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Crime and punishment -- California's conundrum / Behind the state's prison boom Page 1 of 3

Crime and punishment -- California's conundrum


Behind the state's prison boom
Reviewed by Tony Platt
Sunday, December 31, 2006

Golden Gulag

Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California

By Ruth Wilson Gilmore

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS; 388 Pages; $19.95 PAPERBACK

California may lag behind many other states in high school graduation rates, welfare benefits and
investment in public health, but when it comes to punishment, we rank at or near the top. We've
crammed 173,000 convicts into the nation's largest prison system, designed to house at least one-
third less. Our prison suicide and recidivism rates approach twice the national average. And we
have one of the most extravagant penal systems in the country, costing taxpayers about the same as
the state spends on higher education.

In the mid-1970s, under pressure from Ronald Reagan and the Board of Regents, the University of
California closed Berkeley's School of Criminology. Several colleagues and I lost our jobs, but more
important, California lost an opportunity to hear voices of opposition to the unregulated police-
industrial complex launched during the Nixon presidency (1969-1974). By 1977, as public spending
on policing peaked, national and local priorities shifted to incarceration, with California in the
vanguard.

Today, 90 penitentiaries, small prisons and camps stretch across 900 miles of the fifth-largest
economy in the world. It hasn't always been this way. Between 1852 and 1964, California built only
12 prisons. Since 1984, the state has erected 43 penal institutions, making it a global leader in
prison construction.

Most of the new prisons have been built in out-of-the way rural areas, making it easier to lose sight
of the humanity of the people we warehouse: mostly men (93 percent), mostly Latinos and African
Americans (two-thirds), mostly from big cities (60 percent from Los Angeles) and mostly
unemployed or the working poor.

Before the Clinton presidency, we used to hear national leaders debate the merits of punishment

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versus rehabilitation. But after the Democratic Party joined its Republican counterpart on the low
road, politicians of both parties now churn out the same law-and-order platitudes. Occasionally a
major scandal will appear in the headlines, such as the recent receivership imposed by a San
Francisco federal judge on a prison health care system that violates the U.S. Constitution. But you
wouldn't have known from California's gubernatorial race that the prison system is the shame of
our state, testimony to the persistence of institutionalized racism, the widening economic divide
and the gutting of social programs.

How and why this happened in California is the simple question explored in complex ways in the
long-awaited "Golden Gulag." Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a geographer and professor at the University
of Southern California, is an experienced activist in the anti-prison movement, and she has written
an impressive first book that stands as a model of politically engaged scholarship and an
indictment of California's "archipelago of concrete and steel cages."

Gilmore begins by swatting away the usual cliches about crime and punishment. The right claims
that prisons reduce crime, but California's crime rate was decreasing before the prison boom took
off. The left argues that prisons are the "new slavery," designed to provide cheap labor to
mercenary corporations, but, Gilmore notes, "very few prisoners work for anybody while they're
locked up." Others have suggested that the 54,000-strong California Correctional Peace Officers'
Association, with its hefty political war chest, calls the shots in Sacramento. But the guards' union
didn't have enough clout even to stop the governor from recently deciding to transfer 5,000
prisoners to private prisons as far away as Tennessee to alleviate the crowding crisis.

Having dispatched the prevailing common wisdom, "Golden Gulag" digs deeply into the issues. In
this sophisticated, interdisciplinary study, brimming with new ideas, political savvy and moral
urgency, Gilmore takes us on a demanding intellectual exploration of California's economic,
political, spatial and cultural history. To understand the prison situation, she tells us, we need to
understand four interconnected developments, none of which has made people feel more secure in
their everyday lives.

First, most of the new prisons were built on formerly irrigated agricultural lands and in regions
seeking to resuscitate their depressed economies. Second, the state benefited landowners,
construction and utility companies by borrowing from public funds to finance the prison boom.
The small towns that hoped for a bonanza, Gilmore says, have been victimized by a boondoggle.
Third, changes in California's economy, combined with cuts in social programs, have aggravated
chronic unemployment among urban low-wage workers, most of whom are Latino and African
American. Finally, the majority of California's politicians jumped on the law-and-order bandwagon
to promote "sentence-enhancing legislation" in the 1980s, followed in 1994 by public endorsement
of the "three strikes" policy. It wasn't hard to quickly fill up the new concrete cages until they were
overflowing in 2006.

This damning portrait would be depressing indeed if not for the voices of opposition and resistance

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permeating "Golden Gulag" from the first to last page. Drawing upon her own experiences in this
movement, Gilmore provides us with a richly textured account of how working-class women of
color and rural and urban activists have begun to challenge California's penal colony. She
introduces us to the unsung heroes of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, who, like their
counterparts in Argentina, represent a public conscience. "A principled sense of mortal urgency,"
Gilmore writes, "inspires hope."

There are a few disappointments. Gilmore's history begins in the late 20th century; we would have
benefited from learning about how California's original 19th century prisons overflowed with
Chinese prisoners and other working-class convicts, all of whom were forced to work under
grueling conditions for agricultural employers or build the state's infrastructure. Stylistically, some
of "Golden Gulag's" denser theoretical passages could be thinned, and some readers might need a
map to guide them on a journey that takes many important detours.

But these concerns in no way diminish the originality of this groundbreaking book. In the past
century there were only a handful of innovative writers who prodded us to think deeply and
imaginatively about crime and punishment in the modern world. Topping my list are Georg Rusche
and Otto Kirchheimer's "Punishment and Social Structure" (1939), Erving Goffman's
"Asylums" (1961), Michel Foucault's "Discipline & Punish" (1977), Stuart Hall's "Policing the
Crisis" (1978) and Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" (1990). Now, if you want to understand why
progressive California leads the Western world with its regressive system of punishment, Gilmore's
"Golden Gulag" is the first must-read book of the 21st century.

Tony Platt is professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento. His latest book is
"Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, From Patton's Trophy to Public
Memorial" (Paradigm Publishers, 2006).

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This article appeared on page M - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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