Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance, one of the most important national anti-prison organizations in the United States.

"A magnificent analysis of the political economy of superincarceration and the slave plantations that California calls prisons."--Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear
"Golden Gulag is a deeply necessary book for our times. Gilmore digs beneath the easy answers to the more troubling causes of a political consensus that prisons are the only solution to all urban and rural ills."--Nayan Shah, author of Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown
"Ruth Gilmore lays bare the diabolical logic of neoliberal incarceration. She shows us that the prison is a symptom of the decline of our civilization, how the California Nightmare has produced its disposable population. Gilmore's depressingly hopeful analysis is a wake-up call for our somnolence."--Vijay Prashad, author of Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare