Golden Gulag

The book opens late in the twentieth century with a bus carrying 40 women, men, and children departing a church parking lot in South Central Los Angeles at midnight, bound for Sacramento. The riders are employed, disabled, or retired working people with little discretionary income, traveling to advocate for relatives serving long sentences in California's prisons. As the bus passes through the Central Valley, intensely golden glows mark new prisons rising from farmland. In Sacramento, the riders join allies for a rally and a legislative hearing, trying to amend the state's "three strikes" law, a repeat-offender statute imposing dramatically longer prison terms, while the prison guards' union lobbies against reform.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a scholar-activist and geographer, uses this journey to investigate how and why California carried out what government analysts called "the biggest . . . in the history of the world" (5). The book originated in research undertaken in 1992 and 1994 on behalf of mostly African American mothers in Los Angeles who sought to understand the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention (STEP) Act of 1988, which mandated identification of gang members and enhanced their sentences, and the three strikes law. The research shifted the mothers toward broader questions: Why prisons? Why now? Why so many people of color? Why so far from prisoners' homes?

Gilmore presents key facts. California's prisoner population grew nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000, even though crime rates peaked in 1980 and declined thereafter. African Americans and Latinos comprised two-thirds of the roughly 160,000 prisoners, most from urban cores. More than half had steady employment before arrest. Since 1984, the state built 23 major new prisons, having constructed only 12 in the previous century. Corrections spending rose from 2 percent of the general fund to nearly 8 percent, making the California Department of Corrections (CDC) the state's largest agency.

Gilmore rejects the dominant explanation that crime went up, authorities cracked down, and crime came down. The actual sequence, she argues, differed: Crime went up, crime came down, and then the crackdown began. She examines counter-explanations including racial cleansing, the "new slavery" thesis, private prison profits, and rural job creation, finding each insufficient. Her central argument is that prisons are partial geographical solutions to political-economic crises, organized by a state itself in crisis. She defines racism as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death" (28) and contends that prison expansion is a new iteration of this process.

The book's longest chapter traces California's political economy from the nineteenth century through the 1990s, documenting how Anglo power brokers acquired Mexican-owned estates cheaply, how federal subsidies underwrote railroad development, and how the state's diverse labor force was organized into racial hierarchies. World War II transformed the state through military-industrial investment, drawing millions of workers including several hundred thousand African Americans. Postwar California became the exemplary "military Keynesian" state, anchoring its economy in defense spending. The system fractured around 1967 to 1968 as profit rates declined and recession hit. Drought, chronic unemployment, and the 1978 Proposition 13 taxpayers' revolt deepened the crisis. High-wage manufacturing gave way to low-wage work, and Governors George Deukmejian (1982 to 1990) and Pete Wilson (1990 to 1998) consolidated their administrations around anticrime politics while cutting the social safety net.

From this history, Gilmore identifies four surpluses that became the raw materials for prison expansion. Surplus finance capital resulted from declining profit rates that shifted investment into financial instruments. Surplus land emerged as drought, debt, and development took roughly 100,000 irrigated acres out of production annually. A relative surplus population, meaning workers at the extreme edges of or completely outside restructured labor markets, grew as the combined total of unemployed and imprisoned Californians averaged about 1 million. Surplus state capacity arose as the welfare state's bureaucratic and fiscal tools outlasted its legitimacy, becoming available for redirection.

Gilmore details how these surpluses combined into a prison fix. In 1977, California ended its commitment to rehabilitation, declaring the purpose of imprisonment to be punishment. Under Deukmejian, the administration embraced incapacitation, the strategy of preventing crime by physically removing people from society. The legislature exempted the CDC from competitive bidding. To finance expansion, underwriter Frederic Prager and associate Tom Dumphy devised lease revenue bonds that bypassed voter approval. State debt for prison construction expanded from $763 million to $4.9 billion in less than a decade.

A fierce fight over a proposed prison in East Los Angeles, where neighborhood mothers organized opposition, prompted the CDC to target rural communities instead. Struggling towns sent delegations to Sacramento, and large landholders sold surplus acres at inflated prices. Eighteen of the 24 new prisons were built on formerly irrigated agricultural land. The state also intensified criminalization through new felony classifications, mandatory drug sentences, the STEP Act, and the three strikes law. About 70 percent of parolees were returned to prison without new convictions, and by 1995, more than half of new commitments were for nonviolent offenses.

A case study of Corcoran, a small city in Kings County, illustrates these dynamics locally. Kings County ranked among the wealthiest agricultural counties by capital investment yet near the bottom in per capita income because of concentrated landownership in the cotton industry. When drought and debt took roughly 150,000 irrigated acres out of production between 1982 and 1992, seasonal unemployment ran 30 to 50 percent. In 1985, the county voted unanimously to seek a prison, and the CDC bought land from the J. G. Boswell Company, the dominant cotton firm, at an estimated 10 times the farmland price. Fewer than 10 percent of prison jobs went to local residents, CDC employees commuted from elsewhere, and poverty continued rising.

Gilmore then turns to Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC), a grassroots organization formed in South Central Los Angeles in November 1992. The group originated from the November 1991 police shooting of George Noyes at the Imperial Courts housing project. Noyes's cousins, Gilbert and Jocelyn Jones, along with their mother Barbara Meredith, organized among neighborhood women. Meredith brokered a gang truce for the funeral that extended into the broader Los Angeles gang truce of March 29, 1992. Co-founded by Meredith and veteran activist Francie Arbol, Mothers ROC developed practices including court monitoring, legal workshops, and cooperative case research.

Through members' cases, the group discovered how the STEP Act and the three strikes law created categories of people facing drastically different legal consequences. Bernice Hatfield's teenage son was coerced into a 19-year plea bargain after being listed in the state's gang database, despite contradictory testimony and no physical evidence. Pearl Daye's son faced 25 years to life for allegedly shoplifting razor blades because of prior convictions. The mothers arrived at a formulation: There are two laws, one for Black people and one for white people, but you do not have to be Black to be prosecuted under Black law. They refused to endorse a proposed private prison, insisting they would not solve job losses by imprisoning half the population. Internal tensions eventually split the group into the youth-oriented Mothers ROC and Families to Amend California's Three Strikes (FACTS), which expanded statewide.

In the final chapter, Gilmore proposes 10 theses for activists, arguing that a new kind of state is being built on prison foundations, one that shrinks social provision while expanding coercive institutions. People can organize to redirect social wages, meaning publicly funded goods and services, to life-enhancing use. The places where prisons are built and the places prisoners come from can be understood as one political world, abandoned but not defeated. The book closes with a 2001 epilogue in which another bus departs South Central for a conference in Fresno, where rural people trying to stop the building of prisons and urban activists trying to stop the production of prisoners forge a new solidarity.