Will I love Golden Gulag?

Gilmore's Golden Gulag helps us see why California is one of the wealthiest economies on the planet, but also home to the largest carceral system in the world.

She connects the evaporation of the social safety net and disruptions to stable employment by global capitalism to provide the answer: California uses prisons to absorb the surplus labor created by the greed, racism, and inequality of the global economy.

Read this book, and you will understand why, in my book, so many people I wrote about were pushed through our carceral system in California and never returned home.

This book is key to understanding the economic, political, and social drivers behind the rise of the incarceration industry, which moved on to promote and expand immigration detention using the same playbook.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore provides a powerful case study of the explosive growth of California’s prison system since the 1980s. The book traces how corporate lobbyists for the prison industry took advantage of local economic downturn and racist narratives to push new laws that massively increased the number of people incarcerated, fueling a prison boom.

While a depressing account, Gilmore leaves the reader with a sense of hope and… show more.

Along with Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore is one of the major idea shapers and strategists of abolition in the 21st century. The Golden Gulag explains in rich detail why mass incarceration was a product of the crisis of late 20th-century capitalism. She explains why the failures of free-market capitalism, the rise of the power of finance, and the undermining of the welfare state, cast prisons, and jails as the tools to address the resulting structural poverty and racism in the U.S. Unlike the other books I have selected, Gilmore’s book is not an easy read. It should be… show more.