Ruth Wilson Gilmore > Quotes

“Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“Abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems, rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes a movement to undo an occupation.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“How and why, then, did California go about the biggest prison-building project in the history of the world? In my view, prisons are partial geographical solutions to political economic crises, organized by the state, which is itself in crisis. Crisis means instability that can be fixed only through radical measures, which include developing new relationships and new or renovated institutions out of what already exists.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“The more militant anticapitalism and international solidarity became everyday features of U.S. antiracist activism, the more vehemently the state responded by, as Allen Feldman (1991) puts it, “individualizing disorder” into singular instances of criminality.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“It is plausible to argue that these three points have sedimented weight, not as remnant ideology, but rather as ballast for common-sense notions of everyday dangers and alternatives to them. In particular, I believe they help to explain the promotion and acceptance of expanded punishment and the attendant apparatuses of criminal justice in the contemporary period, according to the following scheme. First, the legitimate domestic US state is the national security, or defense, or warfare state. Second, the local world is, and has always been, a very dangerous place: indeed, at the very moment when the nation is basking in foreign victory, the domestic turns hostile. Finally, the key to safety is aggression.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

“In other words, one need not be a nationalist, nor imagine self-determination to be fixed in modern definitions of states and sovereignty, to conclude that, at the end of the day, freedom is a place.
How do we find the place of freedom? More precisely, how do we make such a place over and over again?”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

“...practice makes different.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“Another way to look at the problem is to investigate shifts in the structure of taxation, which both reveal profound reconfigurations of power (understood here as responsibility, which is also authority and autonomy) between levels of the state, and newly emerging relationships between all kinds of capitalists and all kinds of workers.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“Instead of asking whether anyone should be locked up or go free, why don’t we think about why we solve problems by repeating the kind of behavior that brought us the problem in the first place?”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“renovating its welfare-warfare capacities into something different by molding surplus finance capital, land, and labor into the workfare-warfare state. The result was an emerging apparatus that, in an echo of the Cold War Pentagon’s stance on communism, presented its social necessity in terms of an impossible goal—containment of crime, understood as an elastic category spanning a dynamic alleged continuum of dependency and depravation. The crisis of state capacity then became, peculiarly, its own solution, as the welfare-warfare state began the transformation, bit by bit, to the permanent crisis workfare-warfare state, whose domestic militarism is concretely recapitulated in the landscapes of depopulated urban communities and rural prison towns. We shall now turn to the history of this “prison fix.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“Where life is precious, life is precious.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

“The state could build prisons, but not just anywhere. The state could borrow money, but not always openly. The state could round up persons who correspond demographically to those squeezed out of restructured labor markets, but not at the same rate everywhere. After twenty years, $5 billion in capital outlays, and the accumulation of 161,394 prisoners (as of April 2004),26 the CDC has become the state’s largest department, with a budget exceeding 8 percent of the annual general fund—roughly equal to general fund appropriations for postsecondary education. The rapid growth of the”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“Income and employment programs for workers, infrastructural programs for capital, and subsidy programs for farmlands were designed to keep surpluses from again accumulating into the broad and deep crisis that had characterized the Great Depression.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“I’m reminded reading Dear Science, that in the world of teaching I’ve inhabited and made most of my living from for three decades, the kinds of students I prefer to teach above all have been artists, athletes, and engineers. The first two—artists and athletes—understand that practice makes different. They understand that repetition is differentiation. They understand, they understand, they understand. And the third group—engineers—aren’t perplexed but rather energized by thinking the interrelations of system and structure in multiple convolutions and extensions, whatever the scale may be.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore

