Assignment 7 Makeup
Ruth Gilmore argues that expanding the prison population should be connected to a restructuring of the state. The crisis that Gilmore joins to the prison population in the United States is that the more people that are imprisoned the more women and children are without husbands and fathers. There is a social crisis because a lot of African American men are the ones that’s mostly going to prison and is making the social structure of things unbalanced. It seems like prison is this so call ” fix” for all of the chaos in society. “Until the 1960’s virtually all riots in the United States were battles instigated by white people against people of color, or by public or private police (including militia and vigilantes, also normally white) against organizing workers of all races. ( Gilmore 175) A good question was brought up in the test, “if crime rates peaked before the proliferation of new laws and new cages, what work does prison do”? and the test is right if crime rates were decreasing what was the point of having all these prisons being made? The test explains that the reason for this prison expansion were related to racism, racism especially towards blacks. This whole prison system treated the different races unjustly and the black were the ones getting the shorter end of the stick.
This prison expansion was a way to put a end to the socio-economic problems which of course was created by the state, it was not done to help the people of society but more to help the people in the state. “the state has used its enormous capacity to raise money, buy land and build and staff prisons. It also makes new laws that guarantee incarceration for more and more kinds of offences, old and new.” (Gilmore 185) Its like it was their solution (the state) to lock out someone and throw away the key so you wouldn’t have to deal with them again in society. Over all there were many different explanations for the expansion of the prison population, drug epidemic, structural changes in employment opportunities, however when the prison round ups began crime did indeed start to decrease, the public wanted a decrease in crime and they was in fact getting what they wanted. Even though the crime was going down the state was still making more and more prison beds. It still comes into question, was prisons really the fix? or the cover up.
