Prisons - new material (65)
01 January 2007
Golden Gulag Ruth Wilson Gilmore. University of California Press 2007 (ISBN: 978-0-520-22256-4). Ruth Gilmore is a founding member of Critical Resistance, the US national anti-prison campaign, and Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. Her book examines the phenomenal growth of California's state prison system since 1982 and the grassroots opposition to "the expanding use of prisons as catchall solutions to social problems." She notes that: "The California state prisoner population grew nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000, even though the crime rate peaked in 1980 and declined...thereafter. African Americans and Latinos comprise two-thirds of the state's 160,000 prisoners...as a class, convicts are deindustrialised cities' working or workless poor." The book is useful primarily because of its focus on class and upon the way in which economic restructuring impacts on working-class communities, how "resolutions of surplus land, capital, labour and state capacity congealed into prisons." Gilmore examines the prison estate expansion in the context of its impact on rural economies in California as employment-provider; the $5 billion bonds issued for new prison construction; the withdrawal of social welfare from the urban poor and the systematic "dehumanisation" of the poor as a rationale for incarceration. Most importantly, Gilmore's book focuses on effective resistance to criminalisation and prison expansion - the Mothers Reclaiming Our Children campaign, which organised primarily black working class mothers in solidarity with prisoners, against the criminalisation of black youth and against the three-strikes legislation. Any book which analyses the growth of the prison-industrial complex from the perspective of its victims would be a useful tool. Ruth Wilson Gilmore's focus on means and histories of active resistance makes Golden Gulag essential.
Recent developments in prison law - part 1, Hamish Arnott, Simon Creighton and Nancy Collins. Legal Action January 2007, pp.10-13. This is the first part of a longer article and reviews recent developments in policy and case-law regarding foreign national prisoners and categorisation, the prisons incentive scheme, security categorisation, Article 3 of the ECHR and conditions of imprisonment, Article 2 ECHR and the right to life and contacts outside prison.