“How are prisons supposed to produce stability through controlling what counts as crime? Four theories condense two and a quarter centuries of experience into conflicting and generally overlapping explanations for why societies decide they should lock people out by locking them in. Each theory, which has its intellectuals, practitioners, and critics, turns on one of four key concepts: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation. Let’s take them in turn. The shock of retribution—loss of liberty—supposedly keeps convicted persons from doing again, upon release, what sent them to prison. Retribution’s specter, deterrence, allegedly dissuades people who can project themselves into a convicted person’s jumpsuit from doing what might result in lost liberty. Rehabilitation proposes that the unfreedom of”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“the CDC has consistently forecast high growth in highest-security (Level IV) prisoners, and, according to both the Blue Ribbon Commission on Prison Population Management (1990) and Rudman and Berthelsen (reporting to the legislature in 1991), it consolidated the tendency to classify those in custody as higher risks than they might actually be.27 Level IV beds are the most expensive to build; and Level IV prisoners are the most expensive to maintain, because of low guard-prisoner ratios. In 1991, California experienced what”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“we shall see in the detailed analysis that follows, the new state built itself in part by building prisons.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“Anglos dominated the prisoner population in 1977 and did not lose their plurality until 1988. Meanwhile, absolute numbers grew across the board—with the total number of those incarcerated approximately doubling during each interval. African American prisoners surpassed all other groups in 1988, but by 1995, they had been overtaken by Latinos; however, Black people have the highest rate of incarceration of any racial/ethnic grouping in California, or, for that matter, in the United States (see also Bonczar and Beck 1997). TABLE 4 CDC PRISONER POPULATION BY RACE/ETHNICITY The structure of new laws, intersecting with the structure of the burgeoning relative surplus population, and the state’s concentrated use of criminal laws in the Southland, produced a remarkable racial and ethnic shift in the prison population. Los Angeles is the primary county of commitment. Most prisoners are modestly educated men in the prime of life: 88 percent are between 19 and 44 years old. Less than 45 percent graduated from high school or read at the ninth-grade level; one in four is functionally illiterate. And, finally, the percentage of prisoners who worked six months or longer for the same employer immediately before being taken into custody has declined, from 54.5 percent in 1982 to 44 percent in 2000 (CDC, Characteristics of Population, various years). TABLE 5 CDC COMMITMENTS BY CONTROLLING OFFENSE (%) At the bottom of the first and subsequent waves of new criminal legislation lurked a key contradiction. On the one hand, the political rhetoric, produced and reproduced in the media, concentrated on the need for laws and prisons to control violence. “Crime” and “violence” seemed to be identical. However, as table 5 shows, there was a significant shift in the controlling (or most serious) offenses for those committed to the CDC, from a preponderance of violent offenses in 1980 to nonviolent crimes in 1995. More to the point, the controlling offenses for more than half of 1995’s commitments were nonviolent crimes of illness or of illegal income producing activity: drug use, drug sales, burglary, motor vehicle theft. The outcome of the first two years of California’s broadly written “three strikes” law presents a similar picture: in the period March 1994–January 1996, 15 percent of controlling offenses were violent crimes, 31 percent were drug offenses, and 41 percent were crimes against property (N = 15,839) (Christoper Davis et al. 1996). The relative surplus population comes into focus in these numbers. In 1996, 43 percent of third-strike prisoners were Black, 32.4 percent Latino, and 24.6 percent Anglo. The deliberate intensification of surveillance and arrest in certain areas, combined with novel crimes of status, drops the weight of these numbers into particular places. The chair of the State Task Force on Youth Gang Violence expressed the overlap between presumptions of violence and the exigencies of everyday reproduction when he wrote: “We are talking about well-organized, drug-dealing, dangerously armed and profit-motivated young hoodlums who are engaged in the vicious crimes of murder, rape, robbery, extortion and kidnapping as a means of making a living” (Philibosian 1986: ix; emphasis added).”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“The more militant anticapitalism and international solidarity became everyday features of U.S. antiracist activism, the more vehemently the state responded by, as Allen Feldman (1991) puts it, “individualizing disorder”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“The “big stick” approach used by U.S. capital to discipline labor requires an enormous, expensive industrial bureaucracy (David Gordon 1996); the same thing may be true of the capitalist state in crisis.”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

“the California case, the rhythms of tax reduction are strong indicators of structural change and, as table 3 demonstrates, show how the Keynesian state’s delegitimation accumulated in waves, culminating, rather than originating, in Tom Bradley’s 1982 and 1986 gubernatorial defeats. The first wave, or capital’s wave, is indicated by the 50 percent decline in the ratio of bank and corporation taxes to personal income taxes between 1967 and 1986 (California State Public Works Board 1987). Starting as early as 1968, voters had agitated for tax relief commensurate with the relief capital had won after putting Ronald Reagan in the governor’s mansion (Mike Davis 1990). But Sacramento’s efforts were continually disappointing under both Republican and Democratic administrations (Kirlin and Chapman 1994). This set in motion the second, or labor’s, wave, in which actual (and aspiring) homeowner-voters reduced their own taxes via Proposition 13 (1978).25 The third, or federal wave, indicates the devolution of responsibility from the federal government onto the state and local levels, as evidenced by declines of 12.5 percent (state) to 60 percent (local) in revenues derived from federal aid. The third wave can be traced to several deep tax cuts the Reagan presidential administration conferred on capital and the wealthiest of workers in 1982 and again in 1986 (David Gordon 1996; Krugman 1994). The sum of these waves produced state and local fiscal crises following in the path of federal crisis that James O’Connor ([1973] 2000) had analyzed early in the period under review when he advanced the “welfare-warfare” concept. As late as 1977–78, California state and local coffers were full (CDF-CEI 1978; Gramlich 1991). By 1983, Sacramento was borrowing to meet its budgetary goals, while county and city governments reached crisis at different times, depending on how replete their reserves had been prior to Proposition 13. Voters wanted services and infrastructure at lowered costs; and when they paid, they tried not to share. Indeed, voters were quite willing to pay for amenities that would stick in place, and between 1977–78 and 1988–89, they actually increased property-based taxes going to special assessment districts by 45 percent (Chapman 1991: 19).”
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California