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Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. 412pp. $19.95 paper. ISBN: 0520242017.
Golden Gulag attempts to build a case against prisons as cure-all catchments of civic discontent. Gilmore uses her scholarly chops and activist's acumen to get her arms around the prison-industrial mess and shake it until its pieces start falling into place. The story she has to tell stretches from the state's urban ghettos to its fields of cotton, from the nation's leading ever-so-thirsty agribusiness to its disastrous loss of industrial jobs, from power-hungry politicians to parochially minded city managers, and from the sensory overload of its fear-mongering press to the tears of its many grieving mothers.
The book, a wild ride through contemporary California history and across scholarly disciplines, is something to be experienced. Fortunately, Gilmore is a fine and spirited writer who tries mightily to guide and even cajole the reader to press on through the necessary discussions of land use planning, tax law, and local governance strategies. But the immense gift that the reader is left with is a sense of possibility. Not that the persistent monster that is this state's prison system can be tamed, at least not yet, but that it can be understood.
Golden Gulag excels at establishing the sheer number and variety of social sectors and institutions that depend upon the surpluses generated by contemporary society for their existence. Gilmore shows convincingly that...