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62 reviews for:
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
4.4 AVERAGE
62 reviews for:
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
4.4 AVERAGE
I’m going to read it later! It’s for my research paper and im not in the mood right now.
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
To think this was Gilmore’s first book - a detailed and unique analysis of California’s political economy and geographies of labor, containment, and punishment. Been meaning to read this one for a minute but it overlaps with my own interests in more ways than I realized. Some chapters are more dense than others but it goes into questions of class, history, race, place, and time. It definitely feels like a primer and will look further into the notes for guidance on where to continue this reading.
“If we take to heart the fact that we make places, things, and selves, but not under conditions of our own choosing, then it is easier to take the risk of conceiving change as something both short of and longer than a single cataclysmic event. Indeed, the chronicles of revolutions all show how persistent small changes, and altogether unexpected consolidations, added up to enough weight, over time and space, to cause a break with the old order.”
“If we take to heart the fact that we make places, things, and selves, but not under conditions of our own choosing, then it is easier to take the risk of conceiving change as something both short of and longer than a single cataclysmic event. Indeed, the chronicles of revolutions all show how persistent small changes, and altogether unexpected consolidations, added up to enough weight, over time and space, to cause a break with the old order.”
Good and interesting book, glad I read it, I feel that I still don't quite grasp the reason that CA in particular had the huge boom in prison industry vs. every other state and place-- I think the book links it to the three-strikes laws and also does some dives on the incentives of towns to become prison towns, which were intriguing. I would def recommend to someone smarter and with more background knowledge on this than me but I still feel like i got a lot out of it
PS I had this on my list for like 2 years but then they released an audiobook this summer- it wasn't GREAT on audio but way better than nothing so thank you publishers
PS I had this on my list for like 2 years but then they released an audiobook this summer- it wasn't GREAT on audio but way better than nothing so thank you publishers
Honestly just couldn’t get into this. It seemed like a good read, but I was specifically looking for an audiobook to listen to, and this one didn’t hold my attention.
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
It is through prosecutorial use of the "wobble" [(offenses that can be charged as misdemeanors or as felonies)] that defendants whose controlling offense is shoplifting an expensive item have been sentenced to eight years (second strike) or twenty-five years to life without possibility of parole (third strike).Over the years, I've developed many reasons to read, many of them inextricably caught up in raisons d'être as my capabilities for self-sufficiency/survival have waned and waxed. One phrase that's stuck with me circumscribes my efforts in reading nonfiction: to nothing more and nothing less than to solve the murder mystery of the world. It is not the murder of the CEOs or the celebrities, but the calculus of the board rooms lived out in the denial of coverage for the hundreds of thousands: murder as infrastructure, compromise, the child at the heart of Omelas. In this, I have ranged far and wide, as to this day it is still easier for me to reach for an intercontinental study on oppression than to delve into the rancoring skeletons, one of them my own, listlessly moaning just beyond my apartment walls. When this book showed up, I was more than a little excited: here was a piece that promised to drive at the heart of a "liberal" fantasy so busy contending with a Soviet dust mote as to ignore the beam in its own eye. Fortunes played out as they will, and I found my first accessible copy at the Santa Clara County Library, former residence of mine and heartland of the Silicon Valley specter that I have spent at least a decade ideologically decoupling myself from. A stone in a sling, then, against the veritable Goliath.
[W]ithin California, counties that aggressively use mandatory sentencing, such as the notoriously harsh "three strikes" law, have experienced feebler decreases in crime than counties that use the law sparingly.
While [the Task Force on Youth Gang Violence] had stretched the analysis of gang violence to encompass suicidal propensities among white middle-class "Heavy Metal" and "Satanic" gangs, the task force absolutely ignored, for instance, the growing skinhead and neo-Nazi gangs concentrated in the Southland.
The council justified the expense [of hiring a plain-clothes policemen as career and substance abuse counselor instead of a guidance counselor] by treating secondary school guidance—rather than secondary schooling— as crime control.
The statistical branch is not directed to lie, but it is directed to use criteria and parameters that always reinforce claims of imminent shortage [of prison beds].
California's white supremacist, anti-capital Workingmen's Party (1887-80), which emerged briefly from the economic strife of the 1870s, left as its principle legacy the 1882 federal law excluding Chinese immigration[.]
