Discussion

This will be our final online discussion for the semester. There is no specific reading for this week, so I will ask you to write a discussion post that expresses some of your thoughts about all the readings we have done this semester.

GOLDEN GULAG
AMERICAN CROSSROADS
EDITED BY EARL LEWIS, GEORGE LIPSITZ, PEGGY PASCOE, GEORGE SÁNCHEZ,
AND DANA TAKAGI
GOLDEN GULAG
PRISONS, SURPLUS, CRISIS, AND OPPOSITION IN GLOBALIZING CALIFORNIA
RUTH WILSON GILMORE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world
by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2007 by
The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 1950–.
Golden gulag : prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in
globalizing California / Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
p. cm—(American crossroads ; 21).
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-520-22256-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-520-22256-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-520-24201-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-520-24201-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Prisons—California. 2. Prisons—Economic
aspects—California. 3. Imprisonment—California.
4. Criminal justice, Administration of—California.
5. Discrimination in criminal justice administration—California.
6. Minorities—California. 7. California—Economic conditions.
I. Title. II. Series.
HV9475.C2G73 2007
365′.9794—dc22 2006011674
Manufactured in the United States of America
15 14 13 12
This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 60, containing 60%
postconsumer waste, processed chlorine free; 30% de-inked recycled
fiber, elemental chlorine free; and 10% FSC-certified virgin fiber, totally chlorine free. EcoBook 60 is acid free and meets the minimum
requirements of ansi/astm d 5634–01 (Permanence of Paper).1
11 10 9 8 7 6 5
FOR MY MOTHER, RUTH ISABEL HERB WILSON
AND IN LOVING MEMORY OF MY FATHER, COURTLAND SEYMOUR WILSON
This page intentionally left blank
List of Illustrations / ix
List of Tables / xi
Acknowledgments / xiii
List of Abbreviations / xxi
prologue: The Bus / 1
1. Introduction / 5
2. The California Political Economy / 30
3. The Prison Fix / 87
4. Crime, Croplands, and Capitalism / 128
5. Mothers Reclaiming Our Children / 181
6. What Is to Be Done? / 241
epilogue: Another Bus / 249
Notes / 253
Bibliography and References / 281
Index / 355
CONTENTS
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FIGURES
1. California crime index, 1952–1995 / 8
2. Revised California crime index, 1952–2000 / 9
3. Defense prime contracts and manufacturing jobs,
1972–1992 / 44
4. Population growth by region, 1980–1990 / 47
5. Growth in the ratio of property/proprietors’ (profit) income
to total income, 1977–1996 / 59
6. Rise in interest income as a percentage of property/proprietors’ income and decline in the prime rate, 1980–1989 / 61
7. California farmland and irrigated land, in millions of acres,
1945–1987 / 66
8. Votes cast for governor and general fund expenditures,
1978–1994 / 85
MAP
California state adult prisons / 10
ix
ILLUSTRATIONS
This page intentionally left blank
1. Employees in Principal California Manufacturing Industries, 1980–1995 / 51
2. California Population, Labor Force, Jobs, Unemployment,
and Prisoners, 1973–2000 / 73
3. Three Waves of Structural Change in Sources of California
Tax Revenues, 1967–1989 / 82
4. CDC Prisoner Population by Race/Ethnicity / 111
5. CDC Commitments by Controlling Offense / 112
6. Mechanization of Cotton Production, 1940–1980 / 141
7. Overview of Kings County Agriculture, 1982–1992 / 144
8. Annual Change in Corcoran Housing Stock and Vacancy
Rate, Selected Years / 159
xi
TABLES
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Golden Gulag is a late first book—late in my life, late to the press,
and so late in the twentieth century that it appears well into the
twenty-first. In some ways, the contents are old news, but alas not
old enough to have become mere bad memories or the stuff of
history to learn from. Over the years, as I’ve wrestled with the
questions and evidence that shape the book, I’ve had so much
help from so many people that this section of the volume should,
by rights, be longer than any chapter and contain far more entries
than the bibliography. However, well into my second halfcentury on this troubled planet, I’m as forgetful as I am indebted—and hopeful that if you don’t find your name here,
you’ll forgive the oversight. And may all, named or not, excuse
the errors.
Poor Neil Smith. As Geography Department chair at Rutgers,
he generously accepted a cranky middle-aged activist packing a
couple of drama degrees and a headful of social theory to be his
Ph.D. student and got plenty of drama in return. He also made
me think systematically about society and space, accepted my forxiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
mulation for what happened, why, and to what end—and then
made me prove it to him, revision after revision, in my dissertation. We fought a lot. We also celebrated often, and I’m grateful
to Neil and to Cindi Katz for embracing both Gilmores the moment we arrived at New Brunswick, for wining and dining and
throwing parties for us for four years, and making me a scholaractivist.
At Rutgers, Professors Leela Fernandes, Dorothy Sue Cobble,
Bob Lake, Ann Markusen, Susan Fainstein, John Gillis, and
Caridad Souza taught me to work across disciplines; Leela, in
particular, models the analytical courage interdisciplinarity demands. I hope Susan will accept this book in lieu of the paper I
owe her.
When I headed off to Rutgers, my Los Angeles compañeras—
especially Theresa Allison, Geri Silva, Pauline Milner, and
Donna Warren—in Mothers Reclaiming Our Children wished
me well, and they always welcomed me back to the fold—expecting me always to bring useful knowledge and help make
their knowledge useful.
A coalition sparked by Mothers ROC and Families to Amend
California’s Three Strikes (FACTS) expanded statewide thanks
to the relentless energy of Geri Silva, Gail Blackwell, Barbara
Brooks, Sue Rheams, Claudia Marriott, Julia Gonzales, Mary
Avanti, Doug Kieso, Dennis Duncan, Carmen Ewell, and
Christy Johnson, among many other tireless people.
My capacity to think theoretically, but speak practically, I owe
to the stern sisterly tutelage of my Wages for Housework mentors, Margaret Prescod and Selma James.
Without Mike Davis there would be no Golden Gulag. He
shared ideas, research, and resources, pointed me toward Mothxiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ers ROC and Corcoran, asked plenty of great questions, read the
manuscript thoroughly, and also showed me the practical connections between analytical, political, and pedagogical creativity.
Years ago, when neither of us had a proper job, we shook our
graying heads in dismay at a future of endless adjuncting. Now
we both have steady jobs; who knew?
George Lipsitz, Dave Roediger, Robin D. G. Kelley, Don
Mitchell, Beth Richie, Ed Soja, Audrey Kobayashi, Andrea
Smith, Lauren Berlant, Lakshman Yapa, Cindi Katz, Greg
Hooks, Amy Kaplan, George Sánchez, Chris Newfield, Fred
Moten, Devra Weber, Barbara Christian, Bruce Franklin, Angela Y. Davis, Wendy Brown, Cathy Cohen, Judith Butler, Wahneema Lubiano, Steve Martinot, Joy James, Linda Evans, Cheryl
Harris, Joan Dayan, Mike Merrill, Paul Gilroy, Vron Ware,
Peter Linebaugh, Bobby Wilson, Cedric Robinson, Elizabeth
Robinson, Agnes Moreland Jackson, Sue E. Houchins, Deborah
Santana (who set me straight on my working title “Sunshine
Gulag” and suggested “Golden,” lest anyone think the book was
about Florida), and, more than anyone, A. Sivanandan and Stuart Hall indelibly influenced how I think: each fiercely demonstrates how learning well is a generous art.
During graduate school, we students—Laura Liu, Rachel
Herzing, John Antranig Kasbarian, Curtis Frietag, Melina Patterson, Lisa Lynch, Alex Weheliye (who made me think about
land!), Yong-Sook Lee, Marlen Llanes, Nicole Cousino, and
Ralph Saunders—formed communities of purpose that still bind
us in our commitment to live the change.
I’d never have spent a minute, much less six years, at Berkeley were it not for the interventions, encouragement, friendship,
and mentoring of Dick Walker, Gill Hart, and Carol Stack. I also
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv
had the fortune to share work-in-progress with amazing colleagues—Jean Lave, Pedro Noguera, Dan Perlstein, Barrie
Thorne, Harley Shaiken, Allan Pred, Evelyn Nakano Glenn,
Elaine Kim, Michael Omi, Pat Hilden, José David Saldívar, Jeff
Romm, John Hurst, Caren Kaplan, and my dearest Cal pal Kurt
Cuffey. Delores Dillard, Jahleezah Eskew, Nat Vonnegut, Carol
Page, and Dan Plumlee made life easy for the bureaucratically
challenged and, along with Don Bain and Darin Jensen, prove
that staff are the backbone and conscience of academia.
The students of Carceral Geographies at Berkeley dutifully
studied the manuscript and, integrating their readings with ambitious fieldwork, concluded every fall semester with group research projects full of excellent evidence and surprising insights.
The embarrassment of riches of wonderful Berkeley graduate
students who inspired and challenged me around many a seminar table include Clem Lai, Dylan Rodriguez, Frank Wilderson,
Micia Mosely, Judith Kafka, Sora Han, Sara Clarke Kaplan,
Mark Hunter, Priya Kandaswamy, Nari Rhee, Jenna Loyd,
Ethan Johnson, Chris Neidt, Wendy Cheng, Kysa Nygreen,
Juan DeLara, Judy Han, Trevor Paglen, Jen Casolo, Brinda
Sarathy, Joe Bryan, Sylvia Chan, Amanda LaShaw, Kiko
Casique, and Kirstie Dorr.
With patience, brilliance, and skill, four research assistants—
Nari Rhee, Dana Kaplan, Ari Wohlfeiler, Pete Spannagle—
moved the work forward.
Many exemplary people made research possible, especially the
research librarians at Alexander Library at Rutgers and the University Research Library at UCLA. Two print journalists, Dan
Morain of the Los Angeles Times, and Jeannette Todd of the Corcoran Journal, gave me time and insights; Morain’s exemplary
xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
work on California prisons is a starting point for any serious student of the subject, as is the investigative reporting by Mark Arax
and Mark Gladstone. Public servants Don Pauley of Corcoran,
Melissa Harriman of Avenal, Ed Tewes of Modesto, and Bernie
Orozco of the now defunct Joint Legislative Committee on
Prison Construction and Operation provided crucial guidance
without hesitation. Paula Burbach at the California Department
of Corrections cheerfully responded to inquiries.
Some of the research for this book received support from a
Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture graduate fellowship; a Ford dissertation fellowship; a University of
California at Berkeley chancellor’s postdoctoral fellowship; and
fellowships from the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the Open Society Institute.
At the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, David Theo Goldberg, Sandra
Baringer, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Avery Gordon engaged
in spirited collaborative study and fieldwork; we have a book to
make from that experience.
American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern
California is a dream job. I am especially grateful to George
Sánchez, Laura Pulido, and Fred Moten for friendship and mentoring, to all my colleagues for their trust, and to Sonia Rodriguez, Kitty Lai, and Sandra Jones—along with Billie Shotlow
and Onita Morgan-Edwards in Geography—for their skillful
and good-humored staffing.
I’ve shared parts of this work with many scholars whose sharp
insights rapidly improved my thinking, thanks to the support of
sponsoring institutions: the National University of Singapore,
University of Washington, University of Chicago, the University
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii
of Texas at Austin, Johns Hopkins, the Claremont Colleges,
Scripps College, Queens University (CAN), UC Irvine, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, the
Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, New York University, City University of New
York, UCLA, the Brecht Forum, Brown, and Yale.
And then there’s the generosity of activists—a constant caring
regard for doing things both right and well. The principal organizations I work in and depend on are the California Prison
Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. In these and other
groups, many thanks to Tom Quinn, Catherine Campbell, the
late Holbrook Teter, Michelle Foy, Sarah Jarmon, Ellen Barry,
Bo Brown, Karen Shain, Peter Wagner, Brigette Sarabi, Tracy
Huling, Kevin Pranis, Dorsey Nunn, Eddie Ellis, Naomi Swinton, Joe Kaye, Ajulo Othow, Naneen Karraker, Laura Magnani,
Jason Ziedenberg, Deborah Peterson Small, Jonathan Wilson,
Lois Ahrens, John Mataka, Rosenda Mataka, Sandra Meraz,
Yedithza Vianey Nuñez, Joe Morales, Luke Cole, Bradley
Angel, Jason Glick, Amy Vanderwarker, Lani Riccobuono, Debbie Reyes, Leonel Flores, Dana Kaplan, Ari Wohlfeiler, Rachel
Herzing, and the activist’s activist Rose Braz.
At the University of California Press, Linda Norton and
Monica McCormick did everything possible to move this book
into print . . . and Niels Hooper did the impossible. Suzanne
Knott and Peter Dreyer are patient and thorough editors who
taught me a lot about writing to be read.
My brothers, Courtland, Peter, and Jon, and their families,
have waited impatiently, as have my friends who are so close as
to be fictive kin: Howard Singerman, Janet Ray, Brackette
xviii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Williams, Allen Feldman, Barbara Harlow, Sid Lemelle, Salima
Lemelle, Salim Lemelle, the late and always missed Glen
Thompson, Rachel Herzing, Avery Gordon, Chris Newfield,
Laura Liu, Clyde Woods, Mike Murashige, Laura Pulido, Julia
Gonzales, Annie Blum, and Rose Braz helped me develop my capacities, while demanding, singly and in chorus: “Write it down!
Send it in!”
My great regret is that my late father, Courtland Seymour
Wilson, tireless activist, self-educated working-class intellectual,
honest man, won’t have this book on his towering stack of things
to read next; he and my beautiful mother, Ruth Isabel Herb Wilson, sent me out young to do antiracist work, let me be a reader
and dreamer, and always welcomed their prodigal daughter
home. Finally, my husband and best friend, Craig Gilmore,
should be listed as co-author of this book; so much of the thinking, and more than half the suffering of it, was his.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xix
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AICCU Association of Independent California Colleges
and Universities
BJS Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics
BPP Black Panther Party
BRC California Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate
Population and Management
CCPOA California Correctional Peace Officers Association
CDC California Department of Corrections
CDF California Department of Finance
CDF-CEI California Department of Finance, California
Economic Indicators
CEZ California enterprise zone
CO corrections officer; prison guard
DOD Department of Defense
EDD California Employment Development Department
ERC Equal Rights Congress
xxi
ABBREVIATIONS
FACTS Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes
FIRE finance, insurance, and real estate sector
GOB general obligation bond
GSP gross state product
JfJ Justice for Janitors
JLCPCO Joint Legislative Committee on Prison Construction and Operations
LAO California Legislative Analyst’s Office
LAPD Los Angeles Police Department
LRB lease revenue bond
LULUs locally unwanted land uses
MAPA Mexican American Political Alliance
Mothers ROC Mothers Reclaiming Our Children
NAIRU non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment
NIMBY not in my back yard
PIA [California] Prison Industry Authority
PRCC [California] Prison Reform Conference Committee
ROC Mothers Reclaiming Our Children
SPWB California State Public Works Board
UFW United Farm Workers
xxii AB B R EVIATIONS
O
ne midnight in the middle of April, late in the twentieth
century, a bus pulled out of the Holman Methodist Church
parking lot. Traveling a short way along the northern
boundary of South Central Los Angeles, it geared up a
ramp into the web of state and federal highways that connect California’s diverse industrial, agricultural, and recreational
landscapes into the fifth-largest economy in the world. On the
bus, forty women, men, and children settled in for the seven-hour
journey north to Sacramento and the state capitol.
A dream crowd rode for freedom: red, black, brown, yellow,
and white; mothers, fathers, grandparents, sisters, brothers, children, lovers, and friends; gay men and lesbians; interracial families; English, Spanish, Tagalog, Arabic, Polish, and Hebrew
speakers; Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim, Eastern Orthodox,
and Quaker. Their diversity embodied some 150 years of California history and more than 300 years of national anxieties and
antagonisms. But the riders didn’t worry about it; they got on the
1
PROLOGUE
THE BUS
bus because of their sameness: employed, disabled, or retired
working people, with little or no discretionary income, whose
goal was freedom for their relatives serving long sentences behind bars.
The dream riders were summoned by a nightmare, made palpable by the terrifying numbers of prisoners and prisons produced during the past generation, while we were all, presumably,
awake. Just as real was the growing grassroots activism against
the expanded use of criminalization and cages as catchall solutions to social problems.
In order to realize their dream of justice in individual cases,
the riders decided, through struggle, debate, failure, and renewal, that they must seek general freedom for all from a system
in which punishment has become as industrialized as making
cars, clothes, or missiles, or growing cotton. Against the odds,
they had come to activism—acting out, in the details of modest
practices, the belief that “we shall overcome” the deep divisions
so taken for granted in apartheid America. In other words, they
shared more than an interest: purpose made them ride.
Some snoozed. Some played cards. Some talked about who
would join them on the statehouse steps, who would sit with
them in the Senate Committee on Public Safety hearing room,
and what best strategy would persuade a prisoner-hostile legislative committee majority to amend California’s “three strikes
and you’re out” law. Some watched through the window, with an
intensity suggesting that the night might reveal an answer. Instead, what they saw were landscapes of labor, living, and leisure
stretching out beyond the horizon. Leaving Los Angeles, the bus
traveled up the broad old industrial corridor’s central artery. Although the city is still the manufacturing capital of the United
2 PROLOGUE
States, the mix and remuneration of jobs making things has
changed drastically in the past twenty years. Auto and primary
steel are mostly gone, replaced by apparel and rebar.
