The Season of Return & The Carceral State: A Conversation with Professor Robin Bernstein.
Wed, Sep 25 8PM ET.
Join Matir Asurim and Professor Robin Bernstein, author of Freeman’s Challenge, for a discussion on rethinking our assumptions about the American carceral state and centering the voices of incarcerated people. We will dive into the history of the “Auburn model” of incarceration, in contrast to systems focusing on repentance and reform, and explore how economy, politics, and ethics play into the prison system as we know it.
Virtual event. Register here
Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit. Robin Bernstein. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2024
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 made use of incarcerated persons’ labor to manufacture consumer products. Then one young man challenged the system. Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Robin Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.
Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who specializes in race and racism from the nineteenth century to the present. She teaches at Harvard, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Bernstein’s previous book, Racial Innocence:Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards. She has also written a Jewish feminist children’s book, many prize-winning articles, and op-eds and essays in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other venues. She recently received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award.
Find Freeman’s Challenge, at a nearby library, at your local independent bookstore, or Harvard Bookstore.
Learn more at Robin Bernstein’s academic home and public page.
See also also Matir Asurim-related Bookshop list
Text for graphic: The Season of Return & The Carceral State: A Conversation with Professor Robin Bernstein, Wednesday, Sept 25, 2024. 8 PM ET/ 7 PM CT/ 5 PM PT. Images are headshot of professor Bernstein (white woman with short, styled hair and round-rim eye-glasses, wearing a bright suit jacket and collared shirt) and book cover (red white and blue silhouette of a person behind bars with book title: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit –Robin Berstein)
Leave a Reply