The Prison Fix

The Prison Fix Review of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007; 388 pp., $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 have crammed 173,000 convicts into the nation's largest prison system, designed to house at least one-third less. With a workforce of 54,000, the Department of Corrections is the state's largest employer. 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 down 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 to 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 has not 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%), mostly Latinos and African Americans (two-thirds), mostly from big cities (60% from Los Angeles), and mostly unemployed or the working poor. And when prisoners return to their communities, observes Golden Gulag, they are locked out of "education, employment, housing, and many other stabilizing institutions of everyday...