On Interstate 5, the great road over the Tehachapi Mountains,
the bus passed endless residential developments and signs touting “business friendly” regions in the northern reaches of Los
Angeles County before slipping into the darkness of the Angeles
National Forest. The federal interstates enabled suburbanization
of both residence and industry and helped secure California’s historical dominance in the military-industrial complex. Indeed, for
most of the families on the bus, overt wars—World War II,
Korea, and Vietnam—and covert struggles—Jim Crow Mississippi and Louisiana—were the forces that had pushed and
pulled them to Southern California to remake their lives, as
long-distance migrants must.
Rolling down the long grade into the Great Central Valley,
some of the riders speculated about the gargantuan pumping stations that propel water gathered from the state’s northern and eastern regions over the mountains to quench the Southland’s thirst.
And yet although the water courses up out of the valley, a lot remains to irrigate the state’s agricultural immensity. Indeed, while
agriculture is only 3 percent of gross state product (GSP), California ranks first in the United States in agricultural production.
They stopped in Bakersfield to pick up more people: a farmworker, an unemployed journalist, some prisoners’ mothers taking an unpaid day off work and contributing from their slim
wages toward the $1,000 charter cost.
Outside Bakersfield, darkness drew in again around the
Thomas-built coach. A small group of riders, sitting in the back,
started to count sightings of intensely golden glows that eerily
THE BUS 3
poked depth into the flat blackness. These concentrations of
light in farmland are many of California’s new prisons: cities of
men, and sometimes women, that lie next to the dim towns that
host them. Some passengers whispered, their words recorded as
breath on glass: “Donny’s over there.” “Hello Richard.” “I wonder if Angel’s sleeping. I told him we’d pass by.” The small fogs
cleared as the bus labored on.
Other buses make this journey every day from central Los Angeles, leaving not from churches but rather from courts and jails.
Their destinations are the old or new prisons—those that cluster
along Highway 99 and make it a prison alley and others further
afield, from the sturdy perimeter of fortresses along the
California-Mexico border in the south up into Indian country at
Susanville and Crescent City at the Oregon line. Nine hundred
miles of prisons: an archipelago of concrete and steel cages, thirtythree major prisons (see map on page 10) plus fifty-seven smaller
prisons and camps, forty-three of the total built since 1984.
Arriving in Sacramento, the riders joined their allies from
other parts of the state for a prayer breakfast and a rally on the
capitol steps. Then the day’s principal activity began: the long
committee session. They would try again to persuade people
eager for reelection, who review and approve new criminal laws
three hours a week, every week, to undo part of one law even
while a major campaign contributor, the prison guards’ union,
summoned its lobbyist brigades to denounce any reform. For a
moment before the group moved indoors, the ordinarily graywhite state buildings yellowed to reflect the warming sunrise—a
sensation welcomed by a few aching elderly passengers, always
alert for signs for hope. Perhaps on this trip they might knock one
block out of the Golden Gulag’s miles and miles of prison walls.
4 PROLOGUE
THE PROBLEM
T
his book is about the phenomenal growth of California’s
state prison system since 1982 and grassroots opposition to
the expanding use of prisons as catchall solutions to social
problems. It asks how, why, where, and to what effect one
of the planet’s richest and most diverse political economies
has organized and executed a prison-building and -filling plan
that government analysts have called “the biggest . . . in the history of the world” (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991: i). By providing answers to these questions, the book also charts changes in
state structure, local and regional economies, and social identities. Golden Gulag is a tale of fractured collectivities—economies,
governments, cities, communities, and households—and their
fitful attempts to reconstruct themselves.
The book began as two modest research projects undertaken
in Los Angeles in 1992 and 1994 on behalf of a group of mostly
African American mothers, many of whom later rode the bus depicted in the Prologue. All wished to understand both the letter
5
ONE
INTRODUCTION
6 INTRODUCTION
and intent of two California laws—the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention (STEP) Act (1988) and Proposition
184, the “three strikes and you’re out” law (1994). They asked
me, a nonlawyer activist with research skills, access to university
libraries, and a big vocabulary, to help them. The oral reports and
written summaries I presented at Saturday workshops failed to
produce what we hoped for: clues as to how individual defendants might achieve better outcomes in their cases. Rather, what
we learned twice over was this: the laws had written into the
penal code breathtakingly cruel twists in the meaning and practice of justice.
Why should such discoveries surprise people for whom
racism and economic struggle are persistent, life-shortening aspects of everyday experience? Perhaps because, for an increasing
number of people, by the early 1990s, everyday experience had
come to include familiarity with the routines of police, arrests,
lawyers, plea bargains, and trials. The repertoire of the criminal
courts seemed to be consistent if consistently unfair, with everyone playing rather predictable roles and the devil (or acquittal) in
the details. But instead of showing how to become more detailsavvy about a couple of laws, our group study shifted our perspective by forcing us to ask general—and therefore, to our general frustration, more abstract—questions: Why prisons? Why
now? Why for so many people—especially people of color? And
why were they located so far from prisoners’ homes?
The complex inquiry we inadvertently set for ourselves eventually defined the scope of this book, whose tale unfolds four
times: statewide; at the capitol; in rural Corcoran; and in South
Central Los Angeles. Working through California’s prison development from these various “cuts” will uncover the dynamics of
INTRODUCTION 7
the social and spatial intersections where expansion emerged.
There’s a political reason for doing things this way. It is not only a
good theory in theory but also a good theory in practice for people
engaged in the spectrum of social justice struggles to figure out
unexpected sites where their agendas align with those of others.
We can do this by seeing how general changes connect with concrete experiences—as the mothers did in our study groups.
The California state prisoner population grew nearly 500 percent
between 1982 and 2000, even though the crime rate peaked in
1980 and declined, unevenly but decisively, thereafter (see figs. 1
and 2). African Americans and Latinos comprise two-thirds of
the state’s 160,000 prisoners; almost 7 percent are women of all
races; 25 percent are noncitizens. Most prisoners come from the
state’s urban cores—particularly Los Angeles and the surrounding southern counties. More than half the prisoners had steady
employment before arrest, while upwards of 80 percent were, at
some time in their case, represented by state-appointed lawyers
for the indigent. In short, as a class, convicts are deindustrialized
cities’ working or workless poor.
Since 1984, California has completed twenty-three major new
prisons (see map), at a cost of $280–$350 million dollars apiece.
The state had previously built only twelve prisons between 1852
and 1964. The gargantuan new poured-concrete structures loom
at the edge of small, economically struggling, ethnically diverse
towns in rural areas. California has also added, in similar locations, thirteen small (500-bed) community corrections facilities,
five prison camps, and five mother-prisoner centers to its pre-1984
inventory. By 2005, a hotly contested twenty-fourth new prison,
designed to cage 5,160 men will, if opened, bring the total num-
8 INTRODUCTION
FIGURE 1. California crime index by category, 1952–1995. Source: California Department of Justice, Criminal Justice Information Services
Division.
ber of state lockups for adult men and women to ninety.1With the
exception of a few privately managed 500-bed facilities, these prisons are wholly public: owned by the state of California, financed
by Public Works Board debt, and operated by the California Department of Corrections. The state’s general fund provides 100
percent of the entire prison system’s annual costs. Expenses spiked
from 2 percent of the general fund in 1982 to nearly 8 percent
5,000
4,000
3,000
Crime index, revised formula
Crime index, original formula
Property crimes, revised formula
Property crimes, original formula
Violent crimes
2,000
52 54 56 58 60 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 76
Year
78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 98 00
1,000
0
Rate
FIGURE 2. Revised California crime index, 1952–2000. Source: California Department of Justice, Criminal Justice Information Services Division. Note: Throughout its development, this book used the nationally
accepted method for measuring crime, as illustrated by figure 1, which
shows the state attorney general’s 1995 California crime index. In 2003,
“to give a more representative depiction of crime in California,” a different California attorney general added “larceny-theft over $400” to
the California crime index, retroactive to 1983. Whatever the latter’s
motivations, the effect as shown above has been to muddy the waters
concerning when the crime rate began to decline in California and, as
a consequence, what role increasing the numbers of prisons and people
locked up in them has played. Subsequent to this revision, the “California Crime Index has been temporarily suspended as efforts continue
to redefine this measurement.” Data and quotations from Crimes,
1952–2003, table 1, Criminal Justice Statistics Center, Office of the Attorney General, http://caag.state.ca.us/cjsc/publications/candd/cd03/
tabs/ (January 23, 2005).
10 INTRODUCTION
0 50 100 mi
Prisons
Community corrections facilities
Camps
Mother-prisoner facilities
Cities
State capital
Map does not include county
or city jails, ICE detention centers,
state or county juvenile facilities,
or federal prisons.
Crescent
City
Susanville
Vacaville Folsom
Sacramento Ione
San Quentin Tracy Jamestown
San Francisco
Chowchilla
Fresno
Soledad Coalinga Farmersville
Corcoran
Avenal Delano
Wasco San Luis Obispo Bakersfield
Tehachapi
Lancaster
Chino
Los Angeles Norco Blythe
Corona
San Diego El Centro
Calipatria
California state adult prisons. Adapted from a map by Craig Gilmore.
today. The Department of Corrections has become the largest
state agency, employing a heterogeneous workforce of 54,000.
These alarming facts raise many urgent issues involving
money, income, jobs, race and ethnicity, gender, lawmaking, state
agencies and the policies that propel them to act, rural communities, urban neighborhoods, uneven development, migration and
globalization, hope, and despair. Such breadth belies the common
INTRODUCTION 11
view that prisons sit on the edge—at the margins of social spaces,
economic regions, political territories, and fights for rights. This
apparent marginality is a trick of perspective, because, as every geographer knows, edges are also interfaces. For example, even
while borders highlight the distinction between places, they also
connect places into relationships with each other and with noncontiguous places. So too with prisons: the government-organized
and -funded dispersal of marginalized people from urban to rural
locations suggests both that problems stretch across space in a connected way and that arenas for activism are less segregated than
they seem. Viewed in this way, we can see how “prison” is actually
in the middle of the muddle that confronts all modestly educated
working people and their extended communities—the global
supermajority—at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
WHAT IS PRISON SUPPOSED TO DO AND WHY?
The practice of putting people in cages for part or all of their lives
is a central feature in the development of secular states, participatory democracy, individual rights, and contemporary notions
of freedom. These institutions of modernity, shaped by the rapid
growth of cities and industrial production, faced a challenge—
most acutely where capitalism flourished unfettered—to produce stability from “the accumulation and useful administration”
of people on the move in a “society of strangers” (Foucault 1977:
303). Prisons both depersonalized social control, so that it could
be bureaucratically managed across time and space, and satisfied
the demands of reformers who largely prevailed against bodily
punishment, which nevertheless endures in the death penalty
and many torturous conditions of confinement. Oddly enough,
12 INTRODUCTION
then, the rise of prisons is coupled with two major upheavals—
the rise of the word freedom to stand in for what’s desirable and
the rise of civic activists to stand up for who’s dispossessed.
The relationship of prison to dispossession has been well studied. Wedged between ethics and the law, the justification for
putting people behind bars rests on the premise that as a consequence of certain actions, some people should lose all freedom
(which we can define in this instance as control over one’s bodily
habits, pastimes, relationships, and mobility). It takes muscular
political capacity to realize widescale dispossession of people who
have formal rights, and historically those who fill prisons have
collectively lacked political clout commensurate with the theoretical power that rights suggest (see, e.g., Dayan 1999). In contrast, during most of the modern history of prisons, those officially
devoid of rights—indigenous and enslaved women and men, for
example, or new immigrants, or married white women—rarely
saw the inside of a cage, because their unfreedom was guaranteed
by other means (Christianson 1998; E. B. Freedman 1996).
But what about crime? Doesn’t prison exist because there are
criminals? Yes and no. While common sense suggests a natural
connection between “crime” and “prison,” what counts as crime
in fact changes, and what happens to people convicted of crimes
does not, in all times and places, result in prison sentences. Defined in the simple terms of the secular state, crime means a violation of the law. Laws change, depending on what, in a social
order, counts as stability, and who, in a social order, needs to be
controlled. Let’s look at a range of examples. After the Civil War,
an onslaught of legal maneuvers designed to guarantee the cheap
availability of southern Black people’s labor outlawed both
“moving around” and “standing still” (Franklin 1998), and con-
INTRODUCTION 13
victs worked without choice or compensation to build the region’s infrastructure and industrial system (A. Lichtenstein 1996;
B. M. Wilson 2000a). From the 1890s onward, a rush of Jim Crow
laws both fed on earlier labor-focused statutes and sparked the
nationwide apartheid craze. The Eighteenth Amendment to the
Constitution (1919) prohibited the manufacture, import, export,
or sale of intoxicating liquors, at a time when most drugs that are
now illegal were not (Lusane 1991). In Texas, driving while
drinking alcohol is legal, whereas a marijuana seed can put a person in prison for life. Prostitution is legal in some places. In others, the remedy for theft is restitution, not a cage. Murder is the
result of opportunity, motive, and means, and the fact of a killing
begins rather than ends an inquiry into the shifting legal nature
of such a loss. Numerous histories and criminological treatises
show shifts over time in what crime is and why it matters (see,
e.g., Linebaugh 1992; Christianson 1998). Contemporary comparative studies demonstrate how societies that are relatively
similar—industrialized, diverse, largely immigrant—differ
widely in their assessments and experience of disorderly behavior and the remedies for what’s generally accepted as wrong
(Archer and Gartner 1984). As we can see that crime is not fixed,
it follows that crime’s relationship to prisons is the outcome of social theory and practice, rather than the only possible source of
stability through control.
How are prisons supposed to produce stability through controlling what counts as crime? Four theories condense two and a
quarter centuries of experience into conflicting and generally
overlapping explanations for why societies decide they should
lock people out by locking them in. Each theory, which has its intellectuals, practitioners, and critics, turns on one of four key con-
14 INTRODUCTION
cepts: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation.
Let’s take them in turn. The shock of retribution—loss of liberty—supposedly keeps convicted persons from doing again,
upon release, what sent them to prison. Retribution’s specter, deterrence, allegedly dissuades people who can project themselves
into a convicted person’s jumpsuit from doing what might result
in lost liberty. Rehabilitation proposes that the unfreedom of
prisons provides an occasion for the acquisition of sobriety and
skills, so that, on release, formerly incarcerated people can live
lives away from the criminal dragnet. And, finally, incapacitation, the least ambitious of all these theories, simply calculates
that those locked up cannot make trouble outside of prison.
These theories relate to each other as reforms—not as steps away
from brutality or inconsistency, but as attempts to make prisons
produce social stability through applying some mix of care, indifference, compulsory training, and cruelty to people in cages.
If the fourth concept, incapacitation, is not ambitious in a behavioral or psychological sense, it is, ironically, the theory that
undergirds the most ambitious prison-building project in the history of the world. Incapacitation doesn’t pretend to change anything about people except where they are. It is in a simpleminded way, then, a geographical solution that purports to solve
social problems by extensively and repeatedly removing people
from disordered, deindustrialized milieus and depositing them
somewhere else.
But does the absence of freedom for many ensure stability in
the form of lower-crime communities, and idled courts and police officers, for others? We can hazard a quick guess by asking
a different question: would the prevailing theories shift and
mingle over time, persistently reforming reformed reforms, if
INTRODUCTION 15
the outcome were stability? Probably not. And now there’s more
to be said on the subject, since we can count and compare outcomes. State by state, those jurisdictions that have not built a lot
of prisons and thrown more people into them have enjoyed
greater decreases in crime than states where incapacitation became a central governmental activity. For the latter, there are
similar patterns of contrariness: within California, counties that
aggressively use mandatory sentencing, such as the notoriously
harsh “three strikes” law, have experienced feebler decreases in
crime than counties that use the law sparingly.
Here we must briefly digress and reflect further on prison demographics, in particular, their exclusive domination of working
or workless poor, most of whom are not white. Since it has never
before been so easy for people of color to get into prison (jail is another matter [Irwin 1985]), we have to ask how racism works to
lock in both them and more poor white people as well. To what
degree has the regular observer, of any race, learned both willfully and unconsciously to conclude that the actual people who
go to prison are the same as those the abolitionist Ruth Morris
called the “terrible few.” The “terrible few” are a statistically insignificant and socially unpredictable handful of the planet’s humans whose psychopathic actions are the stuff of folktales,
tabloids (including the evening news and reality television), and
emergency legislation. When it comes to crime and prisons, the
few whose difference might horribly erupt stand in for the many
whose difference is emblazoned on surfaces of skin, documents,
and maps—color, credo, citizenship, communities, convictions.
The paroxysmal thinking required to make such a substitution
is the outcome of many prods and barbs, in which aggression, violence, order, and duty conflate into an alleged force of Ameri-
16 INTRODUCTION
can “human nature” (Lutz 2001). This thinking reveals the
imaginary relationships people have with neighbors recast as
strangers in a thoroughly racialized and income-stratified political economy that regularly redefines possibilities while never
setting absolute positive or negative limits.
With the vexing question of difference in mind, let’s return to
the problem of spatial unevenness. If places that spare the cage
are calmer than places that use imprisonment more aggressively,
why is this so? Why wouldn’t higher rates of incapacitation produce more stability? As it turns out, if we ratchet our perspective
down to an extremely intimate view and compare, we see that
identical locations—in terms of the social, cultural, and economic characteristics of inhabitants—diverge over time into different qualities of place when one of them experiences high rates
of imprisonment of residents. And, more, the “tipping point,”
when things start to get really bad, is not very deep. Only two or
three need be removed from n to produce greater instability in a
community of people who, when employed, make, move, or care
for things (Clear et al. 2001; Rose and Clear 2002). Why? For one
thing, households stretch from neighborhood to visiting room to
courtroom, with a consequent thinning of financial and emotional resources (Comfort 2002). Looking around the block at all
the homes, research shows that increased use of policing and state
intervention in everyday problems hasten the demise of the informal customary relationships that social calm depends on
(Clear et al. 2001). People stop looking out for each other and stop
talking about anything that matters in terms of neighborly wellbeing. Cages induce or worsen mental illness in prisoners (Haney
2001; Kupers 1999), most of whom eventually come out to
service-starved streets. Laws (such as lifetime bans from financial
INTRODUCTION 17
aid) and fiscal constraints displacing dollars from social investment to social expense (O’Connor [1973] 2000) lock former prisoners out of education, employment, housing, and many other
stabilizing institutions of everyday life. In such inhospitable
places, everybody isolates. And when something disruptive, confusing, or undesirable happens, people dial 911. As a result, crime
goes up, along with unhappiness, and those who are able to do so
move away in search of a better environment, concentrating unhappiness in their wake. In other words, prisons wear out places
by wearing out people, irrespective of whether they have done
time (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002).
