Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called “the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.” Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom.

In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the “three strikes” law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Race, Sociology, Theory, Social Justice

412 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 2007

About the author

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a prison abolitionist and prison scholar. She is the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York.

Reviews

[Sunny Lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for any anti-racist, abolitionist, feminist. Deconstructs the myth of prison as sites of extractive labor, and argues that the surplus populations of deindustrialized cities under capitalism are designed and designated for prison. Also articulates the conflicts and struggles of mothers organizing against the criminal legal system; it’s so interesting and disheartening how lasting anti-communist sentiments can fracture organizing groups. Ultimately a hopeful vision for political projects we must and should work for and towards. Ruth Wilson Gilmore you are mother

[Alok Vaid-Menon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a must for anyone interested in contextualizing the crisis of (mass) incarceration. Gilmore seamlessly integrates geography, political economy, and a deep study of anti-Black racism to present how states do race as a way to manage populations. Gilmore has been a leading light in abolitionist movements because of this precise and trenchant critique of what race actually is. In so many ways she provides the grammar, the very foundation which has been so helpful in articulating contemporary inequality. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

Prisons as geographic solutions: “Prisons are partial geographic 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” (26)

State-building through prison making: “The new state built itself in part by building prisons. It used the ideological and material means at hand to do so, 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.” (85-86)

Dehumanization: “Dehumanization names the deliberate, as well as the mob-frenzied, ideological displacements central to any group’s ability to annihilate another in the name of territory, wealth, ethnicity, religion. Dehumanization is also a necessary factor in the acceptance that millions of people (sometimes including oneself) should spend part or all of their lives in cages. In the contemporary world, racism is the ordinary means through which dehumanization achieves ideological normality, while, at the same time, the practice of dehumanizing people produces racial categories….the process it not biological, however, but rather the outcome of fatal encounters that ground contemporary political culture (243)

Racism: “Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Prison expansion is a new iteration of this theme. Prisons and other locally unwanted land use accelerate the mortality of modestly educated working people of all kinds in urban and rural settings and shows how economic and environmental justice are central to antiracism” (243)

Racism: “Racism is the ordinary means through which dehumanization achieves ideological normality, while, at the same time, the practice of dehumanizing people produces racial categories…This culture, in turn, is based on the modern secular state’s dependence on classification, combined with militarism as a means through which classification maintains coherence” (243-44).

Power: “Power is not a thing but rather a capacity composed of active and changing relationships enabling a person, group, or institution to compel others to do things they would not do on their own” (245-246)

[Sarah Jaffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me far too long to get around to reading this book but now that I have, I think everyone should.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is written by an activist trying to answer questions asked by mothers fighting for the lives of their children in prison, and grappling with the theory behind her work, so you know I loved it. I found it quite challenging though, and I'm still thinking about how she frames the political economy of prisons and how that intersects with race.

In a nutshell, she argues that "...prisons are partial geographical solutions to political economic crises, organized by the state, which is itself in crisis" [26]. She draws on the work of Hall and Schwartz in how she thinks about and defines crisis: "Crisis occurs when the social formation can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the pre-existing system of social relations" a very technical definition I must confess. But essentially it means that change has to happen, the system of social relations or the social formation must shift. She argues that one way (maybe the only way, I'm out of my depth but I imagine one way) for society to find itself in such a crisis is through the build-up of surpluses. Capitalism depends on a cycle of accumulation of goods and their sale at a profit, it goes into crisis when goods simply accumulate. This crisis is not simply economic, but also political and social. In examining the political economy of California, she find four key surpluses provoking crisis. The state could have chosen different ways to resolve these surpluses, but instead they chose to embark on the largest prison building program the world has ever seen.

So this is the crux, the four surpluses are (in highly simplified form)

finance capital: investors specialising in public debt were having a hard time getting bonds through, they had money and couldn't lend it to a very large and wealthy government

land: given drought, debt and development, farmers have increasingly been withdrawing irrigated land from production - ceasing to invest in irrigation infrastructure as it is no longer economically feasible. In addition there are large amounts of surplus land in and around depressed towns throughout California, together with high unemployment.

labour: manufacturing left, and hit poor communities of colour the hardest. The increasing number of prisoners has kept pace, and in many ways controlled, the rising levels of unemployment, and the highest percentage of prisoners comes from those areas with the highest levels of unemployment

state capacity: with the tax revolt that took place in California in the 1970s, the state was forced into crisis by lack of funds and lack of mandate to redistribute wealth through programs and services, while still maintaining it's bureaucratic architecture. The State needed some other way to maintain that architecture.

And thus, prisons. More of them than anyone has ever seen. The rest of the book is looking at why these surpluses resulted in this particular solution.

It's certainly a deeper and more complex argument than many of the prevailing ideas that she outlines: crime went up, we cracked down; drug epidemic; structural changes in employment opportunities; privatization of prison functions and the search for profit; provision of rural jobs and development; reform. It accounts for all of these things really, drawing them all into a more complex story.

