Description:
"A magnificent analysis of the political economy of superincarceration and the slave plantations that California calls prisons."--Mike Davis, author of "Ecology of Fear"
""Golden Gulag" is a deeply necessary book for our times. Gilmore digs beneath the easy answers to the more troubling causes of a political consensus that prisons are the only solution to all urban and rural ills."--Nayan Shah, author of "Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown"
"Ruth Gilmore lays bare the diabolical logic of neoliberal incarceration. She shows us that the prison is a symptom of the decline of our civilization, how the California Nightmare has produced its disposable population. Gilmore's depressingly hopeful analysis is a wake-up call for our somnolence."--Vijay Prashad, author of "Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare"
Review Quotes: "An impressive first book that stands as a model of politically engaged scholarship and an indictment of California's 'archipelago of concrete and steel cages.' . . . In this sophisticated, interdisciplinary study, brimming with new ideas, political savvy and moral urgency, Gilmore takes us on a demanding intellectual exploration of California's economic, political, spatial and cultural history. . . . Now, if you want to understand why progressive California leads the Western world with its regressive system of punishment, Gilmore's Golden Gulag is the first must-read book of the 21st century."-- "San Francisco Chronicle"