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

• Author: Rasby Marlene Powell
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016809349177
• Published date: 01 March 2010
• Date: 01 March 2010
• Subject Matter: Articles

Laura Whitehorn, Marilyn Buck, and others. These ‘‘others’’ are the captive intellectuals, the many

men and women of the American gulag.

As a former federalprisoner 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 Leavenworthin more or less one piece, I was not eagerto return.

Forced Passages,despite its repetitiverhetoric, and somewhatromantic ideas about revolutionary con-

victs, is a scarywalk in the dark, a return to the cage,an intellectual tribute to themen 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 prisonas 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)’’ graphi-

cally presents h ow prisoners experience the t error of prison time, and reduc tion to near dead or non-

being. 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 high-

security 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 won-

der 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 have yet to wade through the 2,000 pages of Alek-

sandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, you might consider Forced Passages. As criminolo-

gists, we have a lot to learn from convicts, and radical scholars, that dare to befriend the men and

women buried alive at the end of the world.

Gilmore, R. W.

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing

California Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. xxii pp., 388 pp.

Reviewed by: Rasby Marlene Powell, University of North Carolina at Pembroke

DOI: 10.1177/0734016809349177

Gilmore’s book, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California,

is a blend of activist writing and academic analysis. This book evolved from Gilmore’s work with an

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