Gilmore- Keynesianism
In her work “Globallization and US prison Growth: from Military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism”, Ruth Wilson Gilmore takes us through the capitalization of the US crime crisis of the 80’s and 90’s and the explosion in growth of the US prison system. She uses California as the basis of her work. Crime at this time was getting out of hand, mainly due to the increase of drug use and dealing, gang activity, racism, and the changes in employment opportunities that, in turn, led to property crimes. This creates a cycle of complexities, contradictions, and a lose-lose situation for the people. She discusses crisis and surplus, where there is capital made from the crisis of crime.
Since Nixon’s “law and order” platform during his campaign, there has been a rising moral panic amongst society over criminality and crime. Since the piece was published more than 2 million people were incarcerated. Nixon campaign had generated an increase of 1.4 million people added to the prison population. This population mainly consisted of African Americans and Latinos, which was two-thirds of the population. Another demographic of the accumulated prison population was the fact that the population also consists of the workless poor or the working poor. With the widespread of drug use and trading running rampant in communities predominantly consisting of people of color, this also brought gang activity that established drug markets. In addition, with the structural changes in the job market, employment opportunities changed and this left people without a source of income, thus having them turn to a life of crime in survival mode. At this time in history, it seemed as if society has created this overlapping cycle of crises to generate prisoners instead of creating outlets to reduce crime. This crisis and surplus cycle spanned across three decades.
In regards to surplus, by creating more prisons, capital for the state increases in the form cheap labor, finance capital, and land. In her work, she doesn’t really mention specifically how prisons generate capital by having super prisons built and filled to max capacity with prisoners. She does emphasize the point that the state does pay it’s way buy selling off its assets such as prisons and public utilities. With the tax revolt of 1978, in rural areas, there was a cut in schools, employment in agriculture and social programs that left a surplus in land that these prisons would be built on eventually.
