https://scheerpost.com/2024/06/28/americas-prisons-are-slave-labor-factories/
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While the 13th Amendment is often revered for putting an end to American slavery, what many don’t realize is how it represented the middle of America’s continuous relationship with slavery. It codified Black prisoners as a subhuman criminal class and made slavery in the form of prison labor an acceptable practice, uniting incarceration and capitalism.
Robin Bernstein, Dillon Professor of American History at Harvard University, joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to discuss the sinister origins of modern American slavery, as detailed in her new book, “Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit.”
“Prison labor, unpaid prison labor, forced prison labor, absolutely is slavery by another name,” Bernstein tells Scheer. The book shines a light on William Freeman’s story at Auburn State Prison in upstate New York. Freeman, indicted without evidence for horse theft, spent years imprisoned and forced to work in Auburn, a facility that ultimately became the prototype for the modern day American prison system.
“I want to show how the practices that were innovated in Auburn spread not only across the North, not only across the East, not only across the South, but also to California and the whole world,” Bernstein said. She aims to challenge the widely accepted, supposedly enlightened and progressive idea that prisons serve as a positive economic force.
Bernstein hopes her book will reveal that the end of slavery and all its negative associations with southern U.S. states should equally implicate the northern states, given their role in developing this new system.
“[T]he reason I think it’s so important to expose the North’s invention and expose the North’s innovation in these practices is that when we start the story with the 13th Amendment, when we start the story of forced prison labor with the end of the Civil War, what we’re doing is we’re starting the story in the middle, and when we start the story in the middle, we inadvertently let the North off the hook.”
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This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.
Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to say that intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Professor Robin Bernstein, Dillon Professor at Harvard, and she’s involved in the Department of African and African American Studies, teaches a section on U.S. cultural history, and is also in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies. I think I got that right but even if I didn’t, it’s impressive enough. But we’re here to discuss her new book, called “Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit.” And at first, my son, who’s the executive producer, Joshua Scheer, told me this is a book about where did the whole prison for profit system come from, and it came in the north, it didn’t come in the south, even though prisoners were used for profit to pick crops and everything else.
And the book is set before the Civil War. It’s set in the 1840s. And so it’s before the 13th Amendment, it’s before a lot of things about prison. But first of all, I just want to talk about your relation of your being a cultural historian to the exquisite writing of this book. And it really was startling to me. It’s a heavy subject. You get into profound issues. It’s well documented. Extensive footnoting of everything. Your sources meet the highest level of peer reviewed scholarship and so forth. But it’s an absolute joy to read, not because the subject is joyful, but because you really put us there and give us the feel of life in America in a very critical period, the first half of, well coming to the end of the first half of the 19th century. And the subject really goes way beyond the question of prison for profit. It really goes into the role of race in American history and the whole mythology that we somehow were a great experiment, there was just this little flaw, but the biases of class, who gets to vote, whether they’re Black or white. Certainly women didn’t get to vote, but they even, Black or white, had to show a certain economic status and then it became more rigorous.
We’re talking about freed Blacks in the North with all of its contradictions. Yet at the same time, there’s an abolitionist movement with whites and Blacks. It’s quite enlightened compared to the South. And in the midst of all this, there comes to be this experiment of Auburn prison, I’ll let you lay it out, in Auburn, New York. And, it’s supposed to be a model of a good way, but it’s not a model of rehabilitation. It’s really a model of exploitation. How do you get free prison labor and exploit people? And then there’s a grizzly murder at the center of it and really among other things that what this book achieves is a study of media and mass cultural life way before not only the internet before television we’re still listening to it primitive radio even, and so forth.
Yet there is a mass culture. And the mass culture gets hysterical over this. There’s great fear. And basic tropes about race and class, but particularly race, and the Black male get played out in this trial. It’s like the Scopes trial, only it’s a different focus. But at the heart of it is: Are black people, the defense of this black man accused of this heinous crime, which he actually did commit, although there’s a whole history about how we got to that point. And the defense is, oh no, they’re so primitive or so violent or insane almost by definition. I’m going to let you, let this out before I mangle this book any further, but there’s a number of different lines that you’re getting at. So what I’m saying is it’s really a very serious and documented yet accessible study of issues that plague us right now. So take it away.
