I first got my hands on the book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), by stealing it from the ‘hot trash’ cart I was pushing across the yard of Calipatria State Prison after a massive search during the oven-like summer of 2009. In those days, being a yard crew worker on a Level 4 yard was the best way to come up on some of the best contraband snatched from the population during annualized prison-wide contraband sweeps. As I pushed a heavy cart loaded down with TVs, fans, radios, metal stock, and hard-backed reference books in 121 degree heat trailed by two COs, I deftly tore the stiff cloth binding from the spine of the $55.00 version of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s book and dropped it down the front of my state-issue powder blue shirt quick-hands style.
Forever a book thief.
An early fan of Rage Against The Machine and System Of A Down, I’d chased down the writings of Fanon, Abu-Jamal, and Wacquant in the late 90s in pursuit of the logics I thought undergirded the philosophies Zach de la Rocha and Serj Tankian each sent in my direction via their music. Their liner notes have been plastered on every prison locker I’ve had for more than 30 years. Though I would come to read Thomas Mathieson’s The Politics of Abolition (1974), Fay Honey Knopp’s Instead of Prison: A Handbook for Prison Abolitionists (1976), and William de Haan’s The Politics of Redress: Crime, Punishment, and Penal Abolition (1990) – prompted by a conversation between Angela Y. Davis and Dylan Rodriguez published in Social Justice (2000) – after swimming in Gulag, Gilmore’s book framed for me the lens through which I now view California’s “prison alley,” and the larger Neo-Marxist analysis of “racial capitalism,” and its addiction to “crisis,” “extraction,” and the “political economy of punishment.”
As an incarcerated Peer Health Educator, I am paid by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to disseminate self-help information and pedagogical material to residents of the carceral state. Via the Barz Behind Bars (B3) literacy workshop I facilitate for the nonprofit Ben Free Project—which uses select works of literature from the Mellon Foundation-funded Freedom Library to improve literacy—I’ve begun to present scholarly works of historical nonfiction like Gulag to youth offenders wading in the functional literacy gap currently swallowing 38% of CDCR’s adult population who lack a high school diploma or GED, and the 52% who can’t read at a 9th grade level. Deconstructing the historicized counter-narratives about the causes and consequences of the “prisonization complex” in California has proven to capture the curiosity of many of the Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth offenders we engage in-circle.
Ours is an organizing effort rooted in the “insurgent futurity” and “self-determination” Rodriguez has written about, we’ve pursued in order to curate stakeholder conversations about what Davis described as the analysis of “why people of color predominate in prison populations throughout the world and how this structural racism is linked to the globalization of capital,” using literature. What we’ve found is that when the subject matter relates directly to the confined circumstance our surplussed community finds itself in, despite the literacy gap, the desire to understand the history of their respective cultural legacies demands that we as mentors convey this scholarship in order to provide a primer that sustains their desire to learn.
When we effectively facilitate their ability to imprint on the historical scholarship that tells their story and identifies the otherwise hidden machinery at work in our society and that desire for self-knowledge inspires them to want to read—we seed the action work that collectivizes consciousness.
Stephon, a 26 year old Black youth offender serving a thirteen year bid for drug and robbery charges, whose family has handed over to the prison system twenty-one men over the last three generations, described how Gulag taught him how “California’s prison population jumped 500 percent between 1982 and 2000, the 12 pens built between 1852 and 1964 became 23 new ones since 1984, and the CDCR became the largest state agency, using $5B in lease-rev bonds that never went before the voters for approval. This wasn’t an accident. They designed this penal colony system the same way Rockefeller designed the ‘projects’ back east. It really was a Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) in the making.”
In Gulag, Gilmore points out how, since “capital must be able to get rid of workers whose labor power is no longer desirable,” California’s broadly written “three-strikes” law, which counts nonviolent priors with no age, temporal, or jurisdictional limitations as strikes, allowed policing power to dragnet the Black and Brown citizens from urban areas. “They targeted the poor and unemployed in order to remove us, babysit us, and build a carceral economy they could use as a tax base, and a union donor they could rely on,” says Oscar, a Latinx youth offender halfway through a twenty year bid for multiple robberies. Not abiding the Keynesian welfare-state safety net caused many people of color to become the surplus redundancy of citizens formed into “deindustrialized cities,” just as the state’s Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention (STEP) Act of 1988 mandated the databasing of street gang members for enhanced sentences.
Gilmore points to finance capital, land, labor, and state capacity—four surpluses—that account for the true drivers of the PIC’s growth through cheap land sectors of depressed rural communities tied to prison construction. The state gave itself permission to double the length of prison sentences intending to fill the prisons they were building, as an economic plan.
There is a heavy dose of overt and equally nuanced political and economic theory living within Gulag that deserves a full-throated explication beyond what a mere book review or this column can convey, nearly 18 years after its publication. While contemplating “idled capacities,” and how and why “capital must be able to get rid of workers whose labor power is no longer desirable,” Gilmore foregrounded a deeper historicized theory about California’s punitive turn “grounded in the radical failures and counterrevolutionary successes of an earlier era, as exemplified by the antagonism between insurgents and counterinsurgents in 1968.”
The dimension of this particular struggle, exquisitely fleshed out by Yale University’s Elizabeth Hinton via America On Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since The 1960’s (2021), chronicles the resistance of the many communities Gilmore refers to in Gulag, and expounds on how the “criminalization of urban space” – the term coined by University of Michigan’s Heather Ann Thompson describing how a growing number of laws placed the lives of persons of color under greater police scrutiny – lives at the center of the prisonization. At the heart of the thesis that rejects the supposed violent crime justification for the punitive turn, lives the civil rights struggle and the political response thereto, in the form of the totality of state power brought to bear against it.
Be it Rockefeller’s drug laws in 1973, Attica, or the nationwide trend of increasing urban poverty and urban incarceration, “mass incarceration,” writes Thompson, “itself caused crisis and collapse in America’s inner cities.”
Careful to not, as Gilmore says, merely “recite” Gulag‘s text, but to “make a model of doing things,” we pursue the “rehearsal” she describes as noticing – “so that we can notice, and then see ourselves seeing.” Harnessing the collateral writings, journal, podcast, and law review citations we can find and excavate from EBSCO, we use our laptops to try to bring as much of Gilmore’s knowledge base into the room for our workshop peers to chew on. Our hope is that by using books to spur our peers into the pursuit of self-knowledge, we might continue to “create the abolition geography that made it impossible for the state of California to keep building prisons at the rate it had.” Though recently opting to pour hundreds of millions of tax dollars into the refurbishment of an unused furniture factory warehouse at the renamed San Quentin Prison of old, CDCR has shut down multiple prisons and discontinued its out of state prison programs.
However, those budgets haven’t been eliminated – they’ve merely been redirected toward the invisible prison complex machinating via parole and reentry services beyond the fence line – where CDCR has extended its carceral reach – projecting penal and surveillance power into the very urban spaces Thompson described. Thankfully, there is now an avalanche of carceral studies scholarship for those who care about it to devour. Unfortunately, too few thought leaders actually engage directly with the stakeholders whose plight they write about. For those living in the belly of the beast, these are the rare conversations we believe might actually save a life, if only they happened.
One day we hope to present to the more than 700,000 carceral state residents living in confinement around the U.S. who have access to a DOC-issued tablet, a long form conversation with Gilmore about abolition, prison, and the impact of her groundbreaking book that so many of us have used to frame how we think about the state power we are governed by.
Thank you Ruthie.
