“Golden Gulag” by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Abstract: A seminal geography of incarceration’s boom in California, coining “abolition geography.” Gilmore examines how surplus land, labor, capital, and state capacity converged to drive prison expansion in the 80s–90s. Abstract: It provides the economic and racial context behind mass incarceration’s rise, giving abolitionists a structural understanding that our struggle must transform these underlying conditions (e.g., invest in rural economies, not prisons).