Ruth “Ruthie” Wilson Gilmore was born in New Haven in 1950, growing up surrounded by the fierce organizing of the Civil Rights Movement. She inherited many fragments and pieces of resistance in New Haven. Her grandfather organized the first blue collar workers’ union as a janitor at Yale University; her father helped unionize the machinists at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Gilmore’s knowledge of unions as spaces to build power and community against larger systems of power would inform her organizing work throughout her life. In addition to receiving a political education through kinship, Gilmore’s family also attended the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, where she took Black history classes every Sunday. In 1960, a local all-white private school would reach out to the Congregational Church as part of a plan to desegregate. Gilmore became the first and only Black student and one of the few working-class students at the school. 

Gilmore evidently learned about place as a network of relationships—both nurturing and damaging—far before becoming a professor of geography. As she would later say in an interview with OnBeing:

...humans make places. And they make them and enhance them and destroy them. And those places have relations to other places; some are antagonistic, some are different. And there are the various forces that we’re trying so hard to come to terms with today. Such as the forces of global capitalism, the forces of racial capitalism, the forces of patriarchy, and so forth, all have a spatial expression — or I should say really a series of spatial expressions that we should, must be mindful of if we want to change that.

She successfully advocated for and has since been pioneering the concept of carceral geography. This field of study delves into the intricate connections between landscape, natural resources, political economy, infrastructure, and the surveillance, imprisonment, confinement, and controlling of populations. Gilmore is now globally recognized as a leader in the fields of carceral geography and prison abolition. In addition to being the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, she is also a professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Gilmore has additionally been a part of many organizing campaigns to oppose investment in punitive systems (systems based on punishment) and instead invest in a community’s healing. In 1997, alongside Angela Davis and Rose Braz, Gilmore founded Critical Resistance to challenge the prison industrial complex as a solution for social, political, and economic problems. In 1999, Critical Resistance would be crucial in opposing a new prison in Delano, organizing with farmworkers and the California State Employees Association (CSEA) union. The California Prison Moratorium Project, (CPMP) which was co-founded by Gilmore, would also be a part of this action alongside Critical Resistance. CPMP sought to stop all public and private prison construction in California, diverting funds from the prison construction budget to instead invest in alternatives to incarceration. Lastly, Gilmore co-founded the Central California Environmental Justice Network, which organizes against environmental racism in low-income and communities of color. The group would recognize prisons themselves as a detriment to the environment. As Gilmore would write in “The Case for Abolition” alongside James Kilgore:

We know we won’t bulldoze prisons and jails tomorrow, but as long as they continue to be advanced as the solution, all of the inequalities displaced to crime and punishment will persist… for decades abolitionists have been doing everything we can imagine to bring about change. We stand on the frontlines to oppose all forms of state violence.

We work with communities sited for prisons to fight expansion, while organizing to secure decent wages and housing in the regional economy. We work with Republican ranchers worried about the water table, and with undocumented agricultural workers vulnerable to pesticides and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We work with city managers and residents of prison towns disappointed in lockups touted for economic development that never deliver.

We document the cultural and environmental degradation resulting from cities of incarcerated people deprived of their civil rights, write handbooks and advise rural and regional development experts on alternative projects. We work with unions, on strategy to develop long-term goals for job protection, environmental justice and membership growth—especially because half the U.S. labor force has some record of criminalization that makes employment insecure and depresses wages.

This is the presence Gilmore talks about — the presence of decent wages, of housing, of collectively created handbooks, of unions, of organizing, of community, of radical dependency where people can choose reliance on each other over reliance on the prison system. And this presence and radical dependency is at the heart of abolition.

The United States has the highest rate of mass incarceration in the world, with over 1.9 million people currently behind bars. This staggering figure is a result of tough-on-crime policies, mandatory minimum sentencing, and the War on Drugs, which disproportionately targets and surveils low-income, minority communities. While some efforts have sought to address the mass incarceration crisis through reforms such as limiting sentencing, eliminating solitary confinement, campaigning against overcrowded and neglected prison cells, and improving rehabilitation programs , the abolitionist movement has insisted on the dismantling of prisons and creation of alternative, community-based solutions.

Importantly, abolition doesn’t just mean the end of the physical entities we call prisons; it means abolishing the conditions that make people think we need prisons in the first place, instead investing in our relationships with one another. There is a deep fear that abolition means abandoning people - both in that (1) the typical way we think of safety (ie. police, prisons, and surveillance) is dismantled and (2) people are dropped into deeply exploitative conditions after getting out of prison. This understanding of abolition is, again, one that is focused on absence and fails to recognize the building and rebuilding that abolition also involves. Abolition is not abandonment nor is it a dismissal of safety. It is responding to harm through the building of community and vital systems of support and through addressing the root issues of crime including poverty, hunger, state neglect, disinvestment, and other cycles of violence.

FURTHER READING / RESOURCES

In addition to the further reading / resources provided below, Gilmore’s work can also be accessed through the several books she’s written and co-edited including Golden Gulag, Abolition Geography, and Change Everything.

Listen to the full On Being Podcast here

Read the full “The Case for Abolition” article here

Read “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind” by Rachel Kushner here

Read “How I Became a Police Abolitionist” by Derecka Purnell here

Read “What Abolitionists Do?” by Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein here