A Brutal 19th-Century Murder and its Connection to For-Profit Prisons

With Black Americans overrepresented in prisons, where they may be compelled to work nearly for free, many people have pointed out the chilling parallels to slavery. In fact, the modern American prison system is often traced to the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery—with the notable exception of forced labor as punishment for a crime. However, historian Robin Bernstein’s new book posits that for-profit prisons originated even earlier than the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, and in Northern states. 

In addition to tracing the development of these exploitative prisons, Bernstein’s book focuses on the story of one of its early victims. William Freeman was a young Black and Native American man who, as his name suggests, was born free, several decades before slavery was outlawed by the federal government. When he was 15, he was sentenced to five years for the theft of a horse, for which he always maintained his innocence. And when he was forced to work in a factory for no wages, he rebelled.

Freeman’s insistence on his innocence and his labor rights didn’t go unpunished; he was brutally beaten and even sustained a serious head injury that caused deafness and “a state of mental confusion”. That injury would be part of his insanity defense a few years later—the first time the defense was invoked in the United States—after he broke into a farmer’s house and murdered the entire family. 

Bernstein chronicles the whole tragic story and its legacy in Freeman’s Challenge, which activist Angela Davis calls “a provocative, robust, and rigorously researched interrogation of the historical meaning of imprisonment.” Keep reading for a sneak peek at the book and its contents, then download it today.

American prisons are worksites. Of the 1.2 million Americans currently incarcerated in state and federal prisons, two-thirds have jobs. They cook, scrub floors, wash laundry, or maintain buildings. Beyond the prison, they fix roads or fight forest fires. Some raise crops or work in factories. Unlike their free counterparts, incarcerated workers do not have the right to refuse to work, and almost none earn more than one dollar per hour. In many states, prisoners earn nothing at all. Yet every year they produce more than $2 billion worth of commodities and $9 billion in services. How did prisoners become a lucrative labor force? 

Many people trace the origins of profit-driven prison labor to the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment, passed in 1865, states that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” shall exist in the United States — “except as a punishment for crime.” In the eyes of many, this amendment ended slavery while licensing a new form of unfree labor: the de facto reenslavement of African Americans through Southern chain gangs and convict leasing.

But the post–Civil War South did not, in fact, invent profit- driven prison labor. Incarceration and capitalism entangled half a century earlier in the North, in the context of that region’s rising industrialism and gradual abolition of slavery. The key location was New York State, in a village called Auburn. There, a group of white businessmen built a new kind of prison: one that did not aim primarily to punish, confine, or redeem criminals, but instead to stimulate economic development.

Auburn’s state prison enclosed industrial factories where prisoners were leased to private companies, usually for thirty cents per day. The prison pocketed this money; prisoners received no cut. Yet they manufactured furniture and animal harnesses, carpets and combs, and more, which consumers bought throughout New York State. The system did more than enrich the prison and its contractors. It made Auburn prosperous, internationally admired, and proud. Meanwhile, it made prisoners, as one warden put it in 1826, “slaves of the state.” 

A young Black and Native American man named William Freeman challenged this status. Freeman was convicted of horse theft and incarcerated in Auburn for five years, starting in 1840, when he was fifteen years old. When set to work in the prison factories, Freeman resisted. The freeborn son of a manumitted Black father and a free Black and Stockbridge-Narragansett mother, Freeman was incensed at being forced to work, as he put it, “for nothing.” He demanded wages. His claim was simple, but it threatened Auburn’s defining idea: he insisted he was not a slave but a citizen with rights, a worker. 

The assertion triggered violence— first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a quadruple murder that terrified and bewildered white America. William Freeman’s challenge to the prison deserves to be heard. 

Nearly two centuries ago, when the prison industry was in its infancy, Freeman exposed profit-driven incarceration as a form of organized labor-theft, criminality disguised as justice. This book tells that story. 

To grasp the target of Freeman’s challenge, Part I focuses on the Auburn State Prison: how it was uniquely significant, how it affected the people incarcerated there, and how it shaped the world beyond its walls. “Auburn” was the name of a prison, a system of incarceration, and a village that became a city. Over time, Auburn became even more: an economic engine, a microcosm for New York’s politics, and a crucible in which state- funded capitalism boiled into a racialized criminal justice system. 

Part II narrates how Freeman fought this hydra—through words, then violence. Part III shows the aftermath: how white and Black people, differently devastated by Freeman, managed the terror he unleashed. This section reveals consequences that no one could have predicted—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives. 

Today, many activists decry private prisons and corporations that profit from incarcerated labor. But as Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, a hyperfocus on privatization can distract from a more capacious understanding of what she calls “carceral geographies.” Gilmore explains that private companies are best understood as “opportunists slurping at the public trough rather than the prime movers” in the construction of the modern prison. 

Events in nineteenth-century Auburn confirm and expand on this insight. The Auburn State Prison was never a private prison. It was a state prison that partnered with private companies for the purpose of making money. The immediate beneficiaries were, of course, the prison and its contractors. But as this book shows, private companies 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. By the mid-nineteenth century, Auburn had become a kind of “company town,” where the prison directly or indirectly affected every business, every person. 

Prison, as Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and others have explained, is much more than a bounded place. It is a set of relationships, a collective process of spacemaking. This book uncovers these economic, political, and personal relationships at their roots, as they germinated in the soil of central New York. 

By telling a story of penal capitalism on a human scale—through one young man, his family, and his city—this book exposes the contingency of prisons themselves. The making of the modern prison was not inevitable. Prison as we know it was constructed, challenged, defended, adjusted, and re-entrenched by individuals working in concert. By understanding their actions, we can imagine alternatives. We can question the economic and cultural systems that insist prisons are necessary. We can know the world before mass incarceration—and create one after it.

Sources: Historical Society of the New York Courts, NAACP, PEW Charitable Trusts

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