She also draws on Hall and Gramsci to analyse perceptions and changing definitions of crime. I like her take on ideology:

Such change is not just a shift in ideas or vocabulary or frameworks, but rather in the entire structure of meanings and feelings (the lived ideology, or "taking to heart") through which we actively understand the world and place our actions in it (Williams 1961). Ideology matters along its entire continuum, from common sense ("where people are at") to philosophies (where people imagine the coherence of their understanding comes from: Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Marx, Malcolm X, the market)." [243]

Her invocation of race is also interesting:

As the example of racism suggests, institutions are sets of hierarchical relationships (structures) that persist across time (Martinot 2003) undergoing, as we have seen in the case of prisons, periodic reform. Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. [28]

I have often seen this quoted, but usually in addition to other definitions. It is curious that she relates it solely to premature death, I'm trying to wrap my head around that, why you would limit it to that, whether that doesn't leave important things out. I suppose life and death is the most important question after all. She also includes a chapter that tries to grapple with the lived experience of how such a political economy of prisons and race intersects, what that means to people over and above it's roots in political economy:

From the mothers' vantage point, we can see how prison expansion and opposition to it are part of the long history of African-Americans and others whose struggle for liberation in the racial state has never achieved even a fully unfettered capacity to be free labor. The development of political responses to legal dilemmas indicates how profoundly incapacitation deepens, rather than solves, social crisis. This chapter ... personalizes and generalizes the morally intolerable (Kent 1972) to highlight objective and subjective dimensions of the expansion of punishment and prisons, the demise of the weak welfare state, and the capacity of everyday people to organize and lead themselves. [185]

I like how this is done, but found it hard to connect it theoretically to the sections that preceded it on political economy, it almost felt like a world and story apart. But that might be a reflection of my own experience in how hard it is to bring these two worlds together.

I am also thinking through her comments on activism and scholarship, activism and power. She uses Gramsci in a way I hadn't thought of and like immensely:

On the contrary, in scholarly research, answers are only as good as the further questions they provoke, while for activists, answers are as good as the tactics they make possible. [27]

grassroots organization should be the kind that "renovates and makes critical already-existing activities" of both action and analysis to build a movement (Gramsci 1971: 330-31)

Ordinarily, activists focus on taking power, as though the entire political setip were really a matter of "it" (Structure) versus "us" (agncy). But if the structure-agency opposition isn't how things really work, then perhaps politics is more complicated, and therefore open to more hopeful action. People can and do make power through, for example, developing capacities in organizations. But that's not enough, becayse all an individual organization can do is tweak Armageddon. When the capacities resulting from purposeful action are combined toward ends greater than mission statements or other provisional limits, powerful alignments begin to shake the grounds. In other words, movement happens. [248]

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Summary: Included some interesting info, but it was dense and didn't answer the main question it addressed.

I've been working through an online class to learn about the prison abolition movement and it includes several interviews with author Ruth Wilson Gilmore. That's what led me to this academic nonfiction work of hers, which purports to explain the origins of the extensive California prison system. Unfortunately, while this book included some fascinating information, I think it failed in that primary goal.

I could tell this book was intended for an academic audience. With the exception of one chapter, on the Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (ROC) movement, it was dense and difficult to follow. It included a lot of theory, history, and some economic/business info that I struggled with. However, I think I followed along sufficiently to grasp the author's main argument. I would summarize it as: the California prison system is essentially an outlet for surplus capital that is available for investment; surplus land that owners want to sell for a profit; and surplus labor, both in the form of the urban poor who primarily populate the prisons and the rural populations who mistakenly believe that prisons will enrich their community with jobs. The author also noted that it didn't have to work out this way, but fails to explain why prisons, as opposed to some other development project, ended up being the recipient of this investment of surplus resources. She does identify some of the ways that prisons enforce existing race and class hierarchies, but if she posits this as an explanatory factor, I didn't catch that.

Although I wasn't entirely persuaded by the author's main arguments, I did learn a lot from this book. It was an interesting, if extremely academic, look at a lot of the economic and political history of California. The chapter I already mentioned, on Mothers ROC, was a particular favorite of mine. It was more readable and more tangible than the earlier chapters, which focused more on theory. With the exception of this single chapter though, I didn't enjoy reading this very much. I didn't learn what I hoped to from it and by the end, I was relieved to be finished. I would highly recommend reading the section on the valuable work of Mothers ROC, but I'm not sure the rest was worth the effort.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is through prosecutorial use of the "wobble" [(offenses that can be charged as misdemeanors or as felonies)] that defendants whose controlling offense is shoplifting an expensive item have been sentenced to eight years (second strike) or twenty-five years to life without possibility of parole (third strike).

[W]ithin California, counties that aggressively use mandatory sentencing, such as the notoriously harsh "three strikes" law, have experienced feebler decreases in crime than counties that use the law sparingly.

While [the Task Force on Youth Gang Violence] had stretched the analysis of gang violence to encompass suicidal propensities among white middle-class "Heavy Metal" and "Satanic" gangs, the task force absolutely ignored, for instance, the growing skinhead and neo-Nazi gangs concentrated in the Southland.

The council justified the expense [of hiring a plain-clothes policemen as career and substance abuse counselor instead of a guidance counselor] by treating secondary school guidance—rather than secondary schooling— as crime control.

The statistical branch is not directed to lie, but it is directed to use criteria and parameters that always reinforce claims of imminent shortage [of prison beds].

Over the years, I've developed many reasons to read, many of them inextricably caught up in raisons d'être as my capabilities for self-sufficiency/survival have waned and waxed. One phrase that's stuck with me circumscribes my efforts in reading nonfiction: to nothing more and nothing less than to solve the murder mystery of the world. It is not the murder of the CEOs or the celebrities, but the calculus of the board rooms lived out in the denial of coverage for the hundreds of thousands: murder as infrastructure, compromise, the child at the heart of Omelas. In this, I have ranged far and wide, as to this day it is still easier for me to reach for an intercontinental study on oppression than to delve into the rancoring skeletons, one of them my own, listlessly moaning just beyond my apartment walls. When this book showed up, I was more than a little excited: here was a piece that promised to drive at the heart of a "liberal" fantasy so busy contending with a Soviet dust mote as to ignore the beam in its own eye. Fortunes played out as they will, and I found my first accessible copy at the Santa Clara County Library, former residence of mine and heartland of the Silicon Valley specter that I have spent at least a decade ideologically decoupling myself from. A stone in a sling, then, against the veritable Goliath.

