Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

New collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.

Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.

Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Essays, Social Justice, Feminism, Race, History

512 pages, Hardcover

Published May 1, 2022

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

[Sarah Jaffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ahhhhhhhh it's so good. I am consistently bowled over by how broad Gilmore's analysis turns out to be, how much her analysis of prisons is an analysis of capitalism as a whole, how much there is to learn from her work for organizers and yes particularly labor organizers. Just goddamn essential reading. And also a pleasure to read, not only for the sharpness of her analysis but the clarity and beauty of her writing.

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer who for more than thirty years has studied how the rise of prison construction since the 1970s is emblematic of the ways that racial capitalism more generally attempts to resolve or “fix” the crises thrown up by its internal contradictions, especially over this period by way of the “anti-state state.” Gilmore is also part of collectives or movements of people who are doing the work of making a world without prisons–or “abolition”--a world of “fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently” (351). Abolition Geography collects twenty of Gilmore’s academic articles, book chapters, and interviews (along with three co-written with Craig Gilmore). It is a book that certainly has appeal to those interested in the political economy of prisons (Part III: Prisons, Militarism, and the Anti-State State), as well as the prison abolition movement (Part IV: Organizing for Abolition). It is certainly for those of us who are interested in “Race and Space” (Part II). But it should not be lost on anyone that this is a book, from cover to cover really, for those invested in the tireless and oft-failing answers to the question “What Is To Be Done?” (Part I).

What is geography? “Here’s a chicken-egg conundrum: I don’t know whether I think we can find important lessons for making change by studying the margins because I’m a geographer or whether I became a geographer because of how I already thought about contradictions and interfaces. What geography enables is the combination of an innate (if unevenly developed) interdisciplinarity with the fields central mission to examine the interfaces of the earth’s multiple natural and social spatial forms” (411). Geographers unfold the world beginning with place: “a fluid creation of personal and group histories of struggles and work, of investments emotional and financial, of migrations in and out, of culture and change, of births and deaths” (254). To examine place is not to stay there; one always must find how places are connected (one version of globalization) or forgotten (another version), how they are made and unmade, contested and reactivated. People do these things. Through institutions. The small contribution that scholars have to make is by thinking really hard about “what the possibility might be for cooptation, on the one hand, and differential alignment, on the other” (pace Fanon), and “how various groupings cohere internally and connect externally–what calls them to identify in some ways but not in others, how those relationships might change, and to what end” (pace Du Bois) (285). One way they might be transformed is through the state, and its attempts to manage capitalist and social crises, through bureaucratic allocation of resources, the legitimation of their enforcement, and the resolution of capacities rendered surplus which might otherwise prevent the reproduction of this political economy as it had in the past (210).

So while this is a book in which prisons are an object of study and struggle, they are unfolded as one part of a broader political tapestry including: US imperialism and its relationship with military capital, the cultural politics of Black uprisings since the 60s and their coding as “criminal”; the disciplinary/technical project of rendering agricultural labor, land, and communities (frequently Latino) alternately vulnerable and unnecessary; the problem of pollution and where to put it; the role of certain forms of academic knowledge in shoring up or unraveling several of these institutions; the problem of tax and investment and distribution and wages and profit rates; living in a pathological culture that tells you that you must be afraid of particular sorts of people. This is to say that Abolition Geography ought not to be understood parochially. It should really be of interest to everyone on the left, any geographer, anyone interested in organizing to produce social change, and certainly any “good Marxist” (336). (For instance: I’m interested in understanding the different facets of anti-pipeline organizing–I support but have never been substantially involved in prison abolition movements. Yet with Gilmore’s interpretation, making connections both theoretically and practically between these situations isn’t difficult at all. Which is the point.)

Many of these chapters are academic–I’m not sure what readers will make of those published in Progress in Human Geography, for instance. There is some repetition, as one might expect, and some overlap with Golden Gulag. You will get the prison fix argument several times by the end. You will encounter a certain Toni Negri quote three or four times. But even in these, Gilmore’s style is never overbearingly jargony or citation heavy. The interviews are clarifying, and the three chapters written with Craig Gilmore I found to be especially engaging. In every chapter there are nuggets of broadly applicable wisdom. Even though they are not arranged chronologically, I also found it compelling to trace the trajectory from the early 1990s essays like the bombastic “Terror Austerity Race Gender Excess Theater”, to the Golden Gulag period works such as the well known academic article “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography”, to the post BLM chapters and conversations, which reflect on and critique shortcomings of the reinvigorated abolition movement, urging for a certain political openness and perspicacity rather than a retreat into cloistered identities or spaces (whether activist, academic, reactive or more well-intentioned non-profit or social service, etc). Always these alliances need to be *made* through the “practical syncretism” of cycles of questioning, study, and struggle. “Abolition…is the content and context of struggle, the site where culture couples with the political; but it is not struggle’s form. To have form, we have to organize” (42).

