Book Review: Gilmore, R. W. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. xxii pp., 388 pp

Abstract

Buck, and others. These ''others'' are the captive intellectuals, the many men and women of the American gulag.As a former federal prisoner that did time in four United States Penitentiaries (USP), with some of the people quoted in this book, I read Rodriguez with interest, and even a bit of foreboding. Having made it out of USP Marion and USP Leavenworth in more or less one piece, I was not eager to return. Forced Passages, despite its repetitive rhetoric, and somewhat romantic ideas about revolutionary convicts, is a scary walk in the dark, a return to the cage, an intellectual tribute to the men and women that endure the horrors of the beast. The book is arranged into six chapters, each with a provocative title. Chapter 1 ''Domestic War Zones'' introduces the discourse of prison as a consolidation of power that violates its official directives and juridical norms. Chapter 2 ''You Be All the Prison Writer You Wish'' demonstrates how time, space, and movement are altered by prison. Chapter 3 ''Radical Lineages'' focuses on George Jackson and Angela Davis. Chapter 4 ''Articulating War (s)'' graphically presents how prisoners experience the terror of prison time, and reduction to near dead or nonbeing. Chapter 5 ''My Role is to Dig or Be Dug Out'' takes the reader deep into the penitentiary, solitary confinement, and supermax. Chapter 6 ''Forced Passages'' concludes the book with a brilliant attempt to link the slave trade, and Middle Passage, with the modern supermax prison.I am reminded of how most academic criminologists so mindlessly, perhaps cowardly, accept the state premise of prison. Standard introductory corrections textbooks first discuss the use of torture in the preceding centuries, as testimony of how humane we have become to now have imprisonment as state sanction. Rarely do we hear the voice of prisoners. Viet Mike Ngo, interviewed in San Quentin ( 2001) said, ''People in here, they're dying, man. People are dying, and I don't know how to begin to make people understand what's happening to them . . . . That's what this whole thing is about. They're killing us.'' At the very least, Rodriguez has shared the voices of the dungeon, allowed the condemned to speak, and the ghosts to scream. Maybe, if enough academics were better educated in radical discourses, one day we might find the courage to challenge the state rationale for highsecurity prisons and life sentences. This is a book for all the naive criminologists who need to know that prison is no less a horror than the guillotine or scaffold. The book illustrates the struggle for liberation that began with street demonstration in the 1960s, and continues in the hearts and minds of prisoners still locked away in cells. Two million men and women are locked in jails and prisons, and the numbers keep growing. The logic of capitalist criminal justice is to employ one group to incarcerate another group. No wonder this country is going broke. Meanwhile, penal slaves tug on their chain and plan the next revolution.If you miss reading Fanon and Foucault, and ...

Constituting affective identities: Understanding the communicative construction of identity in online men’s rights spaces

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Elusive adulthood and surplus life-time in Spain

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