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42 Race, Capitalist Crisis, and Abolitionist Organizing An Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore february 2010 jenna loyd jenna loyd (jl): It’s great to be talking with you, Ruthie. Can you tell us how you got involved in anti-­ prison work? ruth wilson gilmore (rwg): I started working on anti-­ prison organizing about twenty years ago. It was never not on my agenda, but it became the focus of a good deal of my work when I realized that people who were trying to organize themselves around all different kinds of issues kept running up against the criminal justice system, which then seemed to become a focal point for people who were trying to achieve other goals, whether the goals were adequate education for children, health care, immigrant rights, you name it. People kept running up against the criminal justice system and what seemed to be a wholly new relationship with prisons and policing and jails. I don’t think once upon a time prisons and jails were used judiciously and then just got out of control recently. That is not what I think. But what I do know is that the use of prisons and jails as all-­ purpose solutions for all different kinds of social, political, and economic problems and challenges is different than what it was in the past. This is to say that the practices perfected in the past on the working class, people of color, and people without certain kinds of documentation have reached a new level of industrialized efficiency, and we see all different kinds of people being sucked into that kind of machinery at an incredibly fantastic rate. What has happened over the last twenty years is that different kinds of people have found themselves confronted with suddenly Race, Capitalism, Abolitionism • 43 having to prove or assert innocence or non-­ guilt in the face of criminalizing machinery, including legislation and the ideologically produced representation of all different kinds of people as already criminals. In recent years, one way that people have joined the struggle against the all-­ purpose use of prisons to solve social problems has been to try to assert that certain kinds of people are actually innocent. So they will say, for example, that long-­ distance migrants who are not documented to work are not really criminals because they didn’t do anything, they just showed up to work. Or they will say, “Oh, look. People who are in prison or who are in jail because they are addicted to certain kinds of substances are not really guilty of any crimes. They’re really innocent and should be released.” In my view, while saving anyone is a good thing to do, to try to assert innocence as a key anti-­ prison political activity is to turn a blind eye to the system and how it works. The way the system works is to move the line of what counts as criminal to encompass and engulf more and more people into the territory of prison eligibility, if you will. So the problem, then, is not to figure out how to determine or prove the innocence of certain individuals or certain classes of people, but to attack the general system through which criminalization proceeds. jl: It seems like there’s a gap between this analysis of criminalization as a political process and a widespread explanation for prison expansion, which puts the blame on private prison corporations as the major culprits. Could you talk about how you think about the prison-­ industrial complex (pic), and how this term can help us understand the dynamics of both criminalization and privatization? rwg: The first thing I want to say is that over the last thirty years, . . . the prison and jail capacity of the United States has swelled to such a point that one in a hundred adult residents in the United States is in a jail, in a cell, even as we speak. Right now, one out of a hundred. As this has happened, the percentage, or fraction, of cells that are operated or managed by private entities has stayed about the same. It’s less than 10 percent of all capacity. Now, since absolute capacity has expanded, obviously the number of cages that are privately managed on behalf of public entities has expanded as well. A lot of people imagine that it is private prison operators that lobby for the draconian laws that keep people locked up so they can make more money. While there...

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