This book asks how prison came to be such a widescale solution in late twentieth-century California, in part by looking at the
problem through two extraordinary lenses. It asks what the relationship is between urban and rural political and economic restructuring, and how urban social expense fits into the rural
landscape. It also asks what happens in the urban neighborhoods
prisoners come from when people start talking to each other
again.
THE DOMINANT AND COUNTEREXPLANATIONS
FOR PRISON GROWTH
In its briefest form, the dominant explanation for prison growth
goes like this: crime went up; we cracked down; crime came
down.
Is this true?
The media, government officials, and policy advisers endlessly refer to “the public’s concern” over crime and connect
prison growth to public desire for social order. In this explanation, what is pivotal is not the state’s definition of crime per se but
18 INTRODUCTION
rather society’s condemnation of rampant deviant behavior—
thus a moral, not (necessarily) legal, panic. The catapulting of
crime to public anxiety number one, even when unemployment
and inflation might have garnered greater worry in the recessions of the early 1980s and the early 1990s, suggests that concerns
about social deviance overshadowed other, possibly more immediate, issues.
However, by the time the great prison roundups began, crime
had started to go down. Mainstream media widely reported the
results of statistics annually gathered and published by the FBI,
the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), and state attorneys general.
In other words, if the public had indeed demanded crime reduction, the public was already getting what it wanted. California
officials could have taken credit for decreasing crime rates without producing more than 140,000 new prison beds (more than a
million nationally).
Another explanation for the burgeoning prison population is
the drug epidemic and the presumed threat to public safety
posed by the unrestrained use and trade of illegal substances. Information about the controlling (or most serious) offense of prisoners seems to support the drug explanation: drug commitments
to federal and state prison systems surged 975 percent between
1982 and 1999. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the
widening use of drugs in the late 1970s and early 1980s provoked
prison expansion. According to this scenario—as news stories,
sensational television programs, popular music and movies, and
politicians’ anecdotes made abundantly clear—communities, especially poor communities of color, would be more deeply decimated by addiction, drug dealing, and gang violence were it not
for the restraining force of prisons. The explanation rests on two
INTRODUCTION 19
assumptions: first, that drug use exploded in the 1980s; and second, that the sometimes violent organization of city neighborhoods into gang enclaves was accomplished in order to secure
drug markets.
In fact, according to the BJS, illegal drug use among all kinds
of people throughout the United States declined drastically starting in the mid 1970s (Tonry 1995). Second, although large-scale
traffic in legal or illegal goods requires highly organized distribution systems—whether corporations or gangs (Winslow
1999)—not all gangs are in drug trafficking. For example, according to Mike Davis (1990), in late 1980s Los Angeles, despite
the availability of stiffer sentences for gang members, prosecutors
charged only one in four dealers with gang membership, and
that pattern continued through the 1990s, despite media reports
to the contrary.
A third explanation blames structural changes in employment
opportunities; these changes have left large numbers of people
challenged to find new income sources, and many have turned to
what one pundit called illegal entitlements. In this view, those
who commit property crimes—along with those who trade in illegal substances—reasonably account for a substantial portion of
the vast increase in prison populations. Controlling offense data
for new prisoners support the income-supplementing explanation: the percentage of people in prison for property offenses has
more than doubled since 1982. But at the same time, incidents of
property crime peaked in 1980; indeed, the drop in property
crime pushed down the overall crime rate.
Throughout the economic boom of the 1990s, both print and
electronic media again headlined annual federal reports about
long-term drops in crime (falling since 1980), and elected and ap-
20 INTRODUCTION
pointed officials took credit for the trends. In this context, the explanation for bulging prisons centers on the remarkable array of
stiffer mandatory sentences now doled out for a wide range of
behavior that used to be differently punished, if at all. This explanation, tied to but different from the moral panic explanation,
proposes that while social deviance might not have exploded
after all, aggressive intolerance pays handsome political dividends. The explanation that new kinds of sentences—which is to
say the concerted action of lawmakers—rather than crises in the
streets produced the growth in prison is after the fact and begs
the question: Why prisons now?
Indeed, the preceding series of explanations and their underlying weaknesses suggest that the simple relationship between
“crime” and “crackdown” introducing this section should be
tweaked in the interest of historical accuracy. The string of declarative statements more properly reads: “crime went up; crime
came down; we cracked down.” If the order is different, then so
are the causes. Here, of course, is where the prevailing alternative
explanations come in. These views, like the official stories, are
not mutually exclusive.
A key set of arguments charges racial cleansing: prisons grow
in order to get rid of people of color, especially young Black men,
accomplishing the goal through new lawmaking, patterns of
policing, and selective prosecution (see, for examples, Miller
1996; Mauer 1999; Goldberg 2002). These analysts prove their
claims using two decades of numbers showing the “racial disparities” in flesh-and-blood facts of prison expansion, substantial
for white people and off the charts for nearly everybody else.
There’s no doubt what the accumulated experience is. But why
now? Among many who charge racism, folk wisdom, a product
INTRODUCTION 21
of mixing the Thirteenth Amendment with thin evidence, is that
prison constitutes the new slavery and that the millions in cages
are there to provide cheap labor for corporations looking to
lower stateside production costs.
The problem with the “new slavery” argument is that very
few prisoners work for anybody while they’re locked up. Recall,
the generally accepted goal for prisons has been incapacitation: a
do-nothing theory if ever there was one. There has certainly been
enough time for public and private entities to have worked out
the logistics of exploiting unfree labor, and virtually every state,
including California, has a law requiring prisoners to work. But
the fact that most prisoners are idle, and that those who work do
so for a public agency, undermines the view that today’s prison
expansion is the story of nineteenth-century Alabama writ large
(A. Lichtenstein 1996; B. M. Wilson 2000a). The principal reason
private interests fail to exploit prisoner labor seems to be this: big
firms can afford to set up satellite work areas (what a prisonbased production facility would be), while small firms cannot.
Small firms then fight against big firms over unfair access to
cheap labor and fight as well against publicly owned and operated prison industries (such as the federal system called UNICOR) that, due to low wages (not the same as low labor costs),
unfairly compete in markets selling things modestly educated
people can make and do.
Two other counterexplanations focus on the pursuit of profits.
The first places emphasis on the privatization of public functions.
Although the absolute number of private prisons has indeed
grown, the fact is that 95 percent of all prisons and jails are publicly owned and operated. So the argument that more people are
in prison due to the lobbying efforts of private prison firms doesn’t
22 INTRODUCTION
stand up to scrutiny. The firms are not insignificant, especially in
some jurisdictions, but they’re not the driving force, either. Despite boosterish claims by stock analysts, private prison firms consistently hover on the brink of disaster (Greene 2001; Matera and
Khan 2001), while public sector unions fight against losing jobs
with good pay and benefits. The final profit-centered explanation
focuses more generally on the potential for pulling surplus cash
out of prisons (Dyer 1999). The question remains as to how these
changes came into effect, given the welter of laws and rules directing the uses of capital for public investments. In other words,
what does the fact that the world has gone capitalist in the past
decade and a half (see, e.g., Parenti 1999) mean; and what are the
conditions under which other possibilities might unfold? In particular, how has the role of the state—at various levels, from
urban growth machine to federal devolution machine—changed
in the attempt to produce stability and growth in the general political economy, especially if equity is no longer on the agenda?
The preceding discussion leads us to the third view, which
holds that there are more people in prison in order for “the state”
to help rural areas hungry for jobs; in this explanation of prison
expansion, prisoners of color presumably provide employment
opportunities for white guards. There’s no question that rural
America has been in the throes of a depression that began
decades ago. In the 1980s and early 1990s, a welter of scholarly
and trade articles (e.g., Carlson 1988, 1992; Sechrest 1992; Shichor 1992) promoted the local development discourse and advised prison agencies and civic boosters how to dispel fears and
thereby disarm the NIMBY (not in my back yard) attitude. Such
work reinforced the suspicion that prison expansion is a concrete
manifestation of urban-rural competition and conflict. How-
INTRODUCTION 23
ever, we now know the fiscal benefits to prison towns are difficult if impossible to locate (Hooks et al. 2003; Farrigan and Glasmeier 2002; R. W. Gilmore 1998; Huling 2002; King et al. 2003).
