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archytas's review
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
"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.
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.
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