FREEMAN'S CHALLENGE

Bernstein, a Harvard University professor and award-winning historian, surveys the origins of the United States’ for-profit prisons in this 19th-century case study.

“American prisons are worksites,” writes the author in an introduction, noting that they generate billions of dollars in commodities and services based on the labor of underpaid (or unpaid) incarcerated people who “do not have the right to refuse to work.” Historians most often trace the origins of such profit-driven labor to the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which banned slavery “except as a punishment for crime”; Bernstein highlights its use more than half a century earlier in an engaging and often infuriating survey of New York’s Auburn State Prison. Bernstein notes how the Auburn’s founders sought not only to punish criminals, but also to “stimulate economic development” with prison-sponsored factories that produced myriad consumer products, from animal harnesses to carpets. In many ways, the book convincingly argues, Auburn created a framework that continues to shape the country’s prison industrial complex, with its inclusion of humiliation rituals (such as a ban on speaking) and its much-imitated black-and-white striped uniform. The book pays particular attention to the case of William Freeman, a Black and Native American young man who was first sentenced to Auburn in 1840when he was 15. Freeman would first defy Auburn’s rules by speaking up against its horrific working conditions, and, later, sought revenge through violence in an incident that rocked mid-1800s New York City. The case is a particularly useful study that allows the author to explore the prison’s policies and engage with the contemporary prison abolitionist movement. The book’s strongest suit is its impressive research, which is backed by nearly 70 pages of endnotes. Bernstein balances her solid understanding of theoretical approaches to American prisons, developed by activist and academic Angela Y. Davis and others, with impressive mining of diaries, letters, newspapers, and other primary sources from the era. The book’s engaging, relevant narrative is accompanied by more than three dozen full-color images, including maps, paintings, blueprints, and newspaper clippings.

A timely and haunting look at key elements of incarceration history.