Robin Bernstein: Yeah, thank you so much for that. That was actually a very astute response to my book, and I very much appreciate it. What you’re pulling on is a number of the key moves in the book, which is, I was interested in showing origins of a whole lot of ideas that have become common sense today. So a lot of things that are bizarre, that are planted in our brains, how did these very strange ideas get there? So we can think about strange ideas like white supremacy. White supremacy is an idea that is demonstrably false. There is overabundant evidence that there is no race that is superior to any other race. And in fact, the whole idea of races at all has a very shifting basis and there is no steady, permanent idea of race. And there certainly is no racial superiority. But the fact that white supremacy, this demonstrably false idea, can be a structuring basis of our reality is so bizarre and what I’m interested in doing in all of my work is showing us the bizarreness of these ideas by showing where they actually came from and how they got into our brains.
So that’s one idea that I’m always very interested in undermining, exposing and undermining. In this particular book, I’m interested in showing some of the origins of specific racist ideas. So the racist idea that Black people are somehow inherently prone to criminality. That is a racist idea that had a beginning. And one of its really important points of beginning is in the trial of William Freeman, which has now been forgotten, except it hasn’t at all been forgotten because these ideas are in all of us, whether we believe them consciously or whether we don’t believe them, whether we fight them, whether we embrace them.
I hope we fight them. They are still familiar. We recognize them. So I’m interested in showing one of the lost origins of that diabolical, evil idea that is still so prevalent. And then another idea that I want to show the origins of is the bizarre idea that a prison can and should be an economic force. Let’s pause and step back and say, why? Why should a prison be any kind of economic force at all? Why should economy be part of a justification for a prison? Why should, if I want to build a prison in your backyard, how am I going to convince you that’s a great idea? Am I going to say to you, you should, you love justice, and prisons cause justice.
Prisons deliver justice. And that’s why you should welcome a prison in your backyard. Of course I’m not going to say that. That would have no persuasive power whatsoever. Instead, I’m going to say, you should welcome a prison into your backyard because it’s going to be good for your neighborhood in terms of bringing jobs. It’s going to stimulate the economy. That’s the argument that could actually possibly buy your consent. Why? How? Where did these bizarre ideas come from? And the answer that I expose in this book is, they came from New York. They came from New York in the early 19th century. And I’m showing the actual individuals who came up with these horrible ideas that we are all living with. These horrible ideas that have been implanted in our brains for 200 years. I am showing who planted these ideas in you and me and everybody else.
Scheer: On that point, one of the things you just exposed, really, in this book is that racism was uniquely a southern agricultural phenomenon. Slaves were needed for the plantation economy. They were brought in and created a certain level of prosperity. Of course, the industrializing north would not need that. They could have hired workers and so forth. It’s not true. And, first of all, in the south, the prison system in the south chain gangs and so forth was very much tied to the economy, as in the North. And the book really talks about… What is so interesting is that it connects with intellectual history. Where do ideas come from? Because in one way, this was cast as the work of northern do-gooders, that they were going to have prisons, but the prisons were also going to be a source of wealth and jobs, making carpets or making farm tools or all sorts of things.
And it became, in fact, the profit center. And I just want, in case people think this is ancient history, where I’m recording this from California, you can’t drive in the state of California, on say Highway 99 or anything, without recognizing that almost every, what, maybe fifth exit is a prison. And the economy, particularly of rural California, which we like to think of as all agriculture, even that, of course, involves people who don’t have full rights, and we know all about that. But the fact is, the prison industrial complex is basic to the stability of what used to be rural California. It’s one prison after another now, and so there are all these jobs. And you have in your book some statistics. I think they’re quite modern about the number of license plates that are produced.
