Hello and welcome to this day from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan. This day, March 13th, 1846, a young black and

Native American man named William Freeman is arrested for the murder of four white people in Cuyahoga County, New

York. A number of years earlier, Freeman had been imprisoned in Auburn Prison in upstate New York

for stealing a horse, a charge that he denied. Auburn was one of the first for-profit prisons in

the United States, and Freeman and other inmates suffer deep abuse, physical, and psychological while

imprisoned. After Freeman was released, he spent months trying to advocate for reform of the prison

and gain back wages for the time that he was incarcerated. And then this moment that we're

marking this day in 1846, he commits the murder that we are going to discuss. And it's a

murder that in some ways he resorted to in order to try and make a statement or get payback

against the state in some way. It is a very sorted, complicated tale, but one that illuminates the

roots of a very broken prison system that we live with today. Here to discuss, as always, Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt

and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. And our special

guest for this episode, Robin Bernstein, history professor at Harvard and author of the book,

Freeman's Challenge, which is all about the William Freeman case. Robin, thank you for doing this.

Congratulations on the book. Thank you so much for doing this. Congratulations on the book.

Thank you so much for having me. We see the cover over your left shoulder and it is beautiful. Great.

Great job. Whoever worked on that. We're big fans of striking covers on this podcast.

Obviously, we want to paint a sketch of who William Freeman was, talk about his actions,

but gosh, I'll say maybe my first reaction, a lot of listeners' first reaction is there were

private prisons in the 1840s? Yeah, there actually were not private prisons. What there were

was for-profit prisons. And that's one of the really important distinctions that I'm making in the book.

We have this idea that when we think of a for-profit prison, that that is by definition a private

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