No one should be discouraged by the size of this book. For whatever financial or marketing reason, Verso decided to publish this one in its jumbo font–there are about two paragraphs on every page. This means that you can really fly through it if you want to–but if you’re like me you’ll also be frequently rerturning to these pages.

[kate vee · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. Incredible collection of work over decades that I think best describes the PIC, how it came to exist in the context of racial capitalism, and avenues for abolition. Half a star off only because I think the collection could have been a bit more selective. As is, some bits repeat and it’s less cohesive than it could have been.

[Nisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute must read for anyone grappling with how to understand the landscape of racial capitalism in our current moment and how to burn it down.

[Luca Suede · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I recommend Gilmore to my friends I often hear that her work is too dense and academic, especially for folks most impacted by incarceration. I hear that critique, and I think she tried more in Abolition Geography to be more legible. I also like to remind people that Ruthie is an organizer, from Moms ROC, to Critical Resistance, to CURB, she knows about impact and has been organizing against the PIC in community long before any of us could accuse her of being inaccessible. Her experience organizing & her committed study ring through. Yes, I still wish she would do a bit more “speaking in multiple registers” as Patricia Hill Collins describes it, but I think this collection is her best effort at that thus far. If Golden Gulag scared you off, give this one a try.

Gilmore writes “If people living under the most severe constraints, such as prisoners, can form study groups to learn about the world, then free-world activists have no excuse for ignorance, nor should they rely on funder-designed workshops and training sessions to do what revolutionaries in all times have done on their own.”

Part one is…fine, definitely for academics who are navigating movement work and academia. If this is not you, PLEASE don’t fall off, just skip ahead to the next two sections. “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” (224) from the second section of essays, as well as pretty much the whole last section, but more specifically “The worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” (449) “Race Capitalist Crisis, and Abolitionist Organizing,” (454) and “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” (471) are the must reads from this one. This book took me forever to read because I chose to read it cover to cover, but I encourage folks to jump around to the pieces that are most applicable to their organizing or study.

What I loved most was all the weaving Gilmore does to help us understand the linkage between the Militarization internationally and domestically as it relates to abolition, and connecting the Military Industrial Complex and the Prison Industrial Complex. As always, she also does beautiful work tying race & place. I was really happy to see her offer more reflection on movement history and current anti-prison movements than I have seen in her other work.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Far too much repetition and too much in general in the selection, but the best stuff in here, on the connections between space, place, political economy and the prison is very good indeed: so recommended, though as one to dip into rather than read end to end. A very informative contextualising introduction by the editors also.

NB, includes an all-time great one-liner on what a radical geography is ('what's interesting about 'where is Arizona?' 'no, the point is to ask 'why is Arizona')

[Lola · Rating 5 out of 5]

RWG eat it up

[Marisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible resource, both accessible and intellectually dense at different times, spanning decades of thought and activism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a formidable thought leader. Definitely one to revisit.

[Aquila · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection has a lot of important information and I learned a lot but I felt that the potential impact it could have had was handicapped by the amount of scholarly language present. These concepts should be more accessible to people from a wider array of backgrounds and levels of education.

"Skin, our largest organ, vulnerable to all ambient toxins, at the end is all we have to hold us together, no matter how much it seems to keep us apart."

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gilmore is the constant point of reference for anyone ploughing in the fields of abolitionism these days, If you rely on many of their claims for what her work represents you might open this book with the expectation of finding essays that dogmatically assert a credo of strident non-cooperation with any of the agencies of state power. The concept of ‘non-reformist reforms’, which she takes up from the work of Andre Gorz, get interpreted as a maximalist demand for the immediate end of capitalism with no account being given to the state of consciousness of the people who are expected to rally to this call.

In fact Gilmore’s work fits better with the cultural Marxism of people like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, with a strong inflection to the militancy of A. Sivanandan. (It is interesting that these writers and activists, who did so much of their work in the UK, figure so large in her work.)

The four parts to the book range across the themes of the role of the scholar-activists; racism as it is acted out in the spacial context of modern capitalism; the character of the repressive agencies of the state (prisons and the military); and the organisation of work for abolitionism. Most readers – or at least the non-scholars like me – will get most out of the part two section with it crucial argument that racial oppression is not a disembodied force infecting society like some sort of spiritual virus, but rather a set places – the neigbourhood, the workplace, the police cells and the courts, all of which link into the larger structures of the city (or sometimes the rural township). Her explicitly Marxist account of how space and racial injustice demands a conjunctural analysis of the process of accumulation at particular points in time, which leads to the formulation of the concept of the prison-industrial complex (PIC), which was first mooted by Mike Davis.