In fact, in that prison, Auburn, which I must say growing up, I was presented as a high school kid or something that we had a good prison system. And I remember hearing about Auburn, I was in the Bronx, but I remember hearing there’s a place, and then Sing Sing got more notoriety, but this Auburn that you write about, was really a center of enlightenment in that. Yet I read in your book, no it wasn’t. These prisoners were not allowed to look up. They were not allowed to talk. They worked under the most horrible conditions, which would make a big issue about China, correctly, I think, or any other country, how they use indentured labor, or forced labor, or prison labor. But there it was, this place that was held up as a symbol of enlightenment was actually one of the cruelest experiments.
And the person we’re talking about, we should talk about Freeman, that’s his actual name, he was exposed to this. And his issue, let’s just get to the chase here, he was treated terribly in this prison, but the one thing that really stuck with him is he was not paid for his work. This great enlightened experiment didn’t even go through the motion of paying a small pittance so you’d have something to take when you left prison, or you could buy some extra thing from the commissary or something. No. And, so when he got out, he had two causes. One, he had not stolen the horse as a soon-to-be-16-year-old from someone who, by the way, the woman whose horse was stolen never identified him, did not know who stole her horse. One gets the sense from your book that he probably was a handy target, in terms of the crime. But then once he gets in, here you have a 16 year old and you now got him for five years and all what you do is you beat him, you abuse him, and this work thing turns out to be a vicious form of slavery.
Bernstein: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And this is one of the key points of the book, is that I’m trying to show how, slavery by another name, as it’s often called, convict labor, prison labor has often been called slavery by another name. It has been understood as a way in which the South re-enslaved African Americans after emancipation, after the Civil War. And that’s absolutely true. Prison labor, unpaid prison labor, forced prison labor, absolutely is slavery by another name. But what I’m showing in my book is that, in fact, the South did not invent this. And it did not start after the Civil War. Slavery by another name, forced prison labor, did begin in the wake of slavery, but it began in the wake of Northern slavery, not Southern slavery. And because the North, and specifically New York State, emancipated decades before the South, forced prison labor began in the North and it specifically began in New York State.
It began in the early 19th century and it was slavery by another name. As you say, William Freeman was enslaved and this was a free born African American and also Native American youth. He was a kid when he went into the Auburn State Prison. He was 15 years old. So he was enslaved and he was absolutely furious about this. So in my book, I’m really talking back against some of the ideas we have about North and South. We have this idea that the South invented, forced prison labor, the South invented prison gangs. It is simply not true. The South adapted these processes, adapted these practices from the North. And the reason this matters, the reason I think it’s so important to expose the North’s invention and expose the North’s innovation in these practices is that when we start the story with the 13th amendment, when we start the story of forced prison labor with the end of the Civil War, what we’re doing is we’re starting the story in the middle, and when we start the story in the middle, we inadvertently let the north off the hook.
What I want to do in “Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit,” is put the North back on the hook. That’s my goal. And I also want to show how the practices that were innovated in Auburn spread not only across the North, not only across the East, not only across the South, but also to California and the whole world. You mentioned California before. San Quentin was built on what is called the Auburn system, the Auburn model. This was absolutely conscious. It was explicit. It was specific. They were imitating Auburn and they were stating that’s what they were doing. And now the very idea, regardless of any kind of specific practice, simply the idea that a prison can and should be an economic force, that a state can use prisons as a positive economic force, positive in the views of the state. That itself is a legacy of the individuals whose stories I’m telling in this book.
Scheer: As a footnote to that, by the way, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, is actually changing San Quentin, finally. Now he shut down the death row, which it was infamous for. But also, it’s supposed to become a rehabilitation center. And the interesting idea, early on, there were plenty of people in the United States who believed prisons should rehabilitate people, not just lock them up and throw away the key, or exploit them economically. And so in your book, there are people who are present throughout your book who seem to be well intentioned, but they lose the thread of the story. And your book reminds us it didn’t have a happy ending. It’s amazing it took until now for California to finally get back to rehabilitation as an important idea for San Quentin.
