This is not just any prison. Auburn was, in Bernstein’s words, “America’s original prison for profit.” Its prisoners labored for the profit of their jailers and a welter of contractors and middlemen, and they received nothing in return save for a striped uniform, a narrow cell, scant food, and the lash. Now, prison labor, even prison labor for private profit, long predates Auburn. Not a few of the woolen garments worn in ancient Sumer and Babylon were the products of penal workhouses for prisoners of war and slaves. Jeremy Bentham designed the infamous Panopticon as a private enterprise. The keeper (ideally Bentham himself) was a contractor, and every detail of the panopticon, from the lighting to the rations, was geared toward maximizing his profits.
But Auburn had the dubious honor of realizing this vision for the first time, a prison that sought only better margins. The mercenary spirit of the institution, “built for business, not penitence,” ran directly counter to the high moral tenor of 19th-century prison reform. More fundamentally, Bernstein analyzes Auburn’s regimen, imitated across the country, as more than a theory of prison administration. It was a model for a particular kind of “relationship between prisons and state-funded capitalism.” If the 13th Amendment perpetuated slavery for those who were, so to speak, enslaved to the state by virtue of a criminal conviction, Freeman’s Challenge shows that this exception was invented not in the convict-leasing of the late 19th-century South but in the factory-prisons of the early 19th-century North.
This was the ideology challenged by William Freeman, the son of a Black father and a Black and Stockbridge-Narragansett mother, who spent five years as an inmate at Auburn himself. “His claim was simple,” Bernstein writes, “but it threatened Auburn’s defining idea: he insisted he was not a slave but a citizen with rights, a worker.” Freeman, in his way no less a wordsmith than Bernstein, compressed this critique into two words: “For nothing.” The phrase recurs, again and again, a verbal drumbeat that keeps the tempo of Freeman’s Challenge. To the officers overseeing the prison workshops, he protested that he “didn’t want to stay there and work for nothing.” Emerging from Auburn after five years of what he insisted was false imprisonment, five years of toil and physical abuse that had cost him his hearing and his health, he told his brother-in-law, too, that he “didn’t want to stay there and work for nothing.” After Freeman murdered four members of the Van Nest family, one prominent Auburnite asked him why he had killed a family who had done him no harm and from whom he had taken no money. The captive replied, “Why did they put me in the State Prison for nothing?”