Feminist to Know: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Image: Don J. Usner, Texas Law - The University of Texas at Austin

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a professor, activist, and theorist who has made immense contributions to the prison abolition movement. Gilmore is originally from New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Her family has a long history of union involvement and her grandfather organized the first blue-collar workers' union at Yale University.

Gilmore brought to focus the concept of carceral geography, which looks at the politics of space and geography in carceral practices and institutions. She also co-founded two organizations that have been at the forefront of the contemporary abolition movement: Critical Resistance (with Angela Davis) in 1998 and Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) in 2003.

Her 2007 book Golden Gulag is one of the most foundational texts on abolition politics, detailing the factors in California’s prison boom since the 1980s. The main intervention in Golden Gulag is to lay bare that the boom is an answer to economic crises, not social safety concerns. Gilmore’s discussion of the racial capitalist underpinning of the American carceral state is essential to understanding why our prison system is the way it is today, and why it must change.

Currently, Gilmore teaches across multiple critical disciplines while serving as director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center.