When you say the original idea of San Quentin was based on Auburn and that was a mockery of rehabilitation. It didn’t even make a claim. That was basically these are worthless people and what is fascinating is that at the heart of your book is a trial. It’s like the Scopes trial about creationism. But here’s a trial where both the very prominent people, the son of a president, is the prosecutor, and, or I think he’s the son or the grandson. And the defense counsel is a former senator. Governor.
Bernstein: Seward. William Henry Seward was William Freeman’s defense lawyer. And William Henry Seward, at the time, was very famous for having been the past governor of New York State. He took the case pro bono. And then later, of course, he became the Secretary of State to Abraham Lincoln. And he is now most famous for having brokered the purchase of Alaska. So if you’ve ever heard of Seward’s folly, that’s William Henry Seward, who is William Freeman’s defense lawyer. So one of the things that amazed me as I was learning more about the story and doing the research was how many famous people touched the life of William, William Freeman and were touched by him. So the fact that William Henry Seward got involved, the fact that the son of Martin Van Buren, president Martin Van Buren got involved, and then later on, the case touched the lives of Frederick Douglass.
Harriet Tubman personally knew a lot of the members of William Freeman’s family. She lived in Auburn, she lived in Auburn for the second half of her life, from the 1850s until her death in 1913. Harriet Tubman lived two miles from the Auburn State Prison. This is the prison that innovated a new form of unfreedom. And Harriet Tubman, the great emancipator chose to live two miles away from that citadel of unfreedom. And I think that shows the complexity of all of our lives, however much we are fighting oppression is always right next door. However much we are fighting for freedom, the opposite of freedom, unfreedom, is always nipping at our heels.
So it’s quite astounding how many, amazing people we have. walk through this book. Josiah Henson shows up. Josiah Henson was the prototype for the character of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” He comes to Auburn. He is affected by William Freeman’s trial. Walt Whitman shows up. Walt Whitman responds to the trial. And as you said, this was a huge trial at the time. It was like the Scopes trial. I really like that connection that you’ve made. And so a huge number of very famous people got involved and they are all in my book and you can see a different side of them. You can see a side of Harriet Tubman that you’ve never seen before. You can see a side of Frederick Douglass that you’ve never seen before because these people have never been thought about in relation to prison for profit. We’ve never put together Harriet Tubman with prison for profit. We’ve never talked about those two things together. But in fact, she lived two miles from the original Prison for Profit. She was, of course, cognizant of this. She, of course, had thoughts about this. So that’s what I’m trying to bring forward.
Scheer: Yeah, but also it’s a study of opportunism, your book, because you have again, because this is not the South that we know, oh, the slave master and the whip, they had the whip, the cat of nine tails or whatever, they had all that in Auburn. But somehow, this bought into the notion of an enlightened North, right? And, we don’t do that. We don’t have chain gangs. You do. But it’s in a factory setting, and a prisoner working there has to work all these hours without ever a loud conversation. And they were introduced as a spectacle. Tourists are taken through this thing to show how enlightened it is. But the prisoners can’t look at the visiting tourists from all over the world. It’s really a study, oddly enough, because mass media, you don’t think of as a big factor that early in our history.
But a lot of this played out for mass media, such as it was. Even though people still were riding around basically on horses and so forth. Nonetheless, an image was created, of the thing being sold. Somebody once said, in fact, Bunkman, don’t confuse the thing being sold with the thing itself. The thing that was being sold through the media, and even with photography in its early days and everything, was a notion of this enlightened prison that won because it didn’t cost the taxpayers money. They made a lot of money and so forth with the products they were producing. It was a way of getting some value out of people who otherwise were going to just waste their life, the prisoners.
But it was not that at all. It was a slave camp. That was justified in what, as you mentioned with Harry B. Stowe and so forth, and Frederick Douglass was critical of it, I think. But even the prosecutor and the thing, they were all part of an establishment that thought, hey, we are the good people. And if I had to take a parallel, I teach at USC. I don’t know how it is at Harvard, but we have daily crime reports, sometimes every day, somebody arrested for grabbing an iPhone or something worse. And generally it’s a brown or Black person. And there’s almost no consciousness of who these people are, what happens to them after they’re arrested. It just shows up on a, the blotter that you, I think some law says we have to be informed about it. And you could be at a modern university and not, and that is taking it to defending those people who went to Auburn. And just assume, but things must be okay. And they’re, but they’re not, they’re, not okay.
