Golden Gulag

Golden Gulag
Author: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2007-01-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520938038

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.

Golden Gulag

Golden Gulag
Author: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2007
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780520222564

Publisher description

Abolition Geography

Abolition Geography
Author: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2022-05-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1839761709

The first 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.

Change Everything

Change Everything
Author: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Publisher:
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre:
ISBN: 9781642594140

Racial, gender, and environmental justice. Class war. Militarism. Interpersonal violence. Old age security. This is not the vocabulary many use to critique the prison-industrial complex. But in this series of powerful lectures, Ruth Wilson Gilmore shows that the only way to dismantle systems and logics of control and punishment is to change questions, categories, and campaigns from the ground up. Abolitionism doesn't just say no to police, prisons, border control, and the current punishment system. It requires persistent organizing for what we need, organizing that's already present in the efforts people cobble together to achieve access to schools, health care and housing, art and meaningful work, and freedom from violence and want. As Gilmore makes plain, "Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything." Change Everything is the inaugural book in the new Abolitionist Papers book series, edited by Naomi Murakawa.

The Prison and the Gallows

The Prison and the Gallows
Author: Marie Gottschalk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2006-06-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139455214

The United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. Nearly one in 50 people, excluding children and the elderly, is incarcerated today, a rate unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. What are some of the main political forces that explain this unprecedented reliance on mass imprisonment? Throughout American history, crime and punishment have been central features of American political development. This 2006 book examines the development of four key movements that mediated the construction of the carceral state in important ways: the victims' movement, the women's movement, the prisoners' rights movement, and opponents of the death penalty. This book argues that punitive penal policies were forged by particular social movements and interest groups within the constraints of larger institutional structures and historical developments that distinguish the United States from other Western countries.

Prison by Any Other Name

Prison by Any Other Name
Author: Maya Schenwar
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: Law
ISBN: 162097701X

With a new afterword from the authors, the critically praised indictment of widely embraced “alternatives to incarceration” Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But in a searing, “cogent critique” (Library Journal), Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law reveal that many of these so-called reforms actually weave in new strands of punishment and control, bringing new populations who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment under physical control by the state. Whether readers are seasoned abolitionists or are newly interested in sensible alternatives to retrograde policing and criminal justice policies and approaches, this highly praised book offers “a wealth of critical insights” that will help readers “tread carefully through the dizzying terrain of a world turned upside down” and “make sense of what should take the place of mass incarceration” (The Brooklyn Rail). With a foreword by Michelle Alexander, Prison by Any Other Name exposes how a kinder narrative of reform is effectively obscuring an agenda of social control, challenging us to question the ways we replicate the status quo when pursuing change, and offering a bolder vision for truly alternative justice practices.

The Big House

The Big House
Author: Stephen D. Cox
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2009-11-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 030015495X

""The Big House" is America's idea of the prison - a huge, tough, ostentatiously oppressive pile of rock, bristling with rules and punishments, overwhelming in size and the intent to intimidate. Stephen Cox tells the story of the American prison - its politics, its sex, its violence, its inability to control itself - and its idealization in American popular culture. This book investigates both the popular images of prison and the realities behind them : problems of control and discipline, mainenance and reform, power and sexuality. It conveys an awareness of the limits of human and institutional power, and of the symbolic and iconic qualities the "Big House" has attained in America's understanding of itself"--Jacket.

Understanding E-Carceration

Understanding E-Carceration
Author: James Kilgore
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2022-01-18
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1620976153

A riveting primer on the growing trend of surveillance, monitoring, and control that is extending our prison system beyond physical walls and into a dark future—by the prize-winning author of Understanding Mass Incarceration “James Kilgore is one of my favorite commentators regarding the phenomenon of mass incarceration and the necessity of pursuing truly transformative change.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow In the last decade, as the critique of mass incarceration has grown more powerful, many reformers have embraced changes that release people from prisons and jails. As educator, author, and activist James Kilgore brilliantly shows, these rapidly spreading reforms largely fall under the heading of “e-carceration”—a range of punitive technological interventions, from ankle monitors to facial recognition apps, that deprive people of their liberty, all in the name of ending mass incarceration. E-carceration can block people’s access to employment, housing, healthcare, and even the chance to spend time with loved ones. Many of these technologies gather data that lands in corporate and government databases and may lead to further punishment or the marketing of their data to Big Tech. This riveting primer on the world of techno-punishment comes from the author of award–winning Understanding Mass Incarceration. Himself a survivor of prison and e-carceration, Kilgore captures the breadth and complexity of these technologies and offers inspiring ideas on how to resist.

Beyond Walls and Cages

Beyond Walls and Cages
Author: Jenna M. Loyd
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2013-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0820344117

The crisis of borders and prisons can be seen starkly in statistics. In 2011 some 1,500 migrants died trying to enter Europe, and the United States deported nearly 400,000 and imprisoned some 2.3 million people--more than at any other time in history. International borders are increasingly militarized places embedded within domestic policing and imprisonment and entwined with expanding prison-industrial complexes. Beyond Walls and Cages offers scholarly and activist perspectives on these issues and explores how the international community can move toward a more humane future. Working at a range of geographic scales and locations, contributors examine concrete and ideological connections among prisons, migration policing and detention, border fortification, and militarization. They challenge the idea that prisons and borders create safety, security, and order, showing that they can be forms of coercive mobility that separate loved ones, disempower communities, and increase shared harms of poverty. Walls and cages can also fortify wealth and power inequalities, racism, and gender and sexual oppression. As governments increasingly rely on criminalization and violent measures of exclusion and containment, strategies for achieving change are essential. Beyond Walls and Cages develops abolitionist, no borders, and decolonial analyses and methods for social change, showing how seemingly disconnected forms of state violence are interconnected. Creating a more just and free world--whether in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, the Morocco-Spain region, South Africa, Montana, or Philadelphia--requires that people who are most affected become central to building alternatives to global crosscurrents of criminalization and militarization. Contributors: Olga Aksyutina, Stokely Baksh, Cynthia Bejarano, Anne Bonds, Borderlands Autonomist, Collective, Andrew Burridge, Irina Contreras, Renee Feltz, Luis A. Fernandez, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Amy Gottlieb, Gael Guevara, Zoe Hammer, Julianne Hing, Subhash Kateel, Jodie M. Lawston, Bob Libal, Jenna M. Loyd, Lauren Martin, Laura McTighe, Matt Mitchelson, Maria Cristina Morales, Alison Mountz, Ruben R. Murillo, Joseph Nevins, Nicole Porter, Joshua M. Price, Said Saddiki, Micol Seigel, Rashad Shabazz, Christopher Stenken, Proma Tagore, Margo Tamez, Elizabeth Vargas, Monica W. Varsanyi, Mariana Viturro, Harsha Walia, Seth Freed Wessler.