This is a working of Eisenhower’s idea of a military-industrial complex (MIC). Raised this as a matter of concern during the final months of his presidency, Eisenhower felt it was necessary to draw attention to the ways in which war-making and profit-making were becoming so enmeshed. As a consequence, the whole business of innovation and economic planning became driven by this imperative, making something new out of the capitalism which was fundamental to US society. Given the state’s monopoly of war-making the MIC brought a form of Keynesian state-capitalism into existence, with industries which worked to long-term production schedules when it came to investment and financing, with state planning providing a guarantee of economic stability. It might be said there were advantageous from this arrangement for the working class as well, since arms production generated hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs for skilled workers.

This a useful approach to the subject of state justice and penal policy, but it is important to note key differences between the PIC and the MIC. The explosion of prison-building in the US from the 1980s onwards never acquired the importance to capitalism as a structure of economic support in the way the MIC had. Its significance lay more in the realm of the social policies promulgated across America as the era of the New Deal and the Great Society – the latter associated with Lyndon Johnson’s presidency – came to a close. The experiment with a pseudo-welfare state reinforced the poverty of common in many US cities and with this there was an increase in disorder as destitute communities struggled to survive. Police activity in these neighbourhoods became even more repressive and the mantra of ‘tough on crime’ lead to longer periods of incarceration for convicted offenders. Gilmore argues that putting people in cages became part the alternative to supporting low-income families through money transfers, low cost housing and investment in schools.

The other element driving policy in the direction of PIC was the availability of swathes of land in rural regions adjacent to towns with sizeable communities made up of under-employed households. California provided the leading example of regions with these features, being the product of a deindustrialisation and the shrinking of agricultural activity as globalisation shifted manufacturing and food production to China, Mexico and other low wage nation-states. The land became available for the building of new prisons, often funded by city and town governments willing to pay out local tax-payer dollars in an effort to secure jobs for local workers. Gilmore paints a picture of the PIC more as a set of fortuitous factors present within an American hinterland in the process of impoverishment as a result of neoliberal globalisation than a leap into a dynamic new capitalism.

The idea of abolition emerges from this as a political intervention which is aimed at disrupting the conveyor-line which transports, mainly, minority people from jobless, unsupported communities into the cages where they are at least watered and fed and kept away from being a troublesome nuisance to the rest of society. What struck me from Gilmore’s approach was the absence of dogmatic proscription as to how this should be undertaken, which seems to be in distinction from the positions taken by at least some of her UK acolytes. In a recent volume of essays published by the Left Book Club the dominant tone seems to be that all engagements around the issue of criminal justice and incarceration should take the form of the demand for immediate abolition of the police and the prison system and all efforts in the way of amelioration of their hard defiantly refused. This line is also taken up by Bradley and de Noronha in their recent book, ‘Abolish Borders’.

But Gilmore’s long essay, ‘You have Dislodged a Boulder’, is much more subtle than this ‘Just Say No’ approach. Her account of the work of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) demonstrates her solidarity with political work that is much more grassroots and connected to the issues that bring ordinary people into activity. Sure, there were cast iron principles in Mothers ROC’s work, one being a refusal to kowtow to pressure to disavow the central role that a communist played in its work. But otherwise the patient task of building a movement operating from the community upwards meant long hours of discussion and consensus building. Meetings began with prayer and the idea of ‘the power of motherhood’ as the basis for common feeling and solidarity informed its work at every point.

In the essay ‘Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning’ she makes the tensions which come to the forefront whenever the state goes through a period of attempted relegitimization of its power ‘through the ideology and practices of an anti-state state in the ambient atmosphere of neoliberalism’, as the potentially fertile ground for forging an oppositional movement that finds a place for activist-scholars working in contexts in which the folk with lived experience of oppression, for once, have the loudest voices.

This doesn’t feel to me like advocacy of a strategy that lays down a political stance as the frame around which everything else has to hang. In the UK context what would that have to offer working class Black mothers down into political activity by the threat of knife crime against their children? Abolition of the repressive policing of communities, justified because poverty has reduced the hopes that young people have for their lives to nothing more than control of the few square yards of their immediate neighbourhood, is likely to require a period of engagement with local government forums which make action against gangs the centre of their agendas, not in order to fulfil this mission, but to move beyond it. Formulating political programmes requires a comprehensive understand of the historical conjunction, with all the forces it has conjured into existence and the relationships they have with one another, in order to better understand the tensions within the system and where the points of its weakest links lie.Gilmore’s book seems to me a case study in this approach. There is no doubt about its militant ambition to achieve change, but to do this by mobilising the democratic forces with local communities and across social classes which will bring about transformation.

If there is anything that jars in her work it is the persistent use of the term ‘non-reformist reforms’. These are meant to capture the desire to set goals for change which benefit subaltern groups but which also resist the grip that the past will try to assert over the newly-shaped present. But it is a clunky formulation that gives the impression that what we are looking for is dependent on the power of language alone to come up with the carrots that will have the masses chasing after them. When discussion takes that form it begins to move quicky in the direction of maximalist political programmes which are thinly designed efforts to disguise the goal of abolishing capitalism as the answer to all our problems.

