{"id":13810,"date":"2024-09-16T00:57:06","date_gmt":"2024-09-15T19:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/?p=13810"},"modified":"2024-09-29T07:02:31","modified_gmt":"2024-09-29T01:32:31","slug":"routine-resistance-retribution-auburn-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/routine-resistance-retribution-auburn-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"Rutina, resistencia y represalias: La vida en la prisi\u00f3n de Auburn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Lockstep: Life and Routine at Auburn State Prison<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Every morning at 5:30, a bell ordered William Freeman to leave his cell in the Auburn State Prison.<\/strong> Three, four, five dozen prisoners formed a single file on the gallery. Silently, Freeman placed his right hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him and felt the man behind him cup his. Each man\u2019s left hand held a night tub, or chamber pot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every face turned toward the guard, heads bowed, eyes sweeping the floor, mouths immobile. They marched\u2014closely, fluidly, appearing, one former prisoner wrote, like \u201ca long reptile crawling out of a dead horse.\u201d This was the \u201clockstep,\u201d which Elam Lynds and John Cray instituted to prevent communication as prisoners moved to and from factories.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The games had serious underlying functions: not only to lighten the emotional burdens of imprisonment but also to reduce productivity and thereby profits.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But men found cracks of opportunity, and they bored into them. They whispered, passed notes, even taught each other ventriloquism. They learned each other\u2019s names and origins. Some prisoners, particularly African Americans,<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>parodied the lockstep as they performed it, \u201cstamping and gesticulating as if they were engaged in a game of romps.\u201d                                  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prison Labor: Exploitation and Profit in the Factory System<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The men left their cells and marched into the prison yard. They emptied their night tubs into an underground tank, rinsed them with pump water, and set them aside. Then they rejoined the lockstep and marched through factories that produced carpets, clothes, barrels, furniture, and more, with each chamber generating a different racket, a distinct shade of smoke as raw materials began to smolder or boil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly every day, jailors whipped the prisoners. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These factories were built into the prison. There, starting in the 1820s, the prisoners were forced to manufacture goods for private companies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The companies sold these consumer goods throughout New York and beyond. The companies pocketed all the money. Prisoners like William Freeman received no pay.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As men peeled off to assume their workstations, the line of marchers dwindled. The last stop was Freeman\u2019s: the \u201chame shop.\u201d There, amid gusts of dust, seventy-two men made animal harnesses and hardware for carriages. In 1841, his first full year there, Freeman and others built 6,849 animal harnesses plus hundreds of saddles, stirrups, buckles, carriage lamps, and related items.<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their work was sold wholesale to Cayuga County\u2019s merchants and saddlers at a total market value of almost thirty-two thousand dollars. The contractor bought the year\u2019s labor from the prison for a fifth of that amount\u2014just over seven thousand dollars, less than thirty-five cents per man per day.    <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman\u2019s job: to file rough iron imported from England, smoothing it in preparation for japanning, a lacquered finish. Alongside nine other filers, he burnished the surfaces of buckles, rings, and other hardware for saddles. It was \u201ccoarse work\u201d that required muscle but also \u201cjudgment and comparison.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman filed every morning for two hours, then marched to the mess hall for a half-hour breakfast, marched back, filed more, marched, ate dinner, marched, filed. Every movement regimented, every day the same. <\/strong>Another prisoner described the life: \u201cEach morning, when I seated myself in the shop and cast a look around me upon the things too familiar with my sight, my impression has been accompanied with a sigh, \u2018Ah! I am here yet.\u2019<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman resisted through other means: he worked slowly or submitted previously completed work as new. <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes Freeman relieved the tedium by clowning around. Laughter was prohibited, so men made a game of trying to make each other burst. <\/strong>When keepers looked away, Freeman made motions that were so silly the other men in the hame shop could not keep their faces straight\u2014and they reciprocated. Austin Reed, who was incarcerated alongside Freeman, described another Black prisoner who \u201cwould come to my bench and pretend that he was showing me something about my work, when at the same time he would be talking about something else which would make me bust out and laugh.<\/em>\u201d                                                         <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The games had serious underlying functions: not only to lighten the emotional burdens of imprisonment but also to reduce productivity and thereby profits. If the prison could steal their days\u2019 labor, the men could steal seconds back.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Defiance Through Humor: Acts of Resistance Among Inmates<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

