Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, prison abolitionist, and scholar whose work examines the political economy and geography of imprisonment. She is a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and a co-founder of several grassroots abolitionist organizations including Critical Resistance.
Core ideas
- Organized abandonment and organized violence: Gilmore’s central framework distinguishes two modes of state power over marginalized communities. Organized abandonment is the systematic withdrawal of public resources — schools, hospitals, infrastructure, environmental protection — from specific communities. Organized violence is the replacement of those withdrawn resources with policing, imprisonment, and surveillance. The two are not separate processes but complementary aspects of a single strategy.
- Prison as geographical solution: in Golden Gulag (2007), Gilmore analyzes California’s prison expansion as a solution to four surpluses: surplus land (from agricultural decline), surplus capital (seeking fixed investment), surplus labor (from deindustrialization), and surplus state capacity (from Cold War military downsizing). Prisons absorb all four, turning social crisis into carceral infrastructure.
- Abolition geography: Gilmore argues that abolition is not merely the absence of prisons but the presence of life-affirming institutions — the creation of conditions where prisons are unnecessary because the crises they manage are addressed through other means. This is a geographical project: it requires reorganizing space, resources, and relationships.
- Racism as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death: Gilmore’s definition of racism is structural, not attitudinal. Racism is the production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. This definition connects racism to material conditions — environmental toxicity, healthcare access, policing — rather than locating it in individual prejudice.
Notable works
- Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007)
- Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (2022)
- Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (2022)
Related
- Extractivism — organized abandonment as extraction of community resources
- Environmental racism — the spatial distribution of harm Gilmore’s work documents
- Settler colonialism — the colonial structures underlying carceral geography
- Elizabeth Povinelli — fellow theorist of abandonment and late liberalism