Ruth Gilmore Explains America's Addiction to Prisons

Professor Ruth Gilmore

The highest rate of incarceration in the world today is in the United States, where 2.4 million people are in prisons, euphemistically dubbed "correctional facilities," compared to 28,000 approximately twenty-five years ago. Invited by the Prince al Waleed bin Talal Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR), Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore explained these figures on February 19 in a lecture entitled "Understanding America's Addiction to Prisons."

Addressing a packed audience in West Hall, Gilmore first situated America's addiction to prisons historically, likening the culture of otherness consuming the United States today to that which set the stage for the lucrative institution of slavery in the nineteenth century. Accordingly, the "other" is no longer the African slave but, given the high rates of black people in American prisons today, the African-American citizen and his equally disenfranchised cognates in the contemporary United States.

Gilmore, who based her lecture on her new book, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, argued that, as "ghastly infrastructures productive of a class of civilly dead people," prisons are not an effective solution for social, political, and economic crises and thus constitute only "a partial geographic solution" to inter-societal conflict. She said that the intransigent political culture promoted by the Bush administration has contributed to the social and cultural production of criminality in the United States by exacerbating the historical legacy of slavery and its aftermath, including the expropriation of native land, racist injunctions against immigrants, and racism in land ownership and debt.

Consequently, the United States. upholds its veneer of security through "the concept of the perpetual enemy who is always to be fought but never to be vanquished." Gilmore pointed out that "to help demonize the 'other,' more than two thousand new rules and injunctions criminalizing an increasing number of offenses have been created in the past twenty years alone." Gilmore, who said her home state, California, has the largest number of criminal records and prisons in the country, criticized the argument that the "ever-expanding correctional facilities in the United States are meant to remedy the problem of prison congestion."

Gilmore is chair of the American Studies and Ethnicity Department (ASE) at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is an associate professor of ASE. Her recent publications include articles like "In the Shadow of the Shadow State," published in Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, and "Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning," forthcoming in the political omnibus, Engaging Contradictions.