And, I guess the wake up call of this book is that we really don’t want to examine reality, an uncomfortable reality. We want and everyone there at… and let me just say before we lose the thread, they actually end up, Both the prosecutor and the defense in this trial, the good people and the bad people, whatever, however you label them, end up embracing the most extreme, dangerous, racist notion that Black people are, by virtue of their skin color, immoral and uncomprehending. That really gets to be the big argument.
Bernstein: Yeah, I think that’s really important. One of the arguments that I’m making in this book, or really one of the historical facts that I’m exposing in this book, is that both the prosecution and the defense came to the same conclusion, which is in different ways, they both argued for this racist idea of inherent Black criminality. They co-created it. And while they were diametrically opposed about certain things, their arguments united in this one area and embedded them in the American psyche because this trial got so big so fast and there were so many famous people attached to this trial. So when you have people who seem to disagree, actually coming together and agreeing on something really strongly in this case, racism, it is very persuasive because these people seem to argue, to be disagreeing about everything else. So they actually really reinforced each other. And then the trial, as you said, went national very fast. And there’s a subplot in the book about technology. And one of the things that happened during the trial, by coincidence, is that the telegraph came to Auburn immediately before the trial.
So when the trial happens involving these famous people and this sensationalist murder, it became an opportunity to use the new gadget. To use this wonderful, new, amazing telegraph. And so what they did was they telegraphed the transcripts of the trial. They telegraphed them across the country. And newspapers across the country ran the transcripts daily of this trial. The racist ideas traveled very far, very fast, and this is one of the origin points for one of our ugliest and most tenacious racist ideas that are now in this country. So I’m not saying that William Freeman’s trial was the only origin of this racist idea, but it was a really important origin moment, and it was an early moment of origin. It was among the earliest in this country and it got really big really fast. So this is a moment that if we want to understand racism, if we want to understand the racist criminalization of Black people, we need to look to this moment of origin and see how it actually happened, how these ideas got embedded in the heart of American culture.
Scheer: Yeah and are dominant today because as you point out, because it occurred to me reading it, wait a minute, I’m not a great constitutional scholar, but, the 13th amendment, which is what is taken to endorse a harsh racist prison system, which we have, comes after this. So the consciousness that supported that caveat in the thirteenth amendment, all of us are free, but not these people called prisoners. And then the prison system, which we have the largest prison system in the world, and it’s clearly racially constructed, as well as class, but race is a dominant factor in it really might have happened, not only because of this, but maybe significantly because of the thing that you’re writing about. And what was irritating to me, is when I picked up the book, I thought I knew a lot about all this stuff, and, I really am ignorant.
Bernstein: Less so now.
Scheer: Oh, less so, yeah. No, trust me. I didn’t skim this book. In fact, I had to delay our discussion because I thought it would be a faster read than it was. And, no, I kept checking things and checking, because it is, I want to repeat, a scholarly work just because it’s accessible. It’s accessible. It doesn’t mean it’s not scholarly. I think many scholarly devices are merely a disguise to make something you haven’t figured out seem interesting, plausible, so you hide behind complexity. This cuts it down to a bare thing. Let me just put the barest thing of all, and that is that, quite possibly, first of all, this is a person who was not even 16 when the deed of the crime happened. And it was the theft of a horse. It was not the brutal crime that ends up, and I’m not going to give the end, I’m not going to be a spoiler and tell people, but the last section, the last 50 pages or so of the book is really a great detective story, a great mystery story, and it has a surprising end, but, here was somebody who is judged by both the defense and the prosecutor to have been deformed by virtue of skin color, when, in fact, he may have been, and there’s no real hard evidence, to connect him with the horse theft.