But resistance incurred penalties.<\/strong> Nearly every day, jailors whipped the prisoners. They whipped them for working poorly or slowly, for \u201cplaying old soldier\u201d by handing in the same work on multiple days, for whispering or laughing, for sharing food or pilfering. No disobedience was too small to warrant punishment. Jailors whipped prisoners in the factories, the mess hall, the yard, the cells\u2014but always out of sight of tourists. Jailors whipped prisoners naked, and if they did not strip fast enough, they whipped them more.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Auburn
Auburn Prison is one of the oldest prisons still in use in the Western Hemisphere. Photo by Sean Marshall (CC BY-NC).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

They whipped them as they stood; and those who could not stand were clamped into vices or tied by the wrists to rafters, their toes grazing the floor. The strands of the whip, Austin Reed wrote, \u201csting like the prick of a needle, and when sunken in very deep, the sufferer feels as though he had been bitten by the bite of a dog or been scratch[ed] by the paw of a cat.<\/em>\u201d Each day, keepers registered these punishments in the state-mandated ledger:    <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

November 2, 1840: <\/strong>\u201cJ[ames E.] Tyler Reports the punishment of Allen, nine stripes with the cat for insolence.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

November 5, 1840:<\/strong> \u201cR[obert] D. Cook Reports the punishment of Lynch six stripes with the cat for Spoiling a piece of carpeting.<\/em>\u201d                                            <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On November 1, 1840,<\/strong> barely five weeks into his sentence, Freeman suffered the whip for the first time: \u201cT[homas] H. Toan Reports the punishment of Freeman six strip[e]s with the cat for laughing & making motions to make others laugh.<\/em>\u201d Humor could sustain a prisoner, but it could also cost him.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At day\u2019s end, the men extinguished the fires in the factories. They marched in lockstep to the prison yard, recovered the night tubs, and pumped some water into each one. They marched to their solitary cells. They slung their hammocks. They slept. The next morning, bells rang. The routine began again.                  <\/strong>                <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resistance and Retribution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Some prisoners may have reduced their labor simply to conserve effort, but Freeman did so within a broader pattern of protest.<\/strong> Repeatedly, he told his supervisors that he \u201cdid not want to work\u201d because he \u201cwas deriving no benefit\u201d from the labor. He deserved wages, he repeated. He \u201cought not to work\u201d because had committed no crime. He was innocent, he said, of the horse theft for which he had been convicted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Auburn
Auburn State Prison, c.1880s. Stereoview by L.E. Walker, Warsaw, NY. Gleach\/Santiago-Irizarry Collection (Frederic Gleach CC BY SA).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