But abolishing capitalism, and building socialism in its place, is precisely the thing that has to be proven both to the masses of people (as well as conscientious socialist intellectuals) rather than asserted. Why does the logic of infinite accumulation need to be confronted in order to achieve sustainable social progress? How is racism and other modes of discrimination implicated in the dominance of capital? How is this expressed in the institutional structure of the economy and the political system? How is all this quickening the development of multiple crises across society, and why does traditional reformism have fewer and fewer answers to the problems of society today? On the other side of the divide is a whole series of questions about the forms that a feasible socialism might take, put forward not dogmatically but as reasoned logic about the merits of social planning, democracy and solidarity in the present circumstances. The perspective that comes from the, admittedly problematic, legacy of Leninism, framing the politics that emerges from this activist questioning as a politics of transition, seems more robust and rooted in real life dilemmas than the sketching out of ‘non-reformist reforms’.

[jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

have not read every single chapter just sections throughout w/ a group(!)

Near singular text in repositioning abolition outside of the lenses of morality and idealism, and instead giving it real location, space, and political economic drivers. This really bolstered my own conception of abolition and made for really generous group discussion. I feel like this was a really transformative quarter for my own internal politics and this book kept me in good company. I think this would be a good atlas/bible to hand to someone looking for urban design + socioeconomic lenses to approach abolition, and it is really refreshing to disarm the relegation of abolition to the realms of the imaginary and idealistic. but this is perhaps not the most accessible thing to give a friend/family member and start conversation. RWG names really well the downfalls of academic unapproachability and careerism in abolition, and I do think this text may fall for the former. The language is a lovely labyrinth but I did not always feel it was written to be understood. but all is permissive in the name of RWG.

New atlas(!) I'm sure I will return throughout my life.

[jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

these are essays that RWG wrote over the span of a couple of decades that were collected together rather than a series of essays that RWG specifically wrote to be compiled as a collection, so a lot of the ideas, themes, & topics presented repeat rather than build off of one another in a really focused way. this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was definitely different than what i was expecting especially after having just finished the intense & in depth analysis of GOLDEN GULAG. that being said, i think it's best to take each essay as a standalone piece to process, reference, and practice. and practice, here, is the key verb! RWG calls on readers to have an active & material analysis of our present conditions and to actively build towards abolition as a presence rather than an absence. RWG is sharp as always, and her analysis from the 90's could have very much been written yesterday.

[Orlando Nicoletti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply the best! So much insight, so much good analysis, so much clarity. RWG handles so many difficult questions with rigor, nuance and care, drawing from deep wells of both theory and practice. Such a useful and precious book.

[Paco · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The fiction of race projects a peculiar animation of the human body, and people take to the streets in opposition to its real and deadly effects. And in the end, as the relations of racial capitalism take it out on people's hides, the contradiction of skin becomes clearer. Skin, our largest organ, vulnerable to all ambient toxins, at the end is all we have to hold us together, no matter how much it seems to keep us apart."

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book for the first half, then - as is the case with too many essay collections of an intellectual-activist's works, regardless of their amazingness - it gets extremely repetitive and droning. Gilmore is unrelentingly academic and obviously spends no time catering to any reader who cannot keep up with her argumentation, scholarship, and wide-ranging social-political-economic critique. This book is not for the weak of mind or those not well-read on issues of racism, history, prisons, and politics in the USofA. Sure, her arguments and assertions will ring true but they won't lead to anything but nodding heads and the like. There is agreement with basic principles, and then there is the depth of understanding about how we got here and how we might get out that separates the casual reader/ yes-person with those who actually understand what Gilmore is talking about and how to make that shared anger and turn it into revolutionary change. Gilmore is an intellectual and speaks/writes likes one. The big problem with that is most people are not intellectuals, hell, 40% or more of the people in my city are illiterate, so while I can understand and analyze just about all of what she is putting out there, the people most affected by the problems of the world cannot. And fixing these problems takes a lot more than agreement that they are bad, simply stated, they take understanding them and how to break them down and remake them. Intellectuals won't change the world, a fact I have had to accept as true for far too long. The stakes are high, and the games are complicated AND complex, and until non-intellectuals can get motivated BY intellectuals things are not going to change. How and Why we got here is as important as Where we want to go and When we might get there. I loved the off-the-charts smarts of Gilmore in this collection, but if she spoke to a room full of people in my city most of them would have absolutely no idea what any of it meant or why it was important to know and understand, or they wouldn't care because they aren't negatively affected by it (in the immediate term anyway, since obviously racism and all other social problems affect everyone, whether they understand, care, or admit it). My personal problem is how I mentally and emotionally deal with reading books like this. One the one hand, they are enlivening and powerful, but on the other hand they just make me furious and frustrated and depressive because I have zero faith in Wealthy White People's willingness to acknowledge fault and guilt, make reparations for their actions, and allow the changes that are required for the survival of humanity as a group. The full five stars for Gilmore, but the editors did her a disservice with the arrangement and inclusion in this collection. Her breadth of knowledge isn't given full flight, sadly.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is fairly frustrating. It's also beautiful, and incredibly impressive in every respect. I will first say some mean things about her work and then through a shocking twist I will say something nice.

