Ruth Wilson Gilmore (1950 - )

Sun Apr 02, 1950

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Ruth Wilson Gilmore, born on this day in 1950, is a prison abolitionist and scholar who founded the field of “carceral geography”, the study of the relationships across space and political economy that define modern incarceration.

Gilmore serves as the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York. She has also co-founded several social justice organizations, such as the California Prison Moratorium Project.

In 1998, Gilmore was one of the co-founders of Critical Resistance, alongside Angela Davis. In 2003, she co-founded Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) to fight jail and prison construction and currently serves on its board.

In 2007, Gilmore published her work Golden Gulag, which provides the first detailed explanation for the dramatic increase of U.S. carceral rates since 1980, described by a California state analyst as the “biggest prison building project in the history of the world”, according to University of California Press.

“In the United States, where organized abandonment has happened throughout the country, in urban and rural contexts, for more than 40 years, we see that as people have lost the ability to keep their individual selves, their households, and their communities together with adequate income, clean water, reasonable air, reliable shelter, and transportation and communication infrastructure, as those things have gone away, what’s risen up in the crevices of this cracked foundation of security has been policing and prison.”

- Ruth Wilson Gilmore