California Gulag: prisons, crisis of capitalism and penal abolitionism

Abstract

Seventeen years separate the publication of the book Golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007), from its first and recent translation into Portuguese, entitled Califórnia gulag: prisões, crise do capitalismo e abolicionismo penal, published by Editora Igrá Kniga (2024). Despite this delay, California Gulag is still relevant and helps us to think about the political, economic and social changes of the contemporary period, and deepens themes and discussions in vogue in Brazilian Geography, such as the racial question. The fruit of a long period of activism and academic research by the African-American geographer, the book exposes the contradictions of the political economy of the state of California, analyzing the vertiginous increase in prison complexes in the United States since the 1980s and the popular opposition to the increasing use of prisons as partial geographical solutions to economic and political crises, based on the anti-prison struggles of mothers and relatives of people, especially African-Americans and Latinos, who have had their freedoms deprived by the racial state.