Meanwhile: Devolution and Reconfiguration in the California Carceral Landscape (Ruth Gilmore)

In a wide-ranging discussion, Professor Gilmore explores the geography of the California prison system as it evolved over time.  In California as in much of the rest of the United States, a "prison-industrial complex" expanded and shifted in response to numerous factors, including social disinvestment on the part of both private capital and various levels of government; political strategizing on the part of legislators; the economic aspirations of small, rural communities; and the influence of social activism on state policy and court decisions.  Recently, there have been moves in the direction of decarceration, but this has resulted in a reconfiguration of the carceral landscape more than its diminuation or, as Professor Gilmore advocates, its outright abolishment.

"As every geographer knows, edges are also interfaces. For example, even while borders highlight the distinction between places, they also' connect places into relationships with each other and with noncontiguous places. So too with prisons: the government-organized and -funded dispersal of marginalized people from urban to rural locations suggests both that problems stretch across space in a connected way and that arenas for activism are less segregated than they seem. Viewed in this way, we can see how 'prison' is actually in the middle of the muddle that confronts all modestly educated working people and their extended communities - the global supermajority - at the dawn of the twenty-first century." — Excerpt from Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007)