California's white supremacist, anti-capital Workingmen's Party (1887-80), which emerged briefly from the economic strife of the 1870s, left as its principle legacy the 1882 federal law excluding Chinese immigration[.]

Certainly, the university had been struggling to transform its image from that of a product of Progressive Era-through-Cold War social welfare activism to that of a competitive knowledge factory increasingly responsive to market forces [.] To that end, in 1995 the Regents of the University of California formally shed affirmative action over the objections of faculty, staff, students, and senior administration at the university's nine campuses, because, in the race-neutral language of racism, affirmative action is an inefficient (nonmarket) mode of resource allocation.

In the early 1980s, white corrections professionals debated whether demographically diversifying corrections personnel, especially guards, might not help maintain peace and thus enhance security in prisons' increasingly caging person of color. The alternate view was that racial and ethnic identification would have a stronger pull on a diverse workforce than loyalty to the state [...] The forces for diversity won out in many jurisdictions; and in California, even while the University of California was preparing to void affirmative action, every piece of prison legislation and regulation that involved expanding the CDC explicitly stipulated that minorities (people of color and white women) be actively sought out to join the ranks at all levels.

I can't even begin to describe how powerful this book is. My library copy is currently stuffed with almost two receipts' worth of bookmarks for post-read reviewing purposes, and it's doubtful that I'm going to have the energy to do it all justice. Of course, 'powerful' and 'universal' are very different concepts, so unless you're a fellow Californian and/or extremely deep into the logistics of the US prison industrial complex, you're going to have a hell of a time comprehending just what Gilmore is doing here. However, if you have the slightest inclination towards social justice in this genocidal settler state we call a country, you have to at least flip through this using its generous endnotes/index/bibliography. I guarantee you, the chance of you finding one or two things that send you on your revolutionary paradigm shifting way is so extraordinarily high that even flipping open the book to a random page and randomly sticking your finger down is worth the effort of acquisition.

The outcome in cotton's favor resulted in part from how the overarching New Deal Labor compromise had operationalized reformist politics by renovating structures of the racial state: the division of the rights to organize and bargain between agricultural and non-agricultural workers was also a normative (although by no means absolute) division of rights between workers of colors and white workers [.]

For voters, the crisis centers on how to ensure the surplus population, who rebelled in 1965 and 1992, is contained, if not deported. In tightening labor markets through deportation of reserve labor force cadres to prison or abroad, fear-driven voter-made laws may seem contradictory for capitalism[;] but the contradiction may only be an illusion when employers are able to exploit actual and implied undocumented workers' political powerlessness.

Proposition 13 shielded real property from periodic reassessment and set a maximum tax rate, thus depriving municipal governments of a prime source of revenue [; t]he compensatory implementation of regressive taxes such as sales tax and user fees helped ensure that as local governments drew down their reserves and tightened their belts, the poor would have higher relative costs and fewer services than their richer neighbors.

Everyone's hair stands on end when I claim that Proposition 13 was "labor's" round of disinvestment in the state. It is true that landlords, led by wealthy apartment building owners, bankrolled the proposition. However, it would be naïve to ignore the fact that for most of the people who voted for Proposition 13, their homes were their chief asset; they were wage and salary workers with nothing else to fall back on and much to lose. They decided that protecting their wealth was eminently sensible in a period when double-digit inflation and unemployment made every work wonder how else she might envision retirement security.

In 1973, one in 944 people in California was in prison. In 2000, one in 213 people in California was in prison. In 2023, one in 323 people in California was in prison. Gilmore takes on this bloat of people, policing, and power in self proclaimed 'blue supermajority' state through 19th c. white supremacist labor unions and 21st c. antiracist nonprofits, corporate water fights and military industrial contests, deindustrialization and the question of what happens when one has too much of the (wrong) land, too much of the (wrong) people, and ultimately too much of the (wrong) problem. Now, this is a narrative weaving together myriad strains of thought both institutionalized and community grown, and I wouldn't blame you for finding that Gilmore didn't quite answer the questions you yourself were asking about prisons, or globalization, or what that one city council's weighing in on a CDC(R) (California Department of Corrections (and Rehabilitation, added after this book's publication) issue has to do with your own ability to get a job, buy a house, make your commute, see your loved ones at home rather than in prison.

Indeed, Bernice perceived what had once been a state-identified chink in its own armor a generation earlier, when the first set of postwar federal antigang street crime acts was enacted between 1968 and 1970. At that time, law enforcement hesitated to exercise the statues because of civil rights concerns—especially in the area of discriminatory prosecution. However, more than two decades of political-economic crisis, coupled with intensive and extensive crime sensationalism in the media (political campaigns, news programming, reality-based shows, movies, and television series), had produced the notion that some people's rights should be restricted based on prior patterns of behavior, which was no perceived as common sense. [The Willie Horton syndrome, which I am tempted to call rational choice fascism.]

Prison development has had the intended, although rarely realized, effect of providing jobs, and therefore supplementing household incomes for workers, who presumable would be less likely to organize for jobs, higher wages, or radical goods, such as land reform, that can be gained only at capital's expense [.] Rather, the actual and almost dispossessed [...] have in this instance, as in so many others, been deflected to petitioning the state for benefits within the narrowing scope of prison development and related opportunities.

But as with the lack of critique concerning the need for more prisons, there was no discussion, either, about what it would mean for a small city dominated by a single-industry oligopoly to deal with inequality by bringing in an enormous new employer outside the direct control of anybody; nor did people ponder what might happen should the prison fail to do the economic job.

The obvious contradiction in using donated labor for public works in a town plagued by unemployment is underscored by the fact that at that time the CDC "valued" prisoner labor at $7/hour, thirty-five cents above the average Corcoran hourly wage.