Certainly, the university had been struggling to transform its image from that of a product of Progressive Era-through-Cold War social welfare activism to that of a competitive knowledge factory increasingly responsive to market forces [.] To that end, in 1995 the Regents of the University of California formally shed affirmative action over the objections of faculty, staff, students, and senior administration at the university's nine campuses, because, in the race-neutral language of racism, affirmative action is an inefficient (nonmarket) mode of resource allocation.
In the early 1980s, white corrections professionals debated whether demographically diversifying corrections personnel, especially guards, might not help maintain peace and thus enhance security in prisons' increasingly caging person of color. The alternate view was that racial and ethnic identification would have a stronger pull on a diverse workforce than loyalty to the state [...] The forces for diversity won out in many jurisdictions; and in California, even while the University of California was preparing to void affirmative action, every piece of prison legislation and regulation that involved expanding the CDC explicitly stipulated that minorities (people of color and white women) be actively sought out to join the ranks at all levels.
I can't even begin to describe how powerful this book is. My library copy is currently stuffed with almost two receipts' worth of bookmarks for post-read reviewing purposes, and it's doubtful that I'm going to have the energy to do it all justice. Of course, 'powerful' and 'universal' are very different concepts, so unless you're a fellow Californian and/or extremely deep into the logistics of the US prison industrial complex, you're going to have a hell of a time comprehending just what Gilmore is doing here. However, if you have the slightest inclination towards social justice in this genocidal settler state we call a country, you have to at least flip through this using its generous endnotes/index/bibliography. I guarantee you, the chance of you finding one or two things that send you on your revolutionary paradigm shifting way is so extraordinarily high that even flipping open the book to a random page and randomly sticking your finger down is worth the effort of acquisition.
The outcome in cotton's favor resulted in part from how the overarching New Deal Labor compromise had operationalized reformist politics by renovating structures of the racial state: the division of the rights to organize and bargain between agricultural and non-agricultural workers was also a normative (although by no means absolute) division of rights between workers of colors and white workers [.]
For voters, the crisis centers on how to ensure the surplus population, who rebelled in 1965 and 1992, is contained, if not deported. In tightening labor markets through deportation of reserve labor force cadres to prison or abroad, fear-driven voter-made laws may seem contradictory for capitalism[;] but the contradiction may only be an illusion when employers are able to exploit actual and implied undocumented workers' political powerlessness.
Proposition 13 shielded real property from periodic reassessment and set a maximum tax rate, thus depriving municipal governments of a prime source of revenue [; t]he compensatory implementation of regressive taxes such as sales tax and user fees helped ensure that as local governments drew down their reserves and tightened their belts, the poor would have higher relative costs and fewer services than their richer neighbors.
Everyone's hair stands on end when I claim that Proposition 13 was "labor's" round of disinvestment in the state. It is true that landlords, led by wealthy apartment building owners, bankrolled the proposition. However, it would be naïve to ignore the fact that for most of the people who voted for Proposition 13, their homes were their chief asset; they were wage and salary workers with nothing else to fall back on and much to lose. They decided that protecting their wealth was eminently sensible in a period when double-digit inflation and unemployment made every work wonder how else she might envision retirement security.
In 1973, one in 944 people in California was in prison. In 2000, one in 213 people in California was in prison. In 2023, one in 323 people in California was in prison. Gilmore takes on this bloat of people, policing, and power in self proclaimed 'blue supermajority' state through 19th c. white supremacist labor unions and 21st c. antiracist nonprofits, corporate water fights and military industrial contests, deindustrialization and the question of what happens when one has too much of the (wrong) land, too much of the (wrong) people, and ultimately too much of the (wrong) problem. Now, this is a narrative weaving together myriad strains of thought both institutionalized and community grown, and I wouldn't blame you for finding that Gilmore didn't quite answer the questions you yourself were asking about prisons, or globalization, or what that one city council's weighing in on a CDC(R) (California Department of Corrections (and Rehabilitation, added after this book's publication) issue has to do with your own ability to get a job, buy a house, make your commute, see your loved ones at home rather than in prison.
Indeed, Bernice perceived what had once been a state-identified chink in its own armor a generation earlier, when the first set of postwar federal antigang street crime acts was enacted between 1968 and 1970. At that time, law enforcement hesitated to exercise the statues because of civil rights concerns—especially in the area of discriminatory prosecution. However, more than two decades of political-economic crisis, coupled with intensive and extensive crime sensationalism in the media (political campaigns, news programming, reality-based shows, movies, and television series), had produced the notion that some people's rights should be restricted based on prior patterns of behavior, which was no perceived as common sense. [The Willie Horton syndrome, which I am tempted to call rational choice fascism.]
