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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: Robin Bernstein, "Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Description: 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: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), Robin Bernst...