Well, I personally am now aware of just how the racial demographics of my pre-K to master's degree educational tract were modeled to be pleasing to the white/model minority eye, how the usual fearmongering led voters to approve protections for same sex marriage while failing to ban slavery, and how the state has absolved itself of caring for its most desperate in the age of NAFTA and technofeudalism. What I valued most, though, was when, at the end of detailing all the sordidly heartless practices of state senators, judges, corporate bureaucrats, and retired police officers, Gilmore turned around and told the history of grassroots organizing conducted by those the state of California would love nothing more than to render anathema: working class Black women bonding across racial and political divides (Communism, anyone?) for the simple reason of refusing to accept their shared stories of incarcerated family and community members lying down. All that education that the state has, all that money, all that murder, and sometimes, it takes a Black woman remembering every acrid word dropping from the prosecutor's lips to move the mountain sitting between her and her child.

Fresno County rolled out a Juvenile Jail Complex in 2003; the four-stage project will not be completed until 2040, meaning the county planned a jail for children whose parents had not yet been born.

While the expansion of industrialized punishment in California has a relentless intensity, it is important not to misread the structural as also somehow inevitable. Industrialized punishment produces its own contradictions[.]

Make no mistake: Gilmore does not use the word 'gulag' lightly. If you find yourself exhausted after five pages of reading this, feel free to skip around and pick out what you can. We live in a world that feeds off your lack of ability to see certain others as fully human, and when said folks are carted off out of sight just after they leave the playground, the distance between you and them becomes the space between you and the moon. What you need to understand lies at one of Gilmore's more powerful tenets of her thesis: California's fate as a prison industrial complex is no guarantee, and the instability that has hounded it from its beginnings has only grown with each cycle of attention and sustained rejection the burgeoning generations have paid it. As such, the question is not one of you versus prisons, but you verses the problems that kyriarchical state crafters have chosen to combat with prisons. When the wall comes down and your fellow citizens walk free into lands left to rot and minds left to founder, what social formations, what sustainable practices, what currencies of trade will you value, and how will you contend with the question of those who are left behind? For it need not be that, in this 'civilization' of ours, certain groups pay and are paid top dollar to hunt certain other groups for sport. Think about the value of a human life with sufficient land, learning, and liberty. Then go from there.

Bailiffs, prosecutors, public defenders, and judges began to recognize that, in Bernice Hatfield's words, "nice Negro ladies were big handbags" were watching and noting. Indeed, some judges ordered the women not to write while court was in session [...] Judges who issued such orders got more, rather than fewer, observers in their courtrooms. Some mothers who had difficulty with the written word would simply pretend to take notes and rely on their substantial memories to reconstruct events at the end of the legal day.

The point is not to romanticize gangs, but rather to emphasize that all social formations—even stranded communities in deindustrialized urban centers—develop some means for maintaining order; sometimes it is necessary to look beneath the surface of apparent disorder to grasp the logic of a particular system of order.

Solidarity increased with increased knowledge about the complexity of how power blocs have built the new state by building prisons. Thus an individual police precinct house no longer loomed as the total presence of the state, shrinking back toward its real position—the neighborhood outpost of what both ROCers [(Mothers Reclaiming Our Children)] and FACTS [(Families to Amend California's Three Strikes)] characterized as a military occupation. If it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes a movement to undo an occupation.

Five stars, ten stars, a hundred stars. This is the kind of book that makes life one living, and as someone nearly through his first week of chemo, I'd say I'd have a keener insight into that than most.

[Juhyundred · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish this book got more hype as a historical materialist study of prisons. More abolition as a question of political economy plz

[Gabriella · Rating 3 out of 5]

***Note: as a reminder, this is a long-form book review/reflection paper for my course, CPLN 624: Readings on Race, Poverty, and Place.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag is about the massive growth of California’s state prison system, and grassroots opposition to the expanding use of prisons as fix-alls to social problems. For me, it also became a sharp indictment of the “tarnished practice of planning”, and the way it has left many abandoned localities eager for any means of dealing with their various surpluses and scarcities.

From the beginning, Gilmore is very interested in the spatial nature of prisons. The interconnection of rural and urban restructuring is clear in the seemingly unconnected geography of these prisons—which are largely in the rural San Joaquin Valley—and their residents—who are mostly from the state’s urban core in Greater Los Angeles. She argues that economic restructuring left both agricultural workers in rural California and wartime industrial workers in Greater Los Angeles without their jobs, creating a “surplus of unused land and labor.” This was “solved” by an immense state project to sell prisons as a means of capital investment in public debt, low-wage population control, and economic development for now-unused farmland.

For me, this all connected first to Queen Sugar (HAHA); and then to what I’m learning about regional planning, sprawl, and inequity; and then to the modern onset of Hail Mary economic development pitches. Small towns like Corcoran's bids for big prisons seemed very similar to large cities’ bids for HQ2, or smaller cities like Camden’s recruitment of corporations that insult and refuse to hire local residents. Many places, it seems, are struggling to fix their economic challenges, and finding little help from heavily-subsidized big projects.

So, Gilmore’s detailing of the “connection of forgotten places” made me think a lot more about what some urbanists see as the natural union between divested cities and inner-ring suburbs. Recently, I’m wondering if this union also extends to rural towns and unincorporated areas? Gilmore shows many similarities in the abandonment and predation of these non-Favored Quarter landscapes. In CPLN 630, we’re learning about the failures that come from failing to address economic development needs in rural areas. In GAFL 500, we’re seeing what goes wrong when gentrification is the only form of economic development for neighborhoods in the urban core. So naturally, I found this to be a story about the failures of planning to account for the whole of American geography.