Which was not a crime against people and so forth, but he’s the one that singled out, he did it, and again, who is this person? He’s only 15. And by the way, your book is very good at introducing complexity. And this kid, he came from a solid family. Actually the most important, Negro family in that area. Former slaves who had been freed and then started a life of productive work. His uncle ran this very successful barber shop and so forth. They were admired in the town. I forget the name of the sort of black section. What is that?
Bernstein: New Guinea. New Guinea was the name of the black neighborhood, which his grandparents established.
Scheer: And so he comes from good stock. He worked hard. Even when he got out of prison, he was doing the laundry for his aunt, he had a cleaning operation. He does all this hard work. And he is, and let’s talk a little bit about this fellow, because he comes out and he’s been, he’s lost his hearing. His brain has been, they later did an autopsy and they find some imperfection in his brain that they attribute maybe. He wasn’t all there. He certainly had lost a lot of his cognitive ability and brain by the time he commits the crime, the big crime, after he’s in prison. But the fact of the matter is he comes out of prison and he tries to go straight.
Bernstein: I think what’s really important about William Freeman is that he had something really important to say. What he had to say was that it is wrong to make people work for no compensation. His big point was that he was not a slave, he was a worker. And as a worker, he deserved to be paid. In the Auburn State Prison, he was effectively enslaved. He was forced to work for no compensation of any kind and he was resisting that. He was fighting this fundamental reclassification of who he was. Remember, this is a person whose grandparents became free and they named themselves Freeman. They didn’t have to do that. They could have named, they could have given themselves any name. They could have named themselves after their former enslaver.
Lots of people did that. His grandparents did not. They named themselves Freeman. And then his father, when his father became free, his father named himself Freeman. This was the name that William Freeman inherited. And then, he was accused at the age of 15 of stealing a horse, which he always claimed he did not steal. There was no evidence against him, but that didn’t matter. He was convicted. He was sentenced to five years in Auburn, in the Auburn State Prison, the original prison for profit, and there he was enslaved. So this is a deep wound. This is a deep trauma. And this 15 year old kid, this teenager, has the courage to fight back. And he fought back in prison, and there was terrible retribution, there was terrible violence against him on the part of the guards. The guards were horrible to him, and they singled him out for vicious treatment. And then he got out of prison, and amazingly, one thing that gives me so much respect for William Freeman is that he still had some faith in the, in justice.
He still had a vision of justice, even though the law had never done him any favors at all. But he gets out of prison, and what does he do? He goes to the magistrates. He goes to local magistrates and asks them to help him recover back wages. In his view, the Auburn State Prison has stolen his wages. The Auburn State Prison is criminality disguised as justice, and he wants the money that, in his view, he is owed. And he is laughed at. And he is dismissed and he is told that he has no rights, he is not a worker, he was simply enslaved and now he is out of the prison and now he should go make his way in the world.
And he tries for six months to recover lost wages. And when he fails he eventually turns to violence, and he then is fighting the Auburn system with violence, and that’s the murder that is referred to in the title of the book. This is a person who really had something very important to say. What he had to say was, it is wrong to force people to work for no compensation. Really, on the deepest level, what he was saying was, slavery is wrong.
Scheer: Yeah, the challenge of this book is for people who’ve been raised with the idea of an enlightened North and the racist South, and to break with that idea because the interesting thing, he was actually raised as a free person, by parents who had obtained their freedom legally and so forth. And he was raised with the idea, you are now a normal American, right? Now there’s a whole thing in your book about how the right to vote was taken away from black people who didn’t have economic means, deep prejudice. That’s what Frederick Douglass was speaking about and so forth. But the interesting thing is he was actually an example of post-slavery culture.
If we really were going to have the society that claimed Abraham Lincoln wanted, right? And he’s accused of this crime. He ends up in prison. And he then asserts, wait a minute, why am I doing all this work for nothing? And, of course, there was no rehabilitation. I don’t want to take too much of your time, but take just a minute or two to stretch this out. There’s a conceit that this book challenges. It is. that there were enlightened northern liberals, let’s use that word, who had really constructed better systems of incarceration that involved rehabilitation, involved so on. That’s utter nonsense. They, these people invented an actually, a worse system. and because it was based on this illusion that you were doing something, but you weren’t.