Gilmore has the annoying tendency to treat her own anecdotal case as universal. Auto-theory is really not as cute as you think it is. I think she fundamentally misunderstands the concept of identity: the work of critique is emphatically not the production of a suture. Down that road lie self-defeating nightmares. Gilmore rejects speculation, and so her method, by design, never gets to transcendental structure. She's effectively a structuralist, so she has some serious problems accounting for non-dualistic distinctions.

I apologize for being harsh. I feel very strongly that sutures are exactly the wrong path for leftwing thought. It's easy to do better, and I want to suggest that this amendment would be simple to incorporate. It would be a good start to reframe critique as the ruination of sutures. A suture is just a symbolic prison, after all.

Time to be nice. Gilmore has correctly diagnosed a problem the traditional Left has completely failed to navigate. There's plenty of bad stuff that isn't prison-shaped, but it's good we finally have a practical theory about the distressing state of affairs birthed by the prison-industrial complex. The carceral shadow state proclaims itself to be eternal. It isn't. This story is a hopeful one: the book is full of successes, and useful lessons that can inform future agitation. Thank you, Ruthie, for inspiring me to fight this new enemy, and convincing me that even if it's hard we can actually make meaningful progress towards a world without prisons.

[Maileen Hamto · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation" is a collection of interviews, essays, and collaborative writings by eminent scholar and organizer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. The writings that span more than thirty years focus on the interplay of racial capitalism, U.S. nationalism, and privatization in growing the prison industrial complex. Gilmore illustrates the geopolitical and socioeconomic dynamics involved in dehumanizing people in a capitalistic, profit-driven system. Focusing on the geographies of power and difference, Gilmore explores the complex interplay of globalization and the U.S. criminal justice institution that systematically and disproportionately jails and imprisons Black, Indigenous, Brown, and other people of color.

Gilmore’s work is enlightening and informative, a must-read for scholars and activists seeking a complex and interdisciplinary deep dive to effectively drive systemic change. It’s helpful to understand the racist trajectory of carceral policy in unearthing the root causes of mass incarceration. Policing, courts, and prisons all have a role to play in sustaining an unjust system that profits from the imprisonment of those whom Gilmore characterizes as “modestly educated people in the prime of their lives.” Anyone committed to prison reform and social justice has much to learn from Gilmore’s insights about the cognitive work and tactical organizing required to imagine and build an abolitionist future.

[Michael Sasson · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 * For group study, see especially Chapters 16-19 (or all of Part IV (except Ch 20), maybe adding Chapter 4 from Part I)

Gilmore asks the best questions, is willing to listen and share what she hears from numerous sources who attempt (consciously or not) to answer those questions, and is always focused on wondering in the best way what collective projects would enable forward motion towards freedom, justice, survival and joy.

157 Who works and what works, for whom, and to what end?

159. What’s at issue is not simply that things are getting worse (and they are) but that they are getting worse in stark contradiction to still-rising expectations – the ideology of progress embedded in American common-sense consciousness.

176 What can be said about a political culture in search of “infinite prosperity” that is dependent on a perpetual enemy who must always be fought but can never be vanquished? […] I believe with all my heart there’s an end to violence in both senses of “end”: violence produces power, which under the grow-or-die culture of capitalism seems like a slightly erratic expression of self-interest; but violence does not produce all power, which means perhaps that its effectiveness might come to a finish.

347 We managed to develop and wage campaigns bringing people together across diverse issues and diverse communities in rural and urban California, so that they could recognize each other as probable comrades rather than presumed antagonists.

349 The work brings new social actors into the mix, and, as we discussed earlier, it enables the broadest possible identification of purpose in class terms.

474-5. Abolition geography starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place. Place-making is normal human activity: we figure out how to combine people, and land, and other resources with our social capacity to organize ourselves in a variety of ways, whether to stay put or to go wandering. […] If unfinished liberation is the still-to-be-achieved work of abolition, then at bottom what is to be abolished isn’t the past or its present ghost, but rather the processes of hierarchy, dispossession, and exclusion that congeal in and as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

479 If, as Stuart Hall argued back in the late 1970s, race is the modality through which class is lived, then mass incarceration is class war.

482. First Intifada; US responses to domestic violence: “The idea here is, rather than punish violence better or faster, to end violence by changing the social relationships in which it occurs.”

