Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California » (1st Edition)

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance, one of the most important national anti-prison organizations in the United States.

"A magnificent analysis of the political economy of superincarceration and the slave plantations that California calls prisons."—Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear

"Golden Gulag is a deeply necessary book for our times. Gilmore digs beneath the easy answers to the more troubling causes of a political consensus that prisons are the only solution to all urban and rural ills."—Nayan Shah, author of Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

"Ruth Gilmore lays bare the diabolical logic of neoliberal incarceration. She shows us that the prison is a symptom of the decline of our civilization, how the California Nightmare has produced its disposable population. Gilmore's depressingly hopeful analysis is a wake-up call for our somnolence."—Vijay Prashad, author of Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare

Preface and Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

Prologue: The Bus
1.
Introduction
2. The California Political Economy
3. The Prison Fix
4. Crime, Croplands, and Capitalism
5. Mothers Reclaiming Our Children
6. What Is to Be Done?
Epilogue: Another Bus

Notes