And what you were exhibiting is there’s something grotesque that you had people coming from Norway or all sorts of all over England, everywhere from around the world to visit this prison in Auburn. We should set that, as this is the way to do confinement, right? And this becomes the model for America at its best in the prison, right? This is how we’re going to do it. But you expose there that they never really were interested in that. They were interested in exploiting these people. Humbling them. Destroying them. Here was this one person who wouldn’t go, he didn’t go along. He said, wait a minute, and maybe because they banged him around the head so much, maybe he would, if he had been thinking more clearly, he probably would have said, okay, I’ll go along with the new program, he was meeting some famous people, people would come to town, he could have maybe, Got back in the group, but he was obsessed with the idea that he had been done wrong. And, that it was continuing.
Bernstein: He was right that he had been done wrong. He was completely right about that. And I think you’ve picked up on something very important with the book, which is that I am absolutely putting a spotlight on northern white liberals who had very good intentions, who sincerely wanted to make the world a better place. And I show some of the wrong turns they took. for example, there’s one part of the book that, I find very moving, which is where, some northern liberals got upset that there was whipping happening in the Auburn State Prison, that whipping was a form of punishment, and they felt that this was barbaric, and they decided to come up with a better system, something that would be less barbaric, more humane than whipping.
And what they came up with was a new form of waterboarding. They came up with a machine that would enact waterboarding. And waterboarding, of course, is torture, as is whipping. These are both forms of torture. And one thing that I show in the book is how liberals got very involved arguing about is this form of torture more or less humane than that form of torture? And my point is, torture is torture. When you’re arguing about which form of torture is incrementally better than another form of torture, something has gone horribly awry. You have to stop, and back up and say, torture is wrong, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a lot more wrong or slightly, ever so slightly less wrong.
Torture is torture. It’s all wrong. So I show a lot of white liberals in this book who make this kind of error. where they get stuck arguing about whether whipping is better or worse than waterboarding. Instead of backing up and saying these are both wrong, we need to throw out the entire system we need to start over. And here’s where I think often people who read my book recognize a little bit of themselves. This is certainly where I sometimes resonate with some of the characters in a way that I do not find comfortable. It makes me question, when am I getting mired in these false arguments about whether X is better than Y, when in fact X and Y are both evil and both need to go?
How is my consent bought? How is my consent manufactured? That’s really what’s at the heart of this book. And that’s what I hope people will take away from this book. They’ll actually see The Manufacture of Consent. The people in this book, a lot of the people in this book, have good intentions, they want the best, and they get mired in these evil systems. Their consent is bought, and they’re not that different from us today.
Scheer: Yeah, and I think, finally, you’re being too kind to these people. No, because, look. And you say, do you see yourself in this book? Some of them. No, I see myself in this book. I actually went into San Quentin to interview Kevin Cooper, a guy who’s on death row, and he’s been there, again, at a very early age, 18, 45 years ago and so forth. And, and when you go in, and anytime you enter that system, the inconvenient truth. These are human beings, some of whom have not had a fair trial, some of whom didn’t have a fair childhood. What happened to them before they were 15 or 16? How did they get caught up in it? And then, tuning it out is the main thing that people do.
Otherwise, how would we have the biggest prison system in the world? We’re such an affluent society. We have so many other opportunities or ways of dealing with these things. And the thing I got from your book, the thing that sucked me in with this book, and I do want to just say a minute or two about your scholarship. You’ve given one clue. You have all these telegraph dispatches. There’s so much detail in this book. And then you even tell us, this way you’ll know for sure. Or there’s this probability. I want to underscore this, by the way, it’s Cornell University Press. The actual course of the book, It’s a little high, 25 bucks, but, I got the Kindle version, it seemed a little easier, but it’s well worth, even, but, I noticed today when I went again, the price dropped a little bit, but I want to say this should be a very popular book, rather, because what it does is really uses scholarship, not to obscure things or to show how brilliant the writer is, developed some brand new theory.