This is easily seen in many common methods: the whole idea of Smart Growth is to concentrate development and/or infrastructure in a few key areas, which is sound in every way except the human one—people often live in these “non-priority” areas. Figuring out how to encourage substantive professional planning in struggling geographies, AND how to restore these abandoned communities’ “power to plan”, is thus crucial. It might be the best way to encourage sustainable methods of economic development in communities otherwise ravaged by the prison industry and major corporations, who come cleverly disguised as “their best shot.”

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

The approach that Gilmore takes to analysing the expansion of California’s prison system centres on the political economy - most especially on the pivotal moments of surplus and crisis. She draws beautifully on cultural geography to describe the prison boom in the “golden state” over the past three decades; which has created an "archipelago" of prisons. Gilmore depicts surplus state power and surplus populations (most especially people of color and poor white people) as the making of a crisis to which prison is posited as the solution - as opposed to a number of other possibilities that might better address social instability and insecurity. She challenges the media-driven gang-scare, that was/is largely conflated with youth of colour, and demonstrates that despite the hype and hysteria around crime that law-and-order campaigns rely upon, what actually occurred in California over the past fifty years is that crime rates went up, then they began to decline, and then there was a crackdown (i.e. the crackdown in the form of mass incarceration wasn't a response to increasing crime rates, but actually co-occurred with falling crime rates).

Gilmore complicates and critiques a number of other progressive/radical arguments that attempt to explain California’s prison boom, such as: racial cleansing,  neo-slavery, profits, and reformist demands propelling prison expansion. She notes that only a small number of prisons in CA are actually privatised, and also that most prisoners are idle. This points to the state’s primary technique of ‘crime deterrance’ through the use of prisons, which is incapacitation - as opposed to rehabilitation or even punishment. Gilmore’s analysis invariably returns to organised resistance throughout the book, culminating in a thorough examination of the group ‘Mothers Reclaiming Our Children’.

[Rukshana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished this book a few weeks ago but didn't have chance to post review.

This book is really critical for understanding the 'why' of the prison-industrial complex, and not just the 'how' - which I tend to think we know more about. Ruthie really breaks down why prisons emerged in California in the past several decades; specifically, surplus land, labor, capital, and government capacity. I was really trying to absorb what she was saying in this book, and the chapter on Corcoran (the siting of a prison there and the effects on the town and residents) drove home the discussion on political economy in chapter 2. Everyone I spoke to about this book thought that ch. 2 was one of the most important, but it is a little difficult to get through because it is dense! Definitely worth the effort though. And take notes - they help!

I also really enjoyed the chapter on Mother's ROC, since the Southern California Library owns this collection! (Shameless plug for the Library.)

[Caroline Geer · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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." Wow.

[Rohit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Real awesome analysis of the California prison boom of the '80s and '90s. The book does a cool job of going from macroscopic big-picture analysis of capitalism and California political economy, down to more local analysis of small farm towns and activist groups of Southern California. Very dense, lots of information, but all written in a clear and concise way, accessible regardless of your background in the relevant subjects.

My only gripe is that I was hoping that it would cover dynamics across the entirely of California, instead of focusing on case studies on a couple of small areas in Los Angeles and rural Southern California. It does this to an extent in terms of looking at overall political-economic trends of the state, but it would be have really rounded out the book in an excellent way if it at least did a survey of the way these trends manifested in local regions like the rural northern forests, the SF Bay Area, and various parts of the Central Valley and central California.

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting this book to lay out the full economy of prisons, but that's not what it does. It does give a pretty good sense of the economics and dynamics of sitting prisons in rural communities, but it doesn't go much beyond that. The rest of the book deals both with the economic history in rural CA and an activist group Mothers Reclaiming Our Children. I've heard this book get talked up a lot, so I was pretty disappointed. Also, Gilmore suggests, but doesn't outright say, that the massive prison boom in the 1980s and 1990s was the result of an economic downturn in California and a rural need for income, which is an argument I'm pretty skeptical of. The actual reasons are much more complicated, and in good part social and irrational rather than economic (though economics, of course, plays a part).

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book breaks down the myths of anti-prison sentiments while simultaneously providing a narrative of how the state (specifically California) became a prison state out of recession and surplus. Gilmore provides the language of geographical/historical/capital shifts that increased incarceration and created political tough on crime rhetorics. She also layers this all with describing the racist laws and police interventions used to fill prison beds. Build the prison, then create the prisoner. It seems to me an incredible analysis on the rise of incapacitation through prison.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

An abolitionist classic that holds up perfectly well seven years (seven?? 😢) after my first read. The “What Is To Be Done?” section at the end leaves some important things on the table, I think, but the razor-sharp political economic analysis in chapters 1 and 2 combined with the beautiful movement histories in the later chapters more than atones. Also, I don’t think Gilmore gets enough praise for how good her prose is! There are some really great lines in here (“A principled sense of mortal urgency…”).

Required reading status retained 👍

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really wish I had more time to sit down and write about this book, but I will lave behind some important excerpts that I was particularly fascinated by, and I really do hope I come back to think through this book more in the future, because there’s a lot of really good stuff in here.