488 Indeed, for abolition, to insist on innocence is to surrender politically because “innocence” evades a problem abolition is compelled to confront: how to diminish and remedy harm as against finding better forms of punishment.
======
11-12, 18 definition of racism
45-6 student debt

93-4, 99 THIS. 93 […] freedom is a place. […] The debates that most concern me center on how organizations and institutions craft policies that result in building social movement (through nonreformist reforms) rather than in a real redistribution of harms and benefits.
The projects from which I have derived these lessons all involve novel practices of place-making that revise understandings and produce new senses of purpose.

94. What rises to the surface is how people who are skeptical of “the government” begin to engage in what I call “grassroots planning” – a future orientation driven by the present certainty of shortened lives.

99. Mixing social-science expertise into experimentation in the nonacedemic world can reinforce the bad idea – promoted and affirmed in an innumerate culture where statistics are magic (with the hit-or-miss properties of all magical forces) – that better information from better data is what is needed to make the world better. This way of thinking leads to the supremacy of intrastructural policy tweaking and perpetual displacement machines, and reduces the possibilities of complexly thoughtful action to, for example, expanding reliance on narrowly focused nongovernmental organizations that are locked into endless rehearsals of injury and remedy. <>

114,120,123, 131 (v. Nader), 136-7, 174, 183-6. Racism understood as political economy
133 Why write Golden Gulag?
181 US hypocrisy re treaties
206 riots: changing racial composition
217-18 Keynesian state legitimacy
224, 241 grant funding for movement and community
258, 270 vision and boots problem
260 prison population 1980-2008
288 Why policing?
322 MIC culture (compare to Gaza)

326. THIS! There were some real problems in the 1960s and 1970s, as there are now. Racism and oppression, economic insecurity and depression, for example. People wanted those problems solved. The state didn’t say, “We’re going to solve this problem by giving income guarantees to everyone in low-income communities.” Instead, it said, “We’re going to solve this problem by putting everyone in prison for part or all of their lives for doing things that we didn’t used to put people in prison for.” In the 1970s, the state started coming in and rearranging social relations. Pretty quickly, it became normal that more and more people were taken away and punished. But people also started demanding those kinds of surveillance and control in their own neighborhoods. […] By the early 1980s, community organizations were saying, “We really want more police here.”
344-5. racial prison gangs as state response to prisoner cross-racial solidarity
389 Highlander quote on rx of movements to organizations
395. How might organizing lead to a social movement
398 Justice for Janitors described as bottom up!?!
423 coalition challenges
463 imprisonment as response to low-income worker organizing
465 organizing constrained by recognition
466 political consciousness leading to long-term acts of “self-less” love
468-9. abolitionist grounded vision

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been meaning to read more about the idea of prison abolition for a while, as it is a major current in left wing politics. I had mixed feelings about the book. I read it as an e-book, as a usually read one alongside a paper book so I can read it if I'm in bed with my partner and can't sleep so I don't have to turn a light on. That means that often a book I'm reading as an e-book takes quite a long time to read, and this one took over a month, reading in fairly short and infrequent bursts. This exacerbated some features of the book, i.e. it is quite long, it can be quite repetitive because it's a collection of essays written over years that return to the same themes, and it is written in some fairly heavy going academic prose at times.

On the other hand, there were sections of the book and ideas that were brilliantly written and scintillating to read. I enjoyed Gilmour's engagement with thinkers like Marx, Mike Davis, Stuart Hall, Cedric Robinson and more. I loved the sections about her family history. I appreciated the nuanced and enlightening exploration of the history of the USA's transition from the New Deal era, through Military Keynesianism, through to what she calls the organised abandonment of sections of the working class, especially black and brown people, and looking at it through the lens of Geography, which is outside of my normal frame of reference.

However, I would say that at the end I don't feel particularly more confident in my understanding of Prison Abolition as a political philosophy. There are people who call themselves Abolitionists in the same way that someone would identify themselves as a Socialist, a Conservative, a Liberal or an Anarchist. These political signifiers contain a whole body of ideas about how society, politics, culture and the economy should be run, and we all more or less can understand what everyone means by them. I know that Ruth Wilson Gilmour is a Marxist, and therefore I understand that she is in favour of the revolutionary overthrow of Capitalism and its replacement by Communism. But I'm not sure that this is central to the wider idea of Abolition that many people are engaged with.

Before reading this book I thought that the problem with Prison Abolition is that it is something that cannot happen under this Capitalist regime, and is only something that could happen after a revolution has happened. After reading it I still think that; my thinking hasn't shifted.