But where are the new prisons? Are the host communities and
the places prisoners come from so different? What about the demographic continuities between employees and the prisoners
themselves? Indeed, what already existing relationships make a
town eligible for, or vulnerable to, prison siting in the first place?
And why doesn’t investment stick there?
A fourth counterexplanation is one we might call the reform
school. Analysts from a variety of political perspectives examine
more than two centuries of interlocking prison and legal reforms
and ask what role activists of many kinds—such as benevolent
liberals or women fighting domestic and sexual violence—play,
first in normalizing prison and then enabling its perpetually expanding use as an all-purpose remedy for the thwarted rights of
both prisoners and harmed free persons (see, for examples,
Gottschalk 2002; A. Davis 2003; Critical Resistance–INCITE
2002). This view demands consideration of how political identities defined by injury (Brown 1994) and order derived from punishment (Garland 1990, 2002) shape state norms and practices.
Through formal interaction with the state (as girl, student, citizen, immigrant, retiree, worker, owner, so forth), people develop
and modulate their expectations about what the state should do,
and these understandings, promoted or abhorred by media, intellectuals, and others, guide how, and under what conditions,
social fixes come into being. The state makes things, but it is also
a product of what’s made and destroyed—of the constant creation and destruction of things such as schools, hospitals, art museums, nuclear weapons, and prisons. These issues return us to
24 INTRODUCTION
the question of why the state changes. How do we understand
such change through the development or revision of governmental institutions? Before concluding this introduction to the
problem, let’s look quickly at a key historical moment of the
twentieth century: 1968.
LOOKING BACKWARD TO LOOK FORWARD
The preceding brief review of counterexplanations for prison
growth does not account for the order of things: crime went up;
crime came down; we cracked down. But of course, as every explanation suggests, something big, which proponents of “crime
is the problem; prison is the solution” could be part of, directed
the action. A conspiracy? Not likely. Systemic? Without a doubt.
All the elements are here. Let’s look back for a moment to 1968,
symbolically the year of revolution and counterrevolution, to get
one more take on the picture.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a disorderly year, when revolutionaries around the world made as much trouble as possible in as
many places as possible. Overlapping communities of resistance
self-consciously connected their struggles. Growing opposition
to the U.S. war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia linked up with
anticolonialism and antiapartheid forces on a world scale; and
many found in Black Power a compelling invigoration of historical linkages between “First” and “Third” world liberation, not
unlike the way people today trying to make sense of antiglobalization look to the Zapatistas in Chiapas (see, e.g., Katzenberger
1995). Students and workers built and defended barricades from
Mexico City to Paris, sat down in factories, and walked out of
fields. The more militant anticapitalism and international solidarity became everyday features of U.S. antiracist activism, the
INTRODUCTION 25
more vehemently the state responded by, as Allen Feldman
(1991) puts it, “individualizing disorder” into singular instances
of criminality.
The years 1967–68 also marked the end of a long run-up in
annual increases in profit, signaling the close of the golden age of
U.S. capitalism. The golden age had started thirty years earlier,
when Washington began the massive buildup for World War II.
The organizational structures and fiscal authority that had been
designed for New Deal social welfare agencies provided the
template for the Pentagon’s painstaking transformation (Gregory. Hooks 1991). It changed from a periodically expanded and
contracted Department of War to the largest and most costly bureaucracy of the federal government. The United States has since
committed enormous resources to the first permanent warfare
apparatus in the country’s pugnacious history.
The wealth produced from warfare spending did two
things: it helped knit the nation’s vast marginal hinterland (the
South and the West) into the national economy by moving vast
quantities of publicly funded construction and development
projects, and people to do the work, to those regions (with California gaining the most) (Schulman 1994). The wealth also underwrote the motley welfare agencies that took form during the
Great Depression but did not become truly operational until
the end of World War II (Gregory Hooks 1991). Indeed, the
U.S. welfare state has been dubbed “military Keynesianism”—
an unpronouncable name but a good thing to know—to denote
the centrality of war-making to socioeconomic security. On the
domestic front, while labor achieved moderate protections
against calamity and opportunities for advancement, worker
militancy was crushed and U.S. hierarchies achieved renewed
26 INTRODUCTION
structural salience. The hierarchies mapped both the organization of labor markets and the sociospatial control of wealth.
Thus, white people fared well compared with people of color,
most of whom were deliberately, if craftily, excluded from the
original legislation; men received automatically what women
had to apply for individually; and urban industrial workers secured limited wage and bargaining rights denied household
and agricultural fieldworkers.
This quick look at the crumbling foundations of the old order,
which gave way to the possibility of astonishing prison growth,
raises the urgent topics that this book addresses: money, income,
jobs, race and ethnicity, gender, lawmaking, state agencies and
the policies that propel them to act, rural communities, urban
neighborhoods, uneven development, migration and globalization, hope, and despair. Today’s political-economic superstructure is grounded in the radical failures and counterrevolutionary
successes of an earlier era, as exemplified by the antagonism between insurgents and counterinsurgents in 1968.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
How and why, then, did California go about the biggest prisonbuilding project in the history of the world? In my view, prisons
are partial geographical solutions to political economic crises, organized by the state, which is itself in crisis. Crisis means instability that can be fixed only through radical measures, which include developing new relationships and new or renovated
institutions out of what already exists. The instability that characterized the end of the golden age of American capitalism provides a key, as we shall see. In the following pages, we shall investigate how certain kinds of people, land, capital, and state
INTRODUCTION 27
capacity became idle—what surplus is—what happened, and
why the outcomes are logically explicable but were by no means
inevitable.
A few words about scholar activism, and then our tale begins.
Happily, the Social Science Research Council has taken an interest in what scholar activism is and does, and a group of us are
writing a book about it. For readers of the present book, the key
point is this: the questions and analyses driving this book came
from the work encountered in everyday activism “on the
ground.” However, the direction of research does not necessarily
follow every lead proposed from the grassroots, nor do the findings necessarily reinforce community activists’ closely held
hunches about how the world works. On the contrary, in scholarly research, answers are only as good as the further questions
they provoke, while for activists, answers are as good as the tactics they make possible. Where scholarship and activism overlap
is in the area of how to make decisions about what comes next. As
this project grew from a modest research inquiry into a decade’s
lifework, so too did the need to figure out a guide for action.
We simultaneously make places, things, and selves, although
not under conditions of our own choosing. Problems, then, are
also opportunities. The world does not operate according to an
analytically indefensible opposition that presumes that “agency”
is an exclusive, if underused, attribute of the oppressed in their
endless confrontation with the forces of “structure.” Rather, if
agency is the human ability to craft opportunity from the wherewithal of everyday life, then agency and structure are products of
each other. Without their mutual interaction, there would be no
drama, no dynamic, no story to tell. Actors in all kinds of situations (farms, neighborhoods, government agencies, collapsing
28 INTRODUCTION
economies, tough elections) are fighting to create stability out of
instability. In a crisis, the old order does not simply blow away,
and every struggle is carried out within, and against, already existing institutions: electoral politics, the international capitalist
system, families, uneven development, racism.
As the example of racism suggests, institutions are sets of hierarchical relationships (structures) that persist across time (Martinot 2003) undergoing, as we have seen in the case of prisons, periodic reform. Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or
extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated
vulnerability to premature death. States are institutions made up
of subinstitutions that often work at cross-purposes, but that get
direction from the prevailing platforms and priorities of the current government. Capital, the wealth of the profit system’s development ability, is also a relation, since it could not exist if
workers did not produce goods for less than they’re sold for and
buy goods in order to go back to work and make, move, or grow
more stuff. As private property, land is also a relationship—to
nonowners, to other pieces of land, to mortgagers, and to land
that is not privately owned. And the state’s power to organize
these various factors of production, or enable them to be disorganized or abandoned outright, is not a thing but rather a capacity—which is to say, based in relationships that also change over
time and sometimes become so persistently challenged, from
above and below, by those whose opinions and actions matter,
that the entire character of the state eventually changes as well.
This book is about enormous changes and alternative outcomes. It pauses at many different points both to show how resolutions of surplus land, capital, labor, and state capacity congealed into prisons, and also to suggest—and in the last chapters
INTRODUCTION 29
to argue—how alternative uses of the resources of everyday life
might otherwise have been organized. It is thus a book for everybody who is fighting against racism, old or new, for fair wages,
and especially for the social wage (in sum, for human rights). The
conclusion proposes ten theses for activists who seek to craft policies to build the capacity—the power—that propels social change
organizations, which are the backbone of social movements
(Horton and Freire 1990).
F
ifth- or sixth-largest among the world’s economies, California passed the trillion dollar gross state product mark in
1997, a level nominally equal to U.S. domestic product in
1970. However, the wealthy and productive state’s poverty
rate rose in the national rankings, from thirtieth in 1980 to
fourteenth in 2001. Relative poverty, which compares incomes
within states, also snared more households, pushing California
into the company of historically poor states such as Louisiana,
New Mexico, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Kentucky; with
populous New York and Texas, where prisons have also expanded significantly; and with the classically bifurcated District
of Columbia, which has both the highest per capita income and
highest poverty in the country (Reed 2002). What happened?