This is an excerpt of engineering professors being called in to evaluate the effictiveness of prisons with respect to costs and not according to whether they actually reduced crime:

“The report demonstrates how rival agencies tried, via critique, to situate themselves at the CDC’s trough. David Ashley and Melvin Ramey, professors of civil and environmental engineering from UC Berkeley and UC Davis, respectively, took on the question of capital cost reduction. As with the earlier studies, the central problem remained crime and its mitigation through imprisonment, and the solution turned on cost-effectiveness in the design-bid-build sequence for prison construction—rather than any reevaluation of, for example, the relation between crimes (old or new), education, and recidivism (Ashley and Ramey 1996; cf. Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). The unspoken power of this study lies in the way the university presents itself, via its sober, analytical engineering faculty, as an eminently efficient institution. Certainly, the university had been struggling to transform its image from that of a product of Pro- gressive Era–through–Cold War social welfare activism to that of a competitive knowledge factory increasingly responsive to market forces (R. W. Gilmore 1991). To that end, in 1995 the Regents of the University of California formally shed affirmative action over the objections of faculty, staff, students, and senior administration at the university’s nine campuses, because, in the race-neutral language of racism, affirmative action is an inefficient (nonmarket) mode of resource allocation.”

A lot of Gilmore’s argument, as I understand it hinges on Marx’s notions of surplus labour and the way capitalism is constantly revolutionizing the means of production to render current labour less necessary and more disposable:

“Capital must be able to get rid of workers whose labor power is no longer desirable—whether permanently, by mechanical or human replacement, or temporarily by layoffs—and have access to new or previously idled labor as the need arises. These neces- sities, as Marx’s ([1867] 1967) science of capital accumulation demonstrates, are not due to the personalities or preferences of heads of firms: CEOs who resist such “adjustments” to the labor force jeopardize profits. The progressive nature of capitalism requires the essential commodity—working people’s labor power—in varying quantities and qualities over space, sector, and time.

As systemic expansions and contractions produce and throw off workers, those idled must wait, migrate, or languish until— if ever—new opportunities to sell their labor power emerge. While Marx formulated the category “abstract labor” in order to theorize the origin of value, his writings acknowledge that workers have specific social characteristics drawing them into, or locking them out of, specific labor markets. Marx’s analysis concerning capitalism’s long-term tendency to bifurcate, with increasing wealth for the few and immiseration for the many, centers on the production of what he called the “pivot” of labor power supply and demand—the “relative surplus population” or “reserve army of labor” (Marx [1867] 1967: 640–48).”

This summary by Gilmore is an important setup for Chapter 4, which may have been one of my favourite. It’s a really great study of how industrial cotton agriculture transformed environments in radical ways, consuming enormous amounts of water through water infrastructure projects constructed at the expense of the state (literally involving the military), which really does get to the point Lenin made in State and Revolution of how the bourgeois state solely serves the interests of its own class, the ruling class. These cotton companies attracted labour into their large agricultural sites to harvest cotton, and these workers were eventually replaced with mechanized harvesters. For a variety of reasons many former workers in cotton industry stayed in the area, struggling to find work. The proposal to fix the surplus labour problem was a prison which Gilmore shows a fairly evident failure with respect to former cotton workers, but mostly benefited Capital (here in the form of private utility companies). These are some excerpts I had marked down from the chapter:

“Two prisons have been sited in Corcoran since 1985… J. G. Boswell Company, the world’s largest cotton producer, has its California headquarters in Corcoran (pop. 8,800), where the California Department of Correction (CDC) facilities held more than 12,600 in April 2000.”

“At the beginning of World War II, in order to supplement the water developed by the 1935 Bureau of Reclamation Central Valley Project (Reisner 1986), Boswell and Salyer exploited federal interagency strife between the Departments of the Interior and War to get what they wanted. While Interior, responsible for ad- ministering the Reclamation Act, continued to press for acreage limitations—whether or not they were complied with—War, responsible for the Army Corps of Engineers (“the Corps”), was looking for large-scale projects to raise its profile and legitimacy on the domestic front…

Boswell and Salyer and their Kern County counterparts, Miller-Lux and the Kern Land Company, persuaded the Corps that the Kings and Kern Rivers (which drained, respectively, into the Tulare and Buena Vista Lakes) were flood hazards that threatened the economic well-being of southern San Joaquin Valley agriculture. According to spheres of influence established by the 1902 Federal Reclamation Act, surplus water constituted a national public good, and any federal project to dam and divert water in the western United States came under the aegis, and acreage limitations, of the Bureau of Reclamation (Hundley 1992).8 However, the Corps agreed to handle the “problem,” and without prior authorization from the Roosevelt administration or Congress, built the initial diversion gates in 1942 (Reisner 1986).
Armed with evidence showing no flood danger, and a study showing the culturally depressive effects of large capitalist farmers on small towns, the bureau was prepared to fight the Corps, believing it could activate East-West animosity in Congress in support of its position. But in wartime Washington, the bureau could not summon much interest in a domestic problem, against the War Department, or against productive capitalists (Hundley 1992; cf. Hooks 1991). The Corps, in turn, backed by Senator Sheridan Downey (D–Calif.), accused the bureau of communism for fighting against big capital on behalf of small family farmers (Reisner 1986; Hundley 1992; see also Downey 1947). The controversy did not stall Boswell and Salyer’s growth; since they al- ready owned the lake, its drainage gifted them 80,000 fecund acres. The political struggle over the water was finally resolved when they paid $14,250,000 as a “one-time user fee” for Pine Flat Dam, built by the Corps at a cost of $48 million in 1948. The payment entitled them to all the water, because it was not surplus developed for irrigation but rather a by-product of flood control…”

“Boswell and other Corcoran-based cotton producers used the state’s capacities at the federal, California, and regional levels to transform their family firms into modern industrial enterprises. They exploited state power and social connections to standardize product and to move surface water and workers into their fields. They used interagency rivalries and patriotic rhetoric to gain position and renovated race ideology to secure what they had created. To the greatest extent possible, they externalized substantial costs to the state, to ratepayers in other regions, and to workers in order to guarantee the geography of accumulation for their “white gold””

“As Corcoran’s chronic unemployment translated into child poverty rates running above 30 percent, the challenge to secure the future propelled townspeople to request state intervention in the form of a multimillion dollar prison.”