This book is excellent at explaining how and why mass incarceration has been increasing as more and more of the population have become surplus to the needs of Capitalism and the State. It does not explain how you would abolish prison. It does explore some successful and less successful acts of local resistance to prisons being built and the carceral state. It does not explore what the alternative to prison would be. It does say that focusing on getting non-violent offenders, or women, or gender non-conforming people or elderly people or any other more sympathetic appearing group of people out, is a reformist measure tainted by liberalism, and that it implies that there are other people who should be locked up. But she does not explain what she thinks ought to be done with murderers, rapists, serial killers etc... These are the questions that sceptics of the idea of prison or police abolition have in their minds, and I think the abolitionist movement actually has to provide arguments to persuade the wider public if it wants to be anything other than a parlour game.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Activist scholarship attempts to intervene in a particular historical-geographical moment by changing not only what people do but also how all of us think about ourselves and our time and place, by opening the world we make. "

There is a lot packed into many sentences in this essay collection, demanding slow, awake, reading. Gilmore is incisive and challenging and, best of all, ever hopeful and reasoned.

"We make history, but not under conditions of our own choosing."

She also can turn a phrase well: "the state’s singular control over who may commit violence, how, and to what end."

While the whole collection looks at prison abolition, it is themed - while some essays are pretty theory heavy, others tell stories for a more general audience. Several of the essays written at the height of the Clinton era Three Strikes and Broken Windows policing, both now out of fashion but having left a tsunami of destruction behind, are a grim reminder that brutally inhumane policies are not the prerogative of ultra-conservatives. That Gilmore even has to state things like:
"What the research of Dina Rose and Todd Clear and their colleagues shows is that saturation policing—arresting, convicting, and imprisoning too many people from a neighborhood—actually has negative impacts on the crime rate.34 Why? Because taking so many people out of a neighborhood—and returning many of them years later after the horrors of prison—disrupts the very neighborhood ties that Broken Windows purports to strengthen." this seems incredible now, but I remember the depth of support that these policies had in the 90s, even amongst those who viewed themselves as anti-racist.

The final section is focused on projects to build something different. Here Gilmore moves beyond simply arguing for new approaches and into arguing that working towards something better delivers the value itself. It reminded me of the best of the left.

[Rachael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wowowow such an intense read! (Apologizing now for the long review) I went into this book completely blind to how academic it is and was definitely pretty stumped here and there trying to get through the sections but overall, it was 1000% worth it. With all the racism 101 classes I’ve taken, none have really touched on the aspect of space and geography and how it construes our definitions of identity: “Space always matters, and what we make of it in thought and practice determines, and is determined by, how we mix our creativity with the external world to change it, and ourselves, in the process.” I thought the sections on militarization and the industrial prison complex were extremely compelling but I think my favorite was the parts focusing on epistemology, the whole “the master’s tools will never dismantle master’s house” and of course “Who produces knowledge? How is knowledge policed? Who succeeds in being understood? Who teaches? What is taught? Who learns?” I always think that’s interesting, and also the role of Black women in academia and how much power/control/voice is given to them to tell stories. Lastly, innocence was a pretty interesting concept here, especially “If people living under the most severe constraints, such as prisoners, can form study groups to learn about the world, then free-world activists have no excuse for ignorance, nor should they rely on funder-designed workshops and training sessions to do what revolutionaries in all times have done on their own." Overall an incredible and important read, definitely had to invest some serious brain cells to get through it but it was so worth it. 100% will be referring this book whenever the conversation turns to how every problem ever goes back to colonialism :)

[Dan Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography is truly a treasure trove. For those interested in prison-industrial complex abolition, this collection of Gilmore’s essays across three decades of her scholar-activist work is the best place to land after perusing foundational introductions such as Angela Davis’s Are Prison Obsolete? and Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us. But more than a brilliant text for abolitionists–or even for geographers studying race and space–this work should be considered required reading for any contemporary Marxist.

Gilmore’s analysis of the prison’s central role in racial capitalism extends far beyond the bars and walls of carceral centers to the precarious contours of our communities on the outside. She demonstrates with such clarity and force the shifting strategies of capital to manage crises across the 20th century, during which racism’s “changing same” continuously exploits vulnerable populations through historically distinct deployments. For Gilmore, the prison explosion since the 1970s marks the rise of an “anti-state state,” where following a fall in the rate of profit for capitalists in the late 60s, increased criminalization and incarceration manage surplus populations, land, and state capacity systematically abandoned through globalization and the withdrawal of the social wage. Her analysis marks a break from more simplistic understandings of the neoliberal era as one of state shrinkage and the problem of incarceration as merely problems of privatization or prison labor exploitation.

To read closely Gilmore’s essays is to have the ground shift beneath one’s feet–to understand 20th century American history as an explosive history of class conflict and racialization. In this history, capital reproduces its ability to accumulate through death-dealing institutional networks while working-class revolutionaries resist in solidarity through unions and grassroots organizations. This is a history rife with contradiction and complexity for which Gilmore gives diligent attention and thus makes her one of the most powerful thinkers to unravel the tangled relationship between race and class. She sets within her impressive analytical scope dynamic connections between the military, prisons, police, universities, migration, social movements, cities, rural communities–all mediated by the “fatal couplings of power and difference,” a phrase she borrows from Stuart Hall. Her dazzling intellectual work is intertwined with a fierce commitment to grassroots organizing and popular education, from which she incorporates indispensable lessons to all who fight for the “presence” of abolition - of “social life lived differently” without state violence and with the needs of all met.

