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Title: Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads)
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| Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads) by University of California Press Stability out of Instability: "The Economics of Race" versus "The Economics of Prisons" | The new California prison system of the 1980s and 1990s was constructed deliberately - but not conspiratorially - of surpluses that were not put back to work in other ways. Make no mistake: private building was and is not the inevitable outcome of these surpluses. It did, however, put certain state capacities into motion, make use of a lot of idle land, get capital invested via public debt, and take more than 160,000 low-wage workers of the streets (Gilmore 68).
The state registers its indifference in the growing dropout rate - as high as 63-79 percent in some Black and Latino high schools (Oliver et al. 1993; cf. Horton and Friere 1990). Changes in public policy with respect to the working poor have contributed to the abandonment of entire segments of labor, with the result that the "social safety net has been replaced by a criminal dragnet" (Oliver et al. 1993: 126). Examining California by region, Dan Walters ([1986] 1992) arrived at similar findings for all the state's metropolitan areas (Gilmore 77).
If what Gilmore says above is true, I won't even try to hedge, the wrong people are behind bars. When reading Golden Gulag I am reminded of a short story: Three generations of family members are making a roast. Dad cuts the edges and sticks it in the pre-heated oven - 350 degrees. Son asks, "Dad, why do you cut off the edges?" To whit, dad replies "Son, I really don't know - that was the way grandpa used to do it." The son, looking outside the box in deliberating the absurdity of the whole thing, went to ask his grandfather about the whole business. Grandpa tells him that, "Back in the day, the ovens where too small to fit a roast, so I cut of the edges to make them fit - pretty clever, eh?" The son goes back to his dad and reports that all this time, there was no real need to trim the edges and to consider the waste of all these years. In our fable, the father recognizes the error of his ways and gives his son a big hug for creative thought, genuine concern, and an eye to the future. Right, then I woke up.
Gilmore, starting out with obscure economic jargon, sets us up to think this is going to be purely about economics - it is and it is not. Gilmore, in Golden Gulag does three things: she outlines the economics of the prison, call to question the legal moves to populate the new prisons, and offers a very maternal alternative solution. The first section describes the confluence of factors that resulted in the massive constructions of prisons in California and the resources made available to move the system along (Gilmore 30 - 86). The second section calls to question the lack of creativity in the mobilization of these resources. Oliver (as quoted in Gilmore) argues that the "social safety net has been replaced by a criminal dragnet" (Gilmore 77). Finally, in the third section, Gilmore outlines, like the son in our story above who looks outside the box, tries to undermine mental rigidity, greed, and the institutional momentum of this monster through the stories of mothers reclaiming their children (Gilmore 181 - 240).
Gilmore starts out by outlining the confluence of factors - primarily economic - that resulted in what she outlines as "four surpluses" (Gilmore 58 - 86). Although discrete and independent, a resultant surplus of capital, land, labor, and capacity all items working in tandem produced what was seen as a crisis that needed to be resolved. The transition [or where we went wrong], Gilmore argues began, "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" (Gilmore 149). In the eyes of the lawmakers and economists, a crisis has developed concerning what to do with the excess - the fix, was prison. Along the same lines as the dad in our fable, the California government decided to trim of sides of the roast - trim our resources that is. The problem is not in the assessment of the problem of surplus - that was all nice and dandy. The problem is the assessment of the situation and resultant solution. With the excess in surplus labor - the most vulnerable component - California was beginning to build its internal "pivot point" (Gilmore 71) and result in what Marx argues is a "reserve army of labor" (Gilmore 71). Instead of seeing it as an opportunity what instead was invented was a crisis. What to do with all this excess money? What do we do with this ability to build surplus capital through debt?
In the second section of the book, Gilmore provides an answer to the question of what was done to deal with this excess - create a crisis. Mind you, as she outlines, when there is a crisis there is the resultant need to stabilize - that is not always a bad thing. However, in this case crime was seen as the resultant crisis - the result of excesses - mainly in population. So, in the uncreative "lets cut the edges off" attitude, people with a need for stability, financial stability - that is, decided that the best solution is to get tough on crime. The problem is, there is a crisis - but the crisis is not crime - it is inequity. Truth be told, the resources should be redirected in a different way. Instead of building new prisons and finding ways to fill them up, resources should be directed to the prevention of crime through the development of cultural capital in inner cities to build capacity and flexibility so that the population can be more mobile, more flexible. That would however demand of the body politic to stop the institutional momentum of looking at the problem in a simplistic way. Good luck.
Now, let me backtrack a little... my last statements suggest that I am in agreement with the folks that Gilmore is critiquing. I don't think that there is a crime wave and that we need to stop incarcerating criminals - on the contrary I am simply riffing along Gilmore's critique but my solution would be very different - but that is the subject for the section below. In this section, I want to drive the point home that crime was not the issue but that the institution of the three strikes rule allowed for the increase in the population of the prisons and to move the "reserve army of labor" into concentration camps. The problem is not excess supply; it is a lack of creativity to maximize the utility of those resources. We moved from a welfare state to a prison state - now we need to move back.
Gilmore provides a solution here in her Mothers Reclaim Our Children chapter. She argues that looking at the world from the eyes of Gilda and Barbara through the reeducation of our children is a solution to institutional dehumanization (Gilmore 243). To a limited degree, I agree. However, I think she should have taken her initial economic trajectory and stuck with it. I would argue that prison as a solution is the most inefficient economic solution that one could ever imagine. By instituting the three strikes law to criminalize acts that were once not really criminal, to put in the hands the arbitrary decision to place "wobblers" as either felons or designating the same act as a misdemeanor (Gilmore 108, 224-227, and 264) the California government placed in motion one of the worst economic and social engineering plans akin to the Enron debacle and the resultant power crisis.