He \u201cdidn\u2019t want to stay there and work for nothing.\u201d He was unyielding, certain in his repeated claims of injustice, quick to talk back to those with power over him. When his verbal arguments were ignored, Freeman resisted through other means:<\/strong> he worked slowly or submitted previously completed work as new. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These protests attracted the attention of Samuel P. Hoskins and James E. Tyler, officers who oversaw the hame shop. Hoskins, \u201ca man of unusual activity and vigor,\u201d once rubbed salt into the wounds of a whipped prisoner. <\/strong>Tyler, who \u201cconsider[ed] blacks below whites in intellect\u201d and declared Freeman \u201cbelow the mediocrity of blacks,\u201d once bound a \u201ccrazy\u201d prisoner naked to a post and \u201ccut and lacerated\u201d him \u201cfrom his head to his heels.\u201d Later, Tyler ordered another officer to wield a glowing-hot iron bar as a weapon against a prisoner, who later died. Prisoners who physically defied Tyler enraged him most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He once boasted, \u201cI never allow a man to raise his arm at me and live.<\/em>\u201d Together, Tyler and Hoskins made a routine of kicking Freeman. Tyler would \u201cstrike him and kick him generally when he passed him\u201d; and Hoskins kicked Freeman whenever he \u201cgot the chance.\u201d The blows were so frequent that Freeman \u201cthought he wouldn\u2019t stand it.\u201d He \u201cmade up his mind that he might just as well be dead as alive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Breaking Point<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One day, Freeman resisted physically. <\/strong>When Hoskins came at him yet again, Freeman \u201cwarded off the blows and weighed out Hoskins one.\u201d Freeman, by his own report, \u201cstruck Hoskins with his left hand and faced him around.\u201d Then Freeman \u201cdropped his left hand over his face, and struck him with the right\u201d\u2014a move he called the \u201cbutcher\u2019s chop.\u201d Hoskins then ordered other prisoners to hold Freeman down, and the guards \u201cpounded him.\u201d But the beating did not end Freeman\u2019s defiance.<\/strong> To the contrary, it made him resolve \u201cto fight till he died.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freeman continued resisting. <\/strong>One day in early 1842, after he had worked in the hame shop about sixteen months, Tyler confronted him for withholding labor and demanded he increase production. Freeman refused. \u201cHe told me to go to work,<\/em>\u201d Freeman said later, \u201cand I wouldn\u2019t.<\/em>\u201d Yet again contesting the prison\u2019s founding principle, Freeman told Tyler that he \u201cwas there wrongfully and ought not to work.\u201d Tyler then ordered Freeman to \u201ctake his clothes off \u201das preparation for whipping. Next, according to Freeman, Tyler \u201cstruck him [and] he struck back.\u201d Tyler told a different story: that Freeman grabbed a knife and lunged at him; \u201cI then had to defend myself.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever the truth, Tyler was determined to force Freeman \u201cto submit\u201d to the whip. He kicked Freeman, knocked him down, and ordered other prisoners to \u201cclinch\u201d him. <\/strong>Then, instead of the intended whip, Tyler grabbed what was closest: a basswood board measuring four feet long, fourteen inches wide, and half an inch thick. He smashed the board against Freeman\u2019s left temple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The blow was so severe that the board split lengthwise along the grain,<\/strong> leaving in Tyler\u2019s hands a spike four inches wide. Tyler, who became \u201cexcited,\u201d used the remnant of the board to deliver \u201ceight or ten\u201d more blows\u2014 \u201cpretty snug,\u201d without recovery time in between. \u201cA black man\u2019s hide is thicker than a white man\u2019s,<\/em>\u201d Tyler explained later, \u201cand I meant to make him feel the punishment.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the board hit his temple, Freeman felt something fall. It was not only his body, knocked to the ground, nerves firing\u2014but also something smaller, inside. He later described the sensation: \u201cIt felt as though stones dropp\u2019d down my ears.<\/em>\u201d Although Freeman did not know it specifically, the blow broke his ear drum, gave him a concussion, and damaged his left temporal bone\u2014the thick bone at the side of the skull that protects the ear\u2019s nerves and other structures. After that\u2014quiet. \u201cThe sound went down [my] throat,<\/em>\u201d he said later. The hame shop became muffled, as if dampened by a heavy curtain. Most of his \u201chearing was gone, was all knocked off.\u201d It never returned. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To explore further, visit the official publication page here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every morning at 5:30, a bell ordered William Freeman to leave his cell in the Auburn State Prison. Three, four, five dozen prisoners formed a single file on the gallery.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":13841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":296,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,666],"tags":[48,721,747],"ppma_author":[1067],"class_list":{"0":"post-13810","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"category-political-history","9":"tag-discrimination","10":"tag-political-history","11":"tag-u-s"},"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","authors":[{"term_id":1067,"user_id":76,"is_guest":0,"slug":"robin-bernstein","display_name":"Robin Bernstein","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Robin-Bernstein.webp","url2x":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Robin-Bernstein.webp"},"0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13810\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13810"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicsrights.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=13810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}