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Chargement... Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profitpar Robin Bernstein
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An award-winning historian tells a gripping, morally complicated story of murder, greed, race, and the true origins of prison for profit. In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, "slaves of the state" were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system. In Freeman's Challenge, Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn's prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back--with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman's unforgettable story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery "except as a punishment for crime"--and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom. Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Freeman’s Challenge is the story of a young man’s crimes committed after spending five years in a torturous 19th century prison. It is a damning indictment of for-profit prisons both in the 19th century and today, and outlines the beginning of these prisons and their genesis in the 19th century.
This was not an easy book to read. It was incredibly disturbing both because of the racism and the torture that took place in the prison and the crimes that William Freeman committed upon his release. While his treatment doesn’t excuse his crimes, it certainly gives a reason for them - at least partly that he was so severely brain damaged by the beatings he received that he lost his hearing and his family said he was a completely different person.
This is a heartbreaking book. So many people (black and white, but mostly black) were victimized by these prisons that basically became a way to legitimize slavery. This is a book that will make sure that you feel uncomfortable, as anyone should when reading terrible history like this.
I also enjoyed the narrator of this audiobook. He was easy to understand, expressive, and did a good job making this book such a powerful and upsetting history. ( )