“In 1985, the CDC bought the least desirable of the three parcels from the J. G. Boswell Company. The sale enabled Boswell to get rid of 1,920 relatively poor acres that had been idled during the drought and again during the flood years at an estimated ten times what the sale price as farmland would have been.”

“In the south San Joaquin Valley, water is the controversial utility. Even as Boswell was organizing the land sale to the CDC, smaller farmers in the Kettleman Plains on the west side of the county, hit hard by groundwater depletion during the drought, viewed the coming Avenal prison as a competitor for resources rather than as a complementary employer. They brought a law- suit against the CDC that indirectly pitted them against the big landowners in the area—including Standard Oil, and the vegetable and grape grower Bill Mouren, who sold the three Avenal sections to the state. The lawsuit resulted in a court order for- bidding the CDC to use any groundwater for the facility. That meant the prison had to use surplus water obtained under the city of Avenal’s contract with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (Met). At the lawsuit’s conclusion, the State Attorney General’s office reiterated the CDC’s position in the matter, indirectly acknowledging the general problem of surplus, to which the prison provided a solution: from the state’s perspective, Avenal or any other new prison would benefit farmers and the water table by permanently removing land from agri- cultural production.
At Corcoran, the CDC drilled a deep 1,000-foot well at the site to supplement drinking water bought from the city and purchased surplus and treated effluent for other uses. Corcoran invested $3 million in a treatment facility and was prepared to sell to any buyer at $5 per acre-foot, but presumed the prison would be its biggest customer. The prison contracted instead to buy surplus water from the Corcoran Irrigation District (a regional utility) at $45 per acre-foot, and continued to do so until the city managed to get word to the JLCPCO in Sacramento that the facility was wasting money (CDF 1996). The charge of wasted funds, lodged with the prison oversight committee, was the only way Corcoran could compel the CDC to direct the local prison to buy Corcoran’s treated water, since there was no rule requiring the CDC to integrate with, rather than bypass, the local economy.”

“The obvious contradiction in using donated labor for public works in a town plagued by unemployment is underscored by the fact that at that time the CDC “valued” prisoner labor at $7/hour, thirty-five cents above the average Corcoran hourly wage.”

“Corcoran’s experience is in key ways typical: when measured by jobs for current residents, residential development, locally sited related industries and services, or consumer retail, prisons have not delivered even on the modest employment and growth projections derived from the CDC’s categorical assurances. Indeed, the biggest single beneficiaries of retail dollars are those major shapers of the valley’s development, utility companies. For other retail, prison towns’ economic well-being and growth potential compare unfavorably over time with depressed rural places that did not acquire prisons”

“The unfixing is not, however, an absolute erasure; what’s left behind is not just industrial residue—devalued labor, land made toxic, shuttered retail businesses, the neighborhood or small city urban form—but, by extension, entire ways of life that, having been made surplus, unfix people: women, men, “the kids.””

I wish I took the time to write more notes while reading this. There was a lot of interesting economics stuff in here, which is an important way of contextualizing prison abolition. Prisons are embedded within the context of racial capitalism, but it’s not the way the political project of abolition is always framed. Lenin certainly made similar points to Gilmore, but I think this book is really important for understanding the present context which is different than the early 20th century (or better, the end of the long 19th century).

I wanted to finish with a little discussion of Mothers ROC (Reclaiming Our Children) who are a grassroots organization advocating against prisons. Gilmore describes how their formation:

“as a political group seeking justice coincided with the restructuring of the Communist Labor Party, which had organized in several U.S. cities in the 1950s… The African American revolutionary Nelson Peery founded the small party… Francie Arbol, daughter of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants, had joined the party as a teenager in the 1960s. She had always worked on both workplace and community-based issues arising from exploitation and injustice, while raising her two daughters—mostly alone—on a bookkeeper’s wages. She brought to Mothers ROC a systematic analysis of social structures and political economy, cast in colloquial terms, and a keen sense of how to get things done… When Francie and Barbara sat together to plan the contours of an action-oriented group of mothers, it was in the garage office of the disbanded Communist Labor Party’s ongoing community organization, the Equal Rights Congress (ERC).”

I was really fascinated by this scene of prayer that Gilmore describes unfolding at a Mothers ROC meeting:

“Prayer framed every Mothers ROC meeting. At the beginning and end of each session, the group held hands in a circle to ask for protection and guidance. The women who led the prayers had a gift for preaching. Their invocations set and summarized the seemingly endless agenda of reclaiming the children within a material context of spiritual hope realized through human action. Prayer helped span the visible and invisible social distances among people for whom, in most cases, organized religion was a vital aspect of life. Prayer also figured the power of attentive lis- tening for group-building. During prayer, anyone in the group might comment affirmatively on the leader’s devotional trajectory, and such encouragement of the speaker encouraged the collectivity, as one and then several voices would rise, lifting the speaker’s higher. And finally, by emphasizing the difficulty and urgency of the situation that had brought them together, prayer renewed and strengthened the mothers’ provisional unity. Individual differences, which occasionally produce incidents, did not need to become persistent organizational impediments—in a house of worship or in the ROC. The group meditation on power and powerlessness established the scene in which mothers are able to identify with one another in a fast-changing world.”

I’m contemplating Fanon’s comments on the church:

“But the triumphant communiques from the missions are in fact a source of information concerning the implantation of foreign influences in the core of the colonized people. I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. The Church in the colonies is the white people's Church, the foreigner's Church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few chosen. At times this Manicheism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms.”