Prison development has had the intended, although rarely realized, effect of providing jobs, and therefore supplementing household incomes for workers, who presumable would be less likely to organize for jobs, higher wages, or radical goods, such as land reform, that can be gained only at capital's expense [.] Rather, the actual and almost dispossessed [...] have in this instance, as in so many others, been deflected to petitioning the state for benefits within the narrowing scope of prison development and related opportunities.
But as with the lack of critique concerning the need for more prisons, there was no discussion, either, about what it would mean for a small city dominated by a single-industry oligopoly to deal with inequality by bringing in an enormous new employer outside the direct control of anybody; nor did people ponder what might happen should the prison fail to do the economic job.
The obvious contradiction in using donated labor for public works in a town plagued by unemployment is underscored by the fact that at that time the CDC "valued" prisoner labor at $7/hour, thirty-five cents above the average Corcoran hourly wage.
Well, I personally am now aware of just how the racial demographics of my pre-K to master's degree educational tract were modeled to be pleasing to the white/model minority eye, how the usual fearmongering led voters to approve protections for same sex marriage while failing to ban slavery, and how the state has absolved itself of caring for its most desperate in the age of NAFTA and technofeudalism. What I valued most, though, was when, at the end of detailing all the sordidly heartless practices of state senators, judges, corporate bureaucrats, and retired police officers, Gilmore turned around and told the history of grassroots organizing conducted by those the state of California would love nothing more than to render anathema: working class Black women bonding across racial and political divides (Communism, anyone?) for the simple reason of refusing to accept their shared stories of incarcerated family and community members lying down. All that education that the state has, all that money, all that murder, and sometimes, it takes a Black woman remembering every acrid word dropping from the prosecutor's lips to move the mountain sitting between her and her child.
Fresno County rolled out a Juvenile Jail Complex in 2003; the four-stage project will not be completed until 2040, meaning the county planned a jail for children whose parents had not yet been born.
While the expansion of industrialized punishment in California has a relentless intensity, it is important not to misread the structural as also somehow inevitable. Industrialized punishment produces its own contradictions[.]
Make no mistake: Gilmore does not use the word 'gulag' lightly. If you find yourself exhausted after five pages of reading this, feel free to skip around and pick out what you can. We live in a world that feeds off your lack of ability to see certain others as fully human, and when said folks are carted off out of sight just after they leave the playground, the distance between you and them becomes the space between you and the moon. What you need to understand lies at one of Gilmore's more powerful tenets of her thesis: California's fate as a prison industrial complex is no guarantee, and the instability that has hounded it from its beginnings has only grown with each cycle of attention and sustained rejection the burgeoning generations have paid it. As such, the question is not one of you versus prisons, but you verses the problems that kyriarchical state crafters have chosen to combat with prisons. When the wall comes down and your fellow citizens walk free into lands left to rot and minds left to founder, what social formations, what sustainable practices, what currencies of trade will you value, and how will you contend with the question of those who are left behind? For it need not be that, in this 'civilization' of ours, certain groups pay and are paid top dollar to hunt certain other groups for sport. Think about the value of a human life with sufficient land, learning, and liberty. Then go from there.
Bailiffs, prosecutors, public defenders, and judges began to recognize that, in Bernice Hatfield's words, "nice Negro ladies were big handbags" were watching and noting. Indeed, some judges ordered the women not to write while court was in session [...] Judges who issued such orders got more, rather than fewer, observers in their courtrooms. Some mothers who had difficulty with the written word would simply pretend to take notes and rely on their substantial memories to reconstruct events at the end of the legal day.Five stars, ten stars, a hundred stars. This is the kind of book that makes life one living, and as someone nearly through his first week of chemo, I'd say I'd have a keener insight into that than most.
The point is not to romanticize gangs, but rather to emphasize that all social formations—even stranded communities in deindustrialized urban centers—develop some means for maintaining order; sometimes it is necessary to look beneath the surface of apparent disorder to grasp the logic of a particular system of order.
Solidarity increased with increased knowledge about the complexity of how power blocs have built the new state by building prisons. Thus an individual police precinct house no longer loomed as the total presence of the state, shrinking back toward its real position—the neighborhood outpost of what both ROCers [(Mothers Reclaiming Our Children)] and FACTS [(Families to Amend California's Three Strikes)] characterized as a military occupation. If it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes a movement to undo an occupation.
A magnificent, incredibly researched, inspiring book that I will likely be returning to for years to come.
challenging
informative
slow-paced