William Freeman was a 15-year-old in the the early nineteenth century who was convicted of a crime he insisted he didn’t commit. He was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn prison in New York State. He, and the rest of the prisoners, worked without pay, and when Freeman challenged the system, it had violent repercussions.

In her latest book Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, Robin Bernstein uses Freeman’s story to lay out the twisted history of anti-Black racism in the prison for profit industry. Robin joins host Ali Muldrow to talk about the book and the way the North invented profit-driven prison labor.

Dr. Robin Bernstein is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, which won five awards. Her latest book is Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (University of Chicago Press, May 2024).

The post How the North Invented For Profit Prison Labor with Dr. Robin Bernstei... appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.