Golden Gulag
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom.
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- Some references to the long history of class struggle in California include
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, The Golden Gulag https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag
Huey P Newton (co-founder of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA October 1966) Revolutionary Suicide, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Suicide
Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/...
Mike Davis, City of Quartz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Quartz
- It's a start. Thank you Ruth Wilson, thank you Angela Davis
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition...
https://books.google.com/books/about/Golden_Gulag.html?id=zT...
- The first public academic to my knowledge to begin crystalizing the problem of private prisons and the prison industrial complex was Angela Davis [1] -- I first remember hearing her address this in a 1998 lecture at Northwestern.
Ruth Wilson [2,3] has worked for years analyzing and working to end the expansion and privatization of California's prisons, through both academic and grass roots efforts [4]. Her "Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California" [5] book is both accessible and rigorous, I highly recommend it. I am a bit shocked that their and foundational work were not mentioned in the piece.
There's a discussion between Davis and Wilson here [6] where they surface the mass incarceration/private prison issue, and detail the pathology of California's prison system.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583225811/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTPjC-7EDkc
[4] http://criticalresistance.org/
[5] https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gulag-Opposition-Globalizing-C...
- Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore in part makes the argument that the prisons basically form a jobs program, as small farms got kicked shitless in the 70-80s prisons offered jobs that you could justifiably put in the middle of nowhere and were paid for by the government (federal or state).
She specifically downplays the economics of slave labor in favor of the rural jobs argument (for both analytic and moral reasons)
