Assignment 7
In the article “Globalisation and US prison growth: From military and Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, she explains to us how the expansion of prison populations has increased because of the “law and order” where this involves the handling and control of cases such as robbery, any kind of violence or disturbance of peace.
This type of bad behavior was treated as a punishment with the fulfillment of people in prisons.But not all the time the penalty was fair since, as Gilmore explains, there existed many racial, economic and political factors.The most common population in a California’s prison was African Americans and latinos and some women of all race.
What was causing this expanding in prison? I will call crisis to the circumstances to let more people go to prison. One of the reasons is the “drug epidemic and the threat to public safety posed by the unrestrained use and trade of illegal substances”(172). Because of the unemployment illegal sale of drugs became one of the ways people used to survive. Unemployment was notable and many people opted for easy money and this came from the illegal drug trade.
The lack of employment was another reason for prison expansion in California. When people were not having employs opportunities they were forced to commit property crimes and drugs traffic. The number of prisoner increase “the percentage of people in prison for property offenses more than doubled since 1982” (Pg. 173)
Gilmore also tells us that the function of prisons was to “fix” social problems. For example, she mentions that there was a civil disorder where people of color were out of control and there was some group of people who wanted to organize big movements. All this crisis, a prison was supposed to resolve to have more prisoners and to fix these social problems. Prisoners had to fight for their rights because most of the time they had a long sentence that not always were correct. They were trying to fight in federal courts to get new reforms to help themselves. The author also mentions that people of color and Latinos compromised a big part of the prison population.
In conclusion, we can say that the “surplus labor” incremented the prison population in the U.S was the excedent of unemploy people because there were more people that employments at that time. The mid-1970s recession produced that big corporation eliminated jobs and workers were suffering from unemployment. There were a lot of people who could not get jobs and also there were more people coming as an immigrant looking for jobs.
