Between 1982 and 2000, according to The New York Times Magazine, California built 23 new prisons and,
Gilmore found, increased the state’s prison population by 500 percent. If
prison scholars tend to focus on one angle or another of incarceration trends,
Gilmore provides the most structurally comprehensive explanations, using
California as a case study. In her 2007 book, “Golden Gulag,” she draws upon
her vast knowledge of political economy and geography to put together a
portrait of significant historical change and the drive to embark upon what, as
two California state analysts called it, “the largest prison building project
in the history of the world.” Were prisons a response to rising crime? As
Gilmore writes, “Crime went up; crime went down; we cracked down.” This
sequence, and how crime rates are measured, have been heavily debated, but if
this noncausal order is really the case, what was going on? Gilmore outlines
four categories of “surplus” to explain the prison-building boom. There was
“surplus land,” because farmers didn’t have enough water to irrigate crops, and
economic stagnation meant the land was no longer as valuable. As the California
government faced lean years, it was left with what she calls “surplus state
capacity” — government agencies that had lost their political mandate to use
funding and expertise for social welfare benefits (like schools, housing and
hospitals). In the wake of this austerity, investors specializing in public
finance found themselves with no market for projects like schools and housing
and instead used this “surplus capital” to make a market in prison bonds. And
finally, there was “surplus labor,” resulting from a population of people who,
whether from deindustrialized urban centers or languishing rural areas, had
been excluded from the economy — in other words, the people from which prison
populations nationwide are drawn.
Prisons are not a result of a desire by “bad” people,
Gilmore says, to lock up poor people and people of color. “The state did not
wake up one morning and say, ‘Let’s be mean to black people.’ All these other
things had to happen that made it turn out like this. It didn’t have to turn
out like this.” Her narrative involves a broad array of players and facts, some
direct, some indirect, some coordinated, many not: for instance, farmers who
leased or sold land to the state for the building of prisons; the very powerful
correctional officers’ union, state policymakers, city governments, cycles of
drought, economic crisis and huge deindustrialized urban centers; and the lives
and fates of the descendants of those who migrated to Southern California for
factory work during World War II and after. Her fundamental point is that
prison was not inevitable — not for individuals and not for California. But the
more prisons the state built, the better the state became at filling them, even
despite falling crime rates.
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