Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California
The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America

Extract

Two recent books on US imprisonment—Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and The Prison and the Gallows by Marie Gottschalk—both seek to explain the current US penchant for mass incarceration. Whereas Gilmore has produced a detailed account of just one state in the United States, Gottschalk paints with broader brushstrokes to offer an analysis of the United States as a whole. It is of note that neither of these two books is written by a criminologist. Ruth Wilson Gilmore—one of the co-founders of the US prison reform group, Critical Resistance—is a geographer, while Marie Gottschalk is a political scientist. Within a discipline whose boundaries are notoriously difficult to map, the prison often seems to attract a particularly wide range of commentators, from cognate disciplines like history and sociology, to more distant areas like critical theory, journalism and literature. Though generally in favour of the interdisciplinary nature of criminology as a whole, I have often been somewhat irked by the freedom that many people feel to comment on imprisonment, from well beyond any recognizable field of prison studies or punishment. Whereas the authors of these two studies, both of whom are established scholars in their own fields, are hardly engaging in dilettante musings, the books that they have produced reflect assumptions and ideas from their home disciplines in ways that sit somewhat uneasily at times with criminological approaches to imprisonment.