaries, letters, genealogical records, newspaper articles, court documents, governmental reports, pamphlets, travel accounts, maps” as well as talking to men currently incarcerated in the same prison Freeman was.
Thanks to publishers for the advanced copy!
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