I’ve often had kind things to say about Moynihan, who was a senator, but I notice you take a shot at him in your book. again, a brilliant intellectual blah, blah, blah, but came to all the wrong conclusions about a number of things. And I think at the heart of this book is an assertion of the humanity of the other. That is the heart of this whole book and for that you do need the details. These are not cartoon figures. None of them. None of them. The senator, president, and of course the center of the book, Freeman. But it’s family. Complexity runs right through this book. But complexity is enlightening.
It means there isn’t a simple cartoon other that you can just dismiss. The person who snatched your iPhone is not, they’re humans, there’s history, there’s complexity. And I think what this book underscores is that deep in American mythology was a notion of the obviously good and the obviously evil. That’s what I took away from this book. Yeah, go ahead.
Bernstein: I’m so glad you picked up on that because I wanted to tell the story of William Freeman and his challenge to America’s original prison for profit. I wanted to tell it in an absolutely vivid way. William Freeman had something very important to say. He was not listened to during his lifetime. And then he was largely forgotten. And the origins of American prison for profit have been obscured. They have been hidden from us, which makes an economic, an economic goal in the prison system seem natural. It makes it seem inevitable. And what I wanted to say was there’s nothing natural or inevitable about the linkage of an economy with incarceration.
And so what I wanted to do was tell this story In the most vivid way possible. I wanted to tell it in such a way that people would be, any person would be able to read it. You don’t need a college degree to read my book. My brother in law, who does not have a college degree, read this book and he understood and appreciated every word. And I wanted the book to be incredibly absorbing. I wanted it to be very compelling. I wanted it to suck people in like you said. I wanted people to really get to know the complexity of these characters and the circumstances that they found themselves in because their circumstances were just as complex as our circumstances.
And I wanted people to really feel that and be present with William Freeman as he experienced America’s original prison for profit and, that’s what I hope that I accomplished. And it sounds like I accomplished it with you and I appreciate that.
Scheer: Yeah, and then let’s just leave people with a very, another big idea that they should mull over finally. And that’s the whole notion of abolition. The abolitionist movement, which we think of now, despite its excesses or something, as an incredibly powerful, progressive, obvious experience in American history. But people then don’t quite get the connection to why there are some people who want to absolve, abolish, the prison system. And you, reading your book, you realize what you’re showing is the so-called good model gets corrupted and, or was corrupted from the beginning. And that locking people in these cages, and this total power over them, and never allowing them to develop any sense of confidence, a 15 year old who you drag into your system, you’re destroying any humanity. to these people.
And then you end up with a trial where the defense and the prosecutor both agree, oh, this young man has no humanity. He’s in, the defense says, yeah, he’s incapable of making any human decision, so you don’t have the right to kill him. And then the prosecutor says, no, he’s no longer a good human being. He’s dangerous to everybody. So we have the right to kill him. The idea that this is not a full human being that has to be dealt with is at the heart of it. So I want it to end on that. It’s a very, a bigger theme even than the profit theme, which I know is the focus. Thank you for doing this. And the book again, it’s Cornell Press.
I didn’t want to turn anybody off by the price.
Bernstein: University of Chicago Press, University of Chicago Press.
Scheer: Yeah, but I don’t want to stress the price, but it’s well worth getting. I hope there is a paperback that’s cheaper. But it’s great. It’s “Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit” is also a great courtroom story, since people like that. You have all the documentation that I find compelling about it. I want to thank the folks at KCRW, the NPR station in Santa Monica, for hosting these shows. Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian and our producers there. Joshua Scheer, who insisted I read your book. He’s our executive producer, happens to be my son. But really hounded me to get this. It came out in May. But I’m glad we finally got it. It’s still out there to read. I want to thank Diego Ramos for doing the introduction and the transcription. Max Jones for making a video of this. And the JKW Foundation and the memory of a really terrific journalist, scholar, not scholar, but writer, Jean Stein, for giving us some funding for these shows. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
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