Gilmore, R. W. (2022) Abolition geography: Essays towards liberation. Verso.
Reviewed by Roberto Catello, Liverpool Hope University
Abolition Geography is a collection of twenty essays (including three interviews) written by Ruth Wilson Gilmore between 1991 and 2018. Edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, the book offers a roadmap to understanding Gilmore’s invaluable contribution to the study of carceral geography.
As Bhandar and Toscano make clear in the Editors’ Introduction, the most effective way to understand what abolition geography means is to appreciate “the dialectical tenor of Gilmore’s geographic imagination” (p. 4) Geography, Gilmore argues, shows us that freedom is a place (p. 93, p. 474) and helps us contemplate the dialectics that link the subjective and objective dimensions of human existence which simultaneously enable and constrain human liberation. If freedom is a place, then it follows that liberation is a practice of place-making that turns our lives and bodies into inhabitants of abolition geographies, that is, makers of alternative socio-spatial relationships that challenge and undermine existing carceral dynamics. Thus understood, abolition is not reducible to absence (p. 350). Instead, it is a dialectical act of negation – “making something into something else” (p. 477). Abolition is not just about erasing things but also and crucially about making things: it is about overcoming the carceral present and carving a path towards abolitionist futures by creating the possibility of living social life differently in the here and now (p. 351). Abolition geography, then, is “the antagonistic contradiction of carceral geographies” (p. 474) and “the negation of the negation” of carceral geography (p. 489) and an intellectual cousin of Angela Davis’ (2005) ‘abolition democracy’.
Abolition Geography maps the contemporary political geography of the United States by re-centering the place of prison in the American project of state-building over the past five decades. At the heart of the book lies the territoriality of US power (p. 152) and the way the political geography of the American penal system has been instrumental for the survival of racial capitalism in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. By historicising crime and punishment in the US, Gilmore shows that mass incarceration and racial capitalism are two sides of the same coin. The capitalist mode of production in the US generates inequality because it requires it for its survival. Racism – as a practice that displaces difference into hierarchies that organise the operation of power over political territories (p. 136) – enshrines inequality into capitalism, perpetuates the production of race as “the modality in which class is lived” (Hall 2021, p. 341), and reminds us that mass incarceration is class war. Notably, the book does not limit itself to offering domestic descriptions of criminal punishment as an instrument of racialised state terror but also emphasises how the carceral boom in the US ought to be placed in the broader context of the political-economic geography of globalisation.
Gilmore’s main contention in Abolition Geography is that prison in the US has become a geographical solution to social, political, and economic problems (p. 121, p. 137, p. 203, p. 364) used by a state-in-crisis – that is, a state in need of re-crafting because it is no longer capable of reproducing itself on the basis of existing material conditions and social relations – that has embarked on a major state-crafting project. Beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century, a ‘new’ state emerged to respond to social, economic, and political crises via the restructuring of the US state machine into a penal state. As Gilmore put it, “the state rebuilt itself by building prisons fashioned from surpluses” (p. 218) following the country’s exit from the golden age of US capitalism (c. 1938-1970). While this line of argument is well known and features prominently and persistently in Wacquant’s work on penal expansionism in the neoliberal age, Gilmore seems to be guided primarily by Toni Negri (p. 157, p. 245, p. 274). Accordingly, the main transition under scrutiny in the book is not one from the ‘maternalist welfare state’ to the ‘paternalist penal state’ but rather one from ‘welfare’ to ‘warfare’. The analytic construct used by Gilmore to make sense of this transition is the ‘anti-state state’, “a state that grows on the promise of shrinking” (p. 276), or a state that abandons its public mandates and embraces a tough-on-crime ideology, thus replacing social welfare with domestic warfare (p. 338) by implementing punitive spatial tactics and geographical rearrangements.
As a self-described “good Marxist” (p. 336) who engages seriously with the complexities of political economy, Gilmore makes uses of the analogy between the military industrial complex (MIC) and the prison industrial complex (PIC) to clarify her position on the link between punishment and profit. Mistakenly regarded by many as a synonym for ‘prison for profit’, the PIC actually highlights how social policy in the US has become the hostage of penal policy and how social development and social investment have become subordinate to and dependent on the expansion of the mass punishment industry (pp. 324-325). In other words, the production of crime and punishment has become the organising principle of American society, and penal politics has taken on a foundational role in the shaping of all industrial development in the country (pp. 458-459). This is the logic that allows Gilmore to disarticulate carceral geography from the strict confines of prison facilities and uncover the spatial workings of punitive power outside the prison walls. The carceral state’s militaristic objective is not primarily profiteering from either privatisation or prison labour but the ideological transformation of ‘the criminal’ into a domestic enemy that, through the rearrangement of bodies, resources, and land into carceral practices and institutions, becomes a site of extractive activity for society as a whole.
Geography as Gilmore understands it, is not just a diagnostic tool to clinically evaluate America’s imprisonment binge but also a practical one to be weaponised by advocates for social justice who must come to the realisation that because justice is an embodied practice, it is always-already spatial, i.e., “part of a process of making a place” (p. 137). Anti-prison grassroots organising is a form of place-based identity (p. 254) that conceives of prisons as politically, socially, economically, morally and ideologically indefensible spaces (p. 262). Resistance to carceral expansionism and the PIC is about organising oppositional spaces in civil society that target “organised abandonment” (p. 410) and the logic of disposability that fuels punitive penal policy and industrialised punishment in the neoliberal age. Hence, the various instances of abolitionist and anti-prison organising discussed in the book (Madres del Este de Los Angeles, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, the California Prison Moratorium Project, Black Lives Matter, among others) constitute attempts to create new public spaces that can achieve social justice by fighting domestic militarism through an anti-carceral politics of care and resistance.
Abolition geography is a way of “doing political organizing” and a way of “being in the world” (p. 491) that connects social spaces and carceral quarters by choreographing political solidarity, especially in communities that have been marginalised, segregated, and abandoned. In these “forgotten places”, communities of activists look for and create “a guide to action through embodied political experimentation – to theorize or map or plan their way out of the margins” (p. 410) and attempt to re-modulate socio-spatial relationships to bring about change and produce new geographical realities. It is in these places where people are extracted from their communities and where prisons are often built – places referred to by Gilmore as “gulags” (p. 415) – and in these regions of “dynamic betweenness” (p. 430) where communities find themselves trapped in the deindustrialised American landscapes ravaged by the movements of global capital or so-called desakota (p. 430), that new ‘infrastructures of feeling’ (p. 489) materialise. Out of the territoriality and materiality of punitive power, caring communities emerge dialectically to forge the political hope and unboundedness needed to transition from our carceral present to abolitionist futures.
Arguably, Gilmore’s greatest achievement in Abolition Geography is to show that, far from being purely an academic discipline, geography is a form of interdisciplinary politics that illuminates the spatial forms that ‘the social’ assumes in the process of being reified and becoming concrete worlds – worlds of concrete that can, however, be dismantled ‘brick by brick’ (Cradle Community 2021) through oppositional practices of liberation, hope, care, solidarity, and resistance.
References
Cradle Community (2021). Brick by brick: How we build a world without prisons. Hajar Press.
Davis, A. Y. (2005). Abolition democracy: Beyond empire, prisons, and torture. Seven Stories Press.
Hall, S. (2021). Race, articulation, and societies structured in dominance. In P. Gilroy & R. W. Gilmore (Eds.), Selected writings on race and difference: Stuart Hall (pp.305-345). Duke University Press.