GROWTH
California’s diversity has always been its strength and challenge.
Those who fashioned the Golden State’s dominant political, eco30
TWO
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 31
nomic, and cultural institutions exploited resources and methods
acquired locally, nationally, and internationally. The region’s development into metropolitan and agricultural empires required
extensive labor power, huge infusions of public and private capital, lengthy networks of human, water, and product transport
systems, and a state sufficiently powerful to maintain order and
promote expansion amid complexity.
Nineteenth-century California experienced rapid changes in
both population and land control. The transition following U.S.
victory in the Mexican War featured the implementation of state
tax and currency laws that enabled Anglo power brokers to obtain Mexican haciendas cheaply. At the same time, federal and
state financial and land subventions underwrote California’s railroad incorporation into the U.S. empire, ensuring that local
products would have access to national markets and beyond
(Bean 1973; Pisani 1984). These two movements of landownership concentrated into relatively few hands both the incentive
and the power to shape regional development trajectories. Their
power was not absolute; federal and state programs facilitated
rapid Anglo settlement of the vast state by the inducements of
cheap or even free land, and homesteaders confronted big capital in political and gun battles alike (Caughey 1940; Bean 1973),
with big capital winning when it was not divided against itself
(McWilliams 1946; Pisani 1984).
Not everyone who immigrated was a homesteader, and neither were all workers—immigrant or native born—of European origin. California’s labor force has always been diverse
(Saxton 1971; Bean 1973; Almaguer 1994). Asian, Mexicano,
African, and Anglo men and women came on their own or were
recruited or coerced to mine gold, build railroads, and perform
32 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
industrial, artisanal, agricultural, and service work (Bean 1973).
As is generally the case in the United States, differences among
workers, cast as race, ethnicity, citizenship, gender, and locale,
have both structured and been structured by labor markets
(Caughey 1940; Saxton 1971; Barrera 1979; Almaguer 1994).
California conferred particular form on these structures. As
simultaneously U.S. colonizers in what had formerly been part of
Mexico and controllers of a new state in the U.S. Union, the dominant Anglos organized labor and propertied classes according to
Black-white, European–non-European, and Protestant-Catholic
hierarchies (Saxton 1971; Almaguer 1994). Through legislative
edicts and institutional practices, state, capital, and labor power
blocs manipulated the unique characteristics of the population to
designate a “changing same” (Jones 1967) of those who counted
as members, servants, and enemies (Saxton 1971) of the emerging “Herrenvolk republic” (Saxton 1990). California’s extension
and specification of the normative U.S. racial state (Omi and
Winant 1986) also served to sanction genocide as the final solution to the problem of how to acquire indigenous people’s coveted lands (Caughey 1940; Stannard 1992).
Nineteenth-century California developed an industrial and
agricultural proletariat rather swiftly. In addition to the gradual
dispossession of Mexicanos and of Anglo homesteaders whose
farming failed to pay, many workers idled by depletion of goldmines or completion of railroads had no recourse but to seek wage
employment in factories and fields (Daniel 1981; Jacqueline Jones
1992). Organized labor had different rates of success around the
state. Victories for white workers in the San Francisco Bay
Area—many of whom were veterans of radical struggles elsewhere—were offset by across-the-board defeats for all workers in
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 33
Los Angeles and the inland agricultural counties. Capital triumphed in courtrooms (McWilliams 1946; Bean 1973; cf. Forbath
1991) and through state-sanctioned vigilante terror (Bean 1973;
McWilliams [1939] 1969). California’s white supremacist, anticapital Workingmen’s Party (1877–80), which emerged briefly
from the economic strife of the 1870s, left as its principal legacy
the 1882 federal law excluding Chinese immigration (Caughey
1940; Saxton 1971; Bean 1973). Ample but generally disorganized
and segregated labor formed the nucleus of the state’s rapid
growth into the next century.
In addition to labor, both metropolitan and agricultural development required ample water, and, starting at the turn of the
twentieth century, projects funded from federal and state coffers
transformed relatively arid land into parcels suitable for farm or
residential development (El-Ashry and Gibbons 1988; Pisani
1984; Gottlieb 1988; Hundley 1992). While state-developed
water was sold cheaply to nearly all agricultural buyers, those
with large holdings could exploit economies of scale to obtain
capital for improvements, pay the high cost of transport charged
by the railroad monopolies (Preston 1981; Reisner 1986; Howitt
and Moore 1994), and hire cheap labor in large numbers to work
the fields (Daniel 1981).
Urban-made goods, such as autos, tires, steel, aircraft, and
ships, joined petroleum and rural commodities—cotton, fruit,
vegetables, dairy products, lumber, cement—in California’s annually expanding basket of goods. The state continued to promote development by providing both direct industry subventions
(e.g., aircraft in Los Angeles [Lotchin 1992; Oden et al. 1996]) and
key infrastructural amenities, such as harbors and highways, that
both stimulated demand and enabled transport (Bean 1973).
34 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
Power blocs also designed municipal and intergovernmental
mandates, residential restrictive covenants, and other tools to
keep the state’s burgeoning wealth in the reach of some and out
of the reach of others (Mike Davis 1990; Weber 1994; Oden et al.
1996). The system was not static, but it was, for most of the state’s
history, fairly reliable. By organizing themselves politically and
economically into spatial and social enclosures, U.S.-born white
Californians guaranteed the conditions through which they
could reproduce their collective, if not individual, supremacy
(Almaguer 1994; Walker 1995).
The Great Depression threatened the racial capitalist state’s
progress. The period’s enormous dislocations of capital and labor
hit California with political as well as economic severity (Bean
1973), heightening the natural antagonisms between capital and
labor and occasioning both urban and rural struggles to advance
labor’s cause (Bulosan 1943; McWilliams 1946; Bean 1973; Mike
Davis 1990; Weber 1994; Walker 1995; Don Mitchell 1996). In
the cities, radical and Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) activists brought together great mobilizations, capped by
the San Francisco / West Coast General Strike of May–July 1934
(Caughey 1940; Dowd 1997). In the countryside, Filipino, Mexicano, and other migrant farmworkers worked with communists
and the CIO to organize some of the biggest, and bloodiest, agricultural labor battles in U.S. history (Bulosan 1943; Daniel 1981;
Weber 1994; Don Mitchell 1996). If capitalists engaged in urban
struggles invoked the specter of “communism” (Dowd 1997),
race was the bogeyman of rural class war (Weber 1994; Don
Mitchell 1996; Woods 1998).1 Dense relations among Filipino,
Mexicano/Chicano, African, Chinese, and Japanese workers and
labor contractors and their mostly Anglo employers took on new
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 35
complexity when waves of Anglo Okies poured into the state in
the later part of the depression, prompting inter-Anglo class and
status strife (Bulosan 1943; Morgan 1992; Weber 1994). Upton
Sinclair’s 1934 gubernatorial campaign, with its call to End
Poverty in California (EPIC), won 38 percent of the vote, but
Sinclair lost to Republican Governor Frank Merriam, a political
cipher who had inherited the office. Overall, in concert with federal programs, the reformist strategies of New Dealers and Progressives defused urban struggles (Linda Gordon 1994; Faue
1990) and undermined rural ones (Weber 1994; Don Mitchell
1996). But it was international, rather than class, war that made
the biggest difference to California’s future fortunes.
The “creative destruction” of World War II boosted the California and national economies out of depression. The state’s military industry was large, consisting of both converted capacities
and assembly lines developed specifically for production of war
matériel (Lotchin 1992); by 1940, the federal government was investing 10 percent of its spending in California, a state that comprised 7 percent of the nation (Bean 1973). Millions, including
several hundred thousand African Americans, moved to California to build war machines, and while wartime wages were indexed to race and gender, workers across the board made more
money than they had ever dreamed possible. This prosperous period (1938–45) changed the state’s demographics, and particularly the racial structure of cities, as Black homeowners established communities in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley,
Richmond, and Los Angeles (Bean 1973; Scott and Soja 1996).
Although the war occasioned wartime domestic antiracist
militancy (C. L. R. James 1980), the social organization of warmaking—especially racial segregation of the armed forces, and
36 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
the dispossession and internment of West Coast, primarily Californian, Japanese Americans—preserved white supremacy. In
the postwar period, the repeal of de jure school segregation
(1946) and the declaration that restrictive covenants on real property were unconstitutional (1948) provoked long-lasting proapartheid activism on the part of white Californians. Their political labors culminated in a state constitutional amendment,
organized by the realtors’ association and passed by two-thirds of
the electorate, that guaranteed the right of home and other property owners to refuse to sell to anybody for any reason (Bean
1973).2 Thus, while some domestic changes wrought by warfare
had lasting effects on the state’s political and social economy,
other changes proved illusory, in the near term at least.