There is some repetition, including of ideas, quotations, phrases, and even wholesale paragraphs across some of the essays. But Gilmore’s insights are so powerful and her prose so captivating that these repetitions serve as key markers of the trajectory of her ideas and lineages of influence. Besides, Abolition Geography demands a much more disciplined engagement than a single linear read through its pages. These rich essays demand recurring study as much as our current moment demands committed and active solidarity. This volume demonstrates that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a beacon–an inspiring model for the scholar-activist whose deep wisdom and tireless organizing is a credit to all who fight for liberation.

[Viral · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is one of the most brilliant scholars on the Left right now, with her decades long work on abolitionist theory and praxis and her exceptional work studying the prison-industrial complex with the lens of Marxist geography.

This book honestly feels like a victory lap from her. It's comprised of various essays, some old, some newer, some new, that chart the development of and the political economic logics of the prison-industrial complex, mass incarceration, prisons as social death, military and carceral Keynesianism, and abolitionist organizing. It is truly a landmark collection of political thought and I feel I will find myself returning to this text for years and years to come. My only warning is this book is dense and detailed, so be prepared to read some footnotes and note down some other works to read.

Highly highly recommend. Required reading for any abolitionist who wants to ground their praxis in robust political economic theory.

[KT]

i have been working my way through these essays for months (arguably years -- i first read some of them in 2023). upon reaching the end of the book i didn't feel finished at all...so much i want to return to... i love ruth wilson gilmore's work so much (golden gulag made a lot of marxist analysis really click for me).

i interspersed reading this book over the months/years with revisiting this interview/conversation from millennials are killing capitalism: https://millennialsarekillingcapitali...

highly recommend on all counts! i really want to go back and revisit her critique of the "innocence" framing of getting people out of prison. obviously it resonates with many people, but she pushes back on that framing because what constitutes "innocence" can always shift and, of course, we need genuine, non-carceral approaches for when people cause harm. anyway, great read

[Karen Kohoutek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me a while to finish, between life and it just taking time. This collection of essays and interviews is quite dense and heady. There are so many ideas and so much to think about. It is not a quick or easy read. But it is an excellent analysis of what is called "the prison-industrial complex" and how it developed. There's a lot of brilliant insight into our condition situation, which more people should be aware of. Some of the essays date back to the early '90s, so these insights have been publicly available, just not publicized. I only learned about Gilmore from Twitter! I should have read her years ago. So it's good that there's a solid collection like this as an introduction to her work.

[Adrian · Rating 5 out of 5]

some combo of intellectual and accessible. the writing is...somehow both academic *and* clear? it's such a rare combo. this is a collected book of her essays, so as you read through, you will see some repeated phrases, explanations, concepts that she was working on and developing at the time. The book is organized so that ideas and time (from what I can tell; not every essay has its publication date prominently noted...maybe it's hidden somewhere, but that'd be great on the first title page of each essay!) progress as you read through. I was reading this alongside Octavia's Brood (sci-fi by bipoc folk) and saw so many thru-lines.

[Care · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Abolition geography—how and to what end people make freedom provisionally, imperatively, as they imagine home against the disintegrating grind of partition and repartition through which racial capitalism perpetuates the means of its own valorization… requires challenging the normative assumption that territory and liberation are at once alienable and exclusive—that they should be partitionable by sales, documents, or walls… it’s a way of studying and of doing political organizing and of being in the world and of worlding ourselves.”

[Merricat Blackwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would definitely recommend starting with Golden Gulag. This book kind of reads like a b-sides and demos companion to that one. It's less concise, the arguments are less completely and persuasively linked to each other, and there are some pretty inessential bits. Those are minor criticisms though; I still haven't encountered a better, more practical, more persuasive abolitionist thinker than Ruth Wilson Gilmore anywhere.

[Nils Jepson · Rating 5 out of 5]

changed my life forever i think. materialist analysis of carceral geographies that is simultaneously one of the most in-depth economic and social analyses of structural adjustments and the resulting uneven development and crises, and the most visionary in terms of organizing a way out. especially liked her analysis is of CEQA, radical planning, dead cities, and forgotten places. felt like I was LEARNING and GROWING. truly interdisciplinary. just wowowowowowow.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some brilliant essays in this book including the last one.

Reading this shortly after Troulloit Remixed has affirmed a long suspicion: I don’t like anthologies, particularly of scholars I love. These essays were not meant to be read together and, most, are not as good as Gilmore’s book length writing.