Here is my main argument - with the institution of the three strikes rule and the confluence of the surpluses as well the resultant "invented" crisis of crime that this disgusting rush to build prisons is informed by - we are losing a generation. We are losing a generation that could have been granted their rights to full development in a liberal system [in the truest sense of the word] where the main objective and the right of the individual is free and unfettered rights and resources to be as developed as he/she can be. Let us not split hairs and talk about what "full development" or "liberal" "really" means. Know that the alternative, incarceration is a grim replacement to young men and women - mostly of color - that are languishing in the prisons as felons because they allegedly stole razor blades. What a waste of a life, what a waste of resources and opportunity, what a waste of time - all of which we will never be able to recover and a turnaround we may never be able to effect. So, for those who saw this solution as a result an invented crisis - an indictment should be leveled.
I am not arguing, as I am sure Gilmore and Foucault before her would argue - that we should let the worst of the worst run free. But closer examination of the situation lends itself to a prison system that disciplines and punishes that is a slave to profit. The rise of private prisons is only the tip of the iceberg and a product of globalization gone mad. It is the constructions of multi-million dollar facilities and the mad rush to populate them that looms large. I am not taking away from the efforts of Gilmore et al with Mothers ROC and other creative measures to ameliorate the situation. The key though is to attack the dysfunctional governmental policy and social engineering that posits that we need to incarcerate our young men and women in the name of profit.
What is to be done? The mobilization of government resources and the dash for profit should be directed at institutions that can, arguably through, hyper-competition, generate profit to recycle value back into the community. Schools, medical care, community services, and businesses, which enhance rather than destroy people, are part of the solution. The development of entrepreneurs in a local sphere and the development and availability of capital to the same will rebuilt America. I know... I sound like an apologetic capitalist. Big business is killing the economy (now I sound like a communist) but, ironically, the rebuilding of the middle class is an alternative solution to a policy that is eroding the same and making a very few rich and making the rest really poor. I am certainly not advocating a sense of anarchy but to infuse into the minds of the lucid that we stop cutting the edges of the roast and focus on cooking the whole roast and not wasting the sides. Efficiencies can, and have in the past, be had - but it won't if we keep finding reasons to discipline and punish, effect institutional momentum through the economics of race and the prison, but effect the economics of people. I argue - we should stop cutting the edges... bon appétit.
Miguel Llora | | Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads) by University of California Press Lots of Good Stuff | | As a researcher in criminology and recidivism, this book proved to be very helpful! | | Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads) by University of California Press bought for another | i purchased for a friend who is an inmate
he has praised the book to me | | Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads) by University of California Press A disappointment | This book could have used an editor. I struggled through 200 of the 250 pages (before the notes at the end) before giving up. I was hoping to read an inside account of how the prison unions gained power to promote the building of more prisons, or perhaps an in-depth review of how politicians manipulated the public to be tough on crime. Instead, I find a hard to follow mish-mash of various vaguely related topics (farm worker struggles in the central valley, problems in Latin America, etc.). Although never outright stated, it seems her main conclusion is that California built all these prisons, and then toughened the laws to fill them, because the state wanted to develop land in rural areas. Huh? Could it be that that instead no one else wanted prisons near them, and rural locations were the only place they would be accepted, partly because locals were more interested in the prison jobs? And if this is the conclusion, one would think there would be some analysis disproving that it wasn't politicians getting tough on crime first, and overcrowding then driving the building of prisons in rural areas, rather than the other way around.
The other problem is that the writing appears like someone trying to sound important, rather than trying to explain something. The sentence structure was difficult to follow, with too many adjectives, etc. Here is an example from page 54: "The pivotal verb 'to reproduce' signifies the broad array of political, economic, cultural, and biological capacities a society uses to renew itself daily, seasonally, generationally." Also, the constant quotes in the middle of the text, apparently to give the air of authority missing in the text itself, was distracting. Why not use footnotes? An example from page 43: "The location of defense and other high-technology jobs (Soja 1989; Oliver et al. 1993) exacerbated the state's residential and income segregation (Walters 1992; Mike Davis 1990; Bullard et al. 1994).
There are a few good points buried in this book. For example, the point that California politicians got tough on crime at a time when crime had already started to decline for two years. Or the fact that the definition of crime determines how many criminals there are - an increasing crime rate doesn't necessarily mean an increase in crime, it can simply reflect a change in the definition of what is a crime (possession of smaller amounts of drugs, etc.). Or that the determinate sentencing we now have was partly a result of prisoners suing to be treated equally under the parole rules, with a very unintended consequence. I wish the book had focused on aspects like these, and had been written in easier to follow language.
| | Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads) by University of California Press An excellent book...a must read! | | Ruthie Gilmore's examination of California's prison-industrial complex paints a sobering portrait of the effects of the state's post-industrial decline in the past quarter century. Supplemented by numerous charts, maps, and statistics, Gilmore argues that the massive prison-building project that began in the early 1980s was rooted in earlier developments, namely the failure of the "welfare-warfare state" to absorb the numerous surpluses created by political and economic restructuring. Combining theory and historical-sociological analysis, this highly readable book is at once depressing and optimistic; it lays out the facts and guidelines for pursuing meaningful, antiracist struggles against the systemic dehumanization of immigrants, low-wage workers, and youths of color that continues to characterize U.S. political culture. | | Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads) by University of California Press Product Description | 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 off 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. |
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