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  • The State of Prison
  • Jason Haslam (bio)
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. By Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 388 pages. $50.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper).
Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. By Dylan Rodríguez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 322 pages. $60.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper).
Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Edited by Joy James. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. 351 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper).
Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice. By Michael Hames-Garcia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 352 pages. $60.00 (cloth). $20.00 (paper).
Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States. Edited by D. Quentin Miller. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. $39.95 (paper).
The Spectacle of Death: Populist Literary Responses to American Capital Cases. By Kristin Boudreau. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2006. $20.00 (paper).

In December 2007, New Jersey abolished the death penalty, the first state to do so since the 1976 Supreme Court ruling in Gregg v. Georgia that allowed its reinstatement. This move follows a few years of intense public debate over the nature of the death penalty, including a new Supreme Court case, Baze v. Rees, that will consider whether a common form of lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.1 While the death penalty and the fight to abolish it have garnered public attention in the past years, less press time has been given to the increasingly central role of the prison itself in the United States. Now firmly entrenched in what many have called a period of "mass imprisonment,"2 the U.S. punishment system has, however, received much recent academic attention. In the past decade, studies of the prison and justice systems have [End Page 467] reached a central place in American studies, reflecting, perhaps, the growing and devastating place that the prison has in shaping U.S. lives.

Studies of the prison have run the gamut of disciplinary approaches, as evidenced by the six books under review. Published between 2004 and 2007, these works range from social geography, to legal philosophy, to literary analysis, and more, often within the same text. This multi- and interdisciplinary approach is, in fact, the defining rubric, if one can be said to exist, of the field of prison studies. Prison studies could be read as a locus for thinking about interdisciplinarity, and also as a site at which the often tense, often productive relationship between academic study and social activism is foregrounded. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore points out, "edges are also interfaces" (11), and so an examination of recent trends in prison studies can allow us to see the cultural, social, and lived complexities that arise at the boundaries not only of disciplinarity, but also of the academy and—recognizing the place of the prison—of contemporary society itself. In other words, through analyses ranging from the material to the cultural, the aesthetic to the ideological, the local to the global, and the analytic to the activist, these works highlight the complex social entanglements of prisons and the study thereof.

Four of these books develop out of readings of and participation in activist efforts to abolish or greatly reform the prison system. Gilmore, James, Rodríguez, and Hames-Garcia build, albeit in disparate ways, on the foundation provided by Angela Y. Davis's work3 and by the thoughts of radical prisoners themselves, significantly including George Jackson, whose life and work figures centrally in almost all of the works here. These books, by a group of writers, thinkers, and activists very much in dialogue with one another, amount to a combined response to the post-1970s "prison regime," to quote Rodríguez.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore's book, Golden Gulag, is in some ways the most "local" of the works in that it is focused exclusively on the California prison system. From this specific area of concern, though, Gilmore offers a stunning analysis of the intertwined relations between mass imprisonment, labor economics, geography, and activism. Gilmore states that Golden Gulag "is about...

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