The Mothers ROC is a beautiful way that prayer and faith have not succumbed to a practice in the white man’s ways but ‘God’s ways’ that resists the dehumanizing practice of putting human beings in cages. And I think it’s beautiful that Fanon summarizes decolonization in the very words of the great revolutionary, Jesus:

“In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the wellknown words: "The last shall be first and the first last." Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it, all decolonization is successful.”

What I think is sometimes easy to forget is that colonialism is an ongoing process that includes the poverty of slums and reservations as well as it involves the police and prisons. Dian Million at 4S specifically mentioned Gilmore in a panel on Canadian settler health institutions using poor people, especially Indigenous people, as non-consenting test subjects. Fanon describes police as the very boundary separataing and maintaining the Manichean binary of colonized and colonizer:

“The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies… all… aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilderers" separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.”

That is why the abolitionist task today, the dismantling of prisons and policing, are tasks of decolonization against the ongoing process of colonialism that has its roots in the European slave trade and Indigenous genocide of the Americas.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing from the first sentence!

Each chapter is completely different from the last and each so necessary to understand how prisons were built in such numbers, and why. It has very little to do with crime itself, even by the state's own admission.

Wilson Gilmore starts with Californian political economy (dense, centered on space, deindustrialisation), then why and how prisons became the solution (not a conscious choice of any one person but a response to surplus population and a mode of shoring up venture capitalism), then how prisons leach rural areas of their resources, not provide jobs, and ending with a truly extraordinary chapter on Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, a grassroots, communist (ish?) activist organisations of mothers who found their children taken randomly by the state and used their mothering experience to fight something as enormous as the Three Strikes Law.

Also, the best of the thought of Marx, Foucault and Gramsci is kind of dropped in, much clearer than they wrote it of course. Skip Capital - read this instead.

If you're at all interested in money, power, justice, or race, read this immediately!

[Katie]

My big summer read (because I'm a fun gal). I am not hardcore enough to fully follow Gilmore's breakdown of the political economy of California but I find her basic point - that prison expansion is a response to the creation of surplus populations (and capital and land) - deeply compelling. She is answering the question "why did the US government respond to a historic drop in crime by building more prisons?" and her answer, in a nutshell, is that building prisons isn't a response to the problem of crime, it's a response to the "problem" of too many unemployed people and too much unprofitable land. The chapters on mothers of prisoners organising against prisons are worth anyone's time even if you aren't up for the more economics heavy sections. A summer well spent.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, at times over my head when she got into the weeds with prison data. But that's a byproduct of her meticulous research. California really is a perfect case study of the U.S. prison industrial complex

[Mi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally finished this behemoth of a book 😭 The political economy portion was particularly dense, but overall extremely informative, well-researched, and significant. Interesting to consider in the wider framework of prison abolition on multiple fronts

[Raj Karan Gambhir · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could give this book six stars

[Kony · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gleaned a lot from the book. It draws crucial links between many political, economic, and demographic changes that I wouldn't have pieced together on my own.

My reading experience was a bit marred by stylistic vices:
(1) complex sentences packed with abstract nouns and jargon;
(2) tendency to offer 2-3 nouns/verbs when 1 would do, and to qualify statements to death, thereby trading clarity for "nuance."

Main take-aways of value, for me:
(1) Better understanding of connections among capitalist incentives, neoliberal policies, democratic and non-democratic aspects of California politics, harsh criminal laws (e.g. "three strikes") and the prison-building industry.
(2) Knowledge about grassroots movements, driven by working-class folks seeking social justice, that began in LA and spread across the country.
(3) Perception of implicit kinship between these grassroots movements and today's Occupy movement.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview of an economic and racial analysis of prisons in Cali. Two things I gathered from quickly running through this as a source for something I was working on: prisons as containment policy towards structural unemployment and the key role the central valley plays as location and workforce for most prisons as well as on the political plane. Downsides: It could be cuz I'm not used to MLA style, but in some sections they gave too much clutter to the text. I was hoping to find a more developed political economy analysis of the central valley. I don't think anyone has quite nailed that yet, but its surely needed.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A political-economic geographic analysis of the history of the prison industrial complex in California. Avoiding the prison-as-plantation narrative, Gilmore instead opts for a Marxian illustration of surplus labor/population and the "prison fix" as the solution to this problem of modern capitalism.

Golden Gulag faces the correlation/causation challenge prevalent in many social-science works. However, the book is extensively researched and referenced and provides a plausible explanation for how and why prisons have been at least a feature of modern neoliberal market societies and the particulars of the California case.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting historical account of the development of the California prison system. However, it is deliberately, unabashedly, unsubtly Marxist to the point of being quite annoying - she uses "structure" and "class" to denote anything she feels like mentioning, which is both disingenuous and just plain wrong. Ultimately, her obsession with structural causes leaves no room for the sociocultural side of life.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A somewhat conspiratorially-minded book on how the rise of the carcereal state in California represents a specific form of punitive response to the transformation of the state's political economy from Cold War industrialism to globally oriented information technology — a shift that has made the excluded brown underclass largely redundant. The writing is more activist than academic in tone (nothing wrong with that!) and the arguments are largely derivative of the scholarship of others.

[Julia Crocodile · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the gold standard for a reason!!! Understanding prisons as historical materialist projects! Academia as a direct service to organizers! The political economy of abolition! Yes it's pretty dense, but I feel like it had to be. The mass incarceration project in California isn't exactly straightforward.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at the rise of the Californian penal system, which is truly staggering in its dimensions, as well as the anti-prison organizations that seek to dismantle it.

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

good info but makes the info hard to digest

[Eman Abdelhadi · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most important thinkers of our time. She’s able to combine a materialist, Marxist analysis with attention to race, gender and even ideology. Essential read.