Golden Gulag/Prison Town USA

Ruth Wilson Gilmore's book Golden Gulag and the documentary "Prison Town, USA" compliment each other well. Both serve to expose the reality of the Prison Industrial Complex and its impacts on the American people. Although Gilmore opens up with an anecdote about people riding on a bus to Sacramento to petition the government, the rest of the book gets into more of the technicalities of how the PIC operates, specifically in California. What I appreciated about the documentary is the human face it puts with both the experience of being incarcerated in America, and being forced to buy into the system on the other end--by becoming a prison guard.

It is always painful for me, a California-born, to read about the prison system in California, when we spend so much money per year on prisons and so little on education. People are literally fast-tracked into prison. When my friends and I would cut school, if we were caught, we would be taken by the truancy police to a truancy depot, rather than returned to school. This shows how young people are very actively being sent the message that one step out of line (or three strikes) will get you locked up, rather than cared for or looked after by the state system. As Gilmore focuses on the capitalistic benefits for certain people of the expansion and privatization of prisons, she also points to the ways that labor and welfare become inextricably linked to warfare. She says that the new state renovated "its welfare-warfare capacities into something different by molding surplus finance capital, land, and labor into the workfare-warfare state" (85). One main theme that comes out in this statement, and also throughout her masterpiece, is the idea of dependency. This connects back to the film because we see the ways that the people living in these prison towns become utterly dependent on the prisons, and how that fuels and feeds this growth of monstrous prisons. The ways that the larger powers, i.e. the state and private companies, benefit from the expansion of prisons is masked by the ways that working class white folks are pitted against working class people of color, when the former are exploited as prison workers and the latter are criminalized and locked up as prison inmates.