Along with phantom social gains, the period’s profits seemed
in danger of evaporating after the hot war’s end; however, public
and private sector power blocs wagered the state’s economic future on the burgeoning military-industrial complex and became
major players in the Pentagon-centered movement to maintain
expansive military preparedness in the postwar era (Markusen et
al. 1991; Gregory Hooks 1991). “Industrial heartland” manufacturers generally reconverted war industry capacity to production
of consumer or producer goods (Markusen and Yudken 1992).
But in California, as throughout “the gunbelt” (Markusen et al.
1991), the political-economic strategy was to seek increased federal investment in the form of prime Department of Defense
(DOD) contracts. California coupled aerospace (Markusen and
Yudken 1992) with electronics research and development (Saxenian 1995) to achieve the highest dollar volume of prime DOD
contracts of any state from 1958 on (Markusen et al. 1991). Rising with the South during the Cold War (Schulman 1994), Cali-
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 37
fornia developed major military-industrial districts, heavily concentrated in Los Angeles and Santa Clara (“Silicon Valley”)
Counties (Markusen et al. 1991; Oden et al. 1996; Saxenian 1995).
With its dependence on defense secured, California became the
exemplary “military Keynesian” (Turgeon 1996; Mike Davis
1986) or “welfare-warfare” (O’Connor [1973] 2000; cf. F. J. Cook
1962) state.
The massive infusion of wealth designated for aeronautical
and electronic warfare innovations required a new and specialized labor force (Markusen and Yudken 1992; R. W. Gilmore
1991; Geiger 1993), prompting the state to make enormous investment in educational infrastructure. Historically, California
had followed the national postsecondary trajectory. Land-grant
agricultural and mechanical colleges were established in the
wake of the 1862 federal Morrill Act. Public and private senior
research universities, such as Stanford and the University of California, developed in the late nineteenth century in tandem with
the diversification and consolidation of the modern business corporation (Chandler 1990; Geiger 1985) and the expansion of U.S.
imperialism. To produce, under the sign of Sputnik (1958), sufficient professional, managerial, and technical strata for the theoretical and applied challenges to come, the state crafted an unprecedented “master plan” for higher education, which pledged
an appropriate postsecondary education at public expense to
every high school graduate (R. W. Gilmore 1991; Walker 1995).3
Through the 1960s, California’s relative stability depended on
interlacing the military complex with consumer and producergoods manufacturing, agriculture, resource-extraction industries, and high levels of consumption (Mike Davis 1986; Walker
1995). The state’s population grew with the economy, doubling
38 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
between 1950 and 1970 to over 20 million people (Teitz 1984).
The federal interstate highway system and the State Water Project (SWP) allowed for extensive and intensive residential and
commercial development. People and firms could be spread further and further afield thanks to excellent roadways. The guarantee of water well into the next century facilitated increasingly
dense development in the relatively arid Southland and served
also to subsidize Central Valley agriculture via low-cost sale of
the project’s surplus water to growers (Reisner 1986).
Politically and numerically, Anglos continued to control the
state. However, opportunities for advancement, opened to all
Californians by federal mandates that were the outcome of antiracist struggle, led to the making of new political formations.
Groups opposed to inequality used campuses and desegregated
armed forces units as places to promote causes and forge alliances
that differed from, but often complemented, neighborhood- and
work-based mobilizations; by these means, activists renovated
possibilities for broad-based radical coalitions that had not been
evidenced since the urban and rural strikes of the 1930s (R. W.
Gilmore 1991, 1993b).
The reasons for activism centered on the period’s uneven
achievement of “domestic reform and . . . productivity sustained
by mass purchasing power” (Mike Davis 1986: 181). In other
words, a key feature of military Keynsianism only partially reorganized the structures of the racial state. Economic inequality is
a political problem. African Americans who had migrated from
the South and East to fight their way into wartime industries
(C. L. R. James 1980) and their California-born children were
poorer in real terms in 1969 than they had been in 1945, because
after the hot war was over, most were pushed out of war matériel
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 39
jobs, whose pay levels could not be duplicated in other sectors
(Soja and Scott 1996; Ong and Blumenberg 1996). Thus, extreme
poverty concentrated in Alameda County, Los Angeles, and
other regions where Black people had settled (Himes [1945]
1986; Sonenshein 1993; Walker 1995; cf. Massey and Denton
1993).
The 1965 Watts Rebellion was a conscious enactment of opposition (even if “spontaneous” in a Leninist sense) to inequality
in Los Angeles, where everyday apartheid was forcibly renewed
by police under the direction of the unabashedly white supremacist Chief William Parker (Sonenshein 1993).4 In Oakland, the
Black Panther Party was conceived as a dramatic, highly disciplined, and easy-to-emulate challenge to local police brutality.
Militant Black urban antiracist organizing that focused on attacking the concrete ways in which “race . . . is the modality
through which class is lived” (Stuart Hall 1980: 341) emerged
from many decades of struggle in the bloody crucible of revolution against both southern apartheid and its doppelgänger in
northern cities (Dittmer 1994; Kelley 1990; Newton 1996).5 As
Richard Walker (1995) notes, the Black Power movement inspired complementary Brown Power (Chicano: both urban
[Acuña 1988] and rural [United Farm Workers (Pulido 1995a)]
variants) and Yellow Power (Asian American) movements
(Pulido 2005).
In 1967 the system began to come apart symbolically and materially. During the Summer of Love, as thousands of flower children flocked to San Francisco to repudiate the establishment, California lined up its anti-antiracist coercive forces behind the
vanguard Panther Gun Bill (Bean 1973; Donner 1990; Newton
1996)6
—all of this at the same time that the rate of profit began its
40 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
spectacular decline (David Gordon 1996). The 1969–70 recession
hit California harder than the rest of the United States because of
deep cuts in military spending (Teitz 1984). Unemployment in the
state nearly doubled, even though total personal income hardly
wavered from its steady upward climb (CDF-CEI December
1975). Notably, the layoffs of thousands of aerospace engineers, although in the end temporary (Teitz 1984), provided an important
foundation for invigorating active consciousness of a normative
racial state—regardless of reports on civil disorders that concluded “institutional racism” to be a structural problem in the nation and the state (California, Governor’s Commission 1965;
United States, Kerner Commission 1968).7 Thus, at the historical
turn that set the stage for California’s restructuring, power blocs
rising from the Sunbelt (Kevin Phillips 1969; Schulman 1994), including California’s Governor Ronald Reagan and U.S. President
Richard Nixon, began to propose “law and order” as the appropriate response to domestic insecurity, whatever its root causes
(Kevin Phillips 1990; Newton 1996).
CRISES
After several years of relative relief underwritten by new rounds
of military investment, California entered another slide in the
world recession of 1973–75. For the United States, the recession
was a deliberate structural adjustment, effected through monetary policy—the 1971 abandonment of the gold standard in August and devaluation of the dollar the next winter (Mike Davis
1986; Shaikh 1996). Workers responded in 1974 with major
strikes around the country, including a number of stoppages—
especially in transport and communication—in California
(CDF-CEI October 1975).8 They also swept Democrats into of-
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 41
fice in state and congressional elections, with California no exception. However, high unemployment and high interest rates
undermined the power of traditional big organized labor in California and elsewhere: workers in government sectors and in
dominant industries, such as transport and steel, were disciplined by the Federal Reserve’s strategic manipulation of the cost
of money to divest labor of its already circumscribed midcentury
gains (Dickens 1996; N. Lichtenstein 1982).
The state’s chronic urban unemployment (Oliver et al. 1993;
Grant et al. 1996) deepened in concert with rural displacements—with unemployment running highest in inner cities and
in rural counties most reliant on resource extraction and agriculture (Bradshaw 1993; CDF-CEI 1977). Mining and lumber significantly reduced operations throughout the state during the
1970s (CDF-CEI 1977). In agriculture, the devastating drought
of 1975–77 drove smaller farmers into bankruptcy; many who
stayed in business borrowed heavily to finance irrigation improvements and changed crops to exploit the growing international market in specialty produce (Howitt and Moore 1994;
Watts 1994b). Labor-replacing innovations in major agribusiness
commodities such as cotton pushed thousands of farmworkers
into the production of labor-intensive, minimally organized
crops such as berries and nuts (Bradshaw 1993; cf. Wells 1996).
Wages have never recovered from the freeze during this key period of urban and rural labor disciplining, either in the United
States as a whole or in the Golden State (David Gordon 1996;
Arnold and Levy 1994; Greenhouse 1997).
During the 1970s, immigration swelled the state’s labor force,
particularly in the Southland (Waldinger and Bozorgmehr
1996), the San Francisco Bay Area (Walker 1995), and around in-
42 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
land valley farms (Bradshaw 1993; Walker 1995). The newcomers came from all over the world, but most were from Mexico,
followed by other Central American countries, especially El Salvador and Guatemala (Sabagh and Bozorgmehr 1996; Walker
1995). Complementing natural population increase, immigration
after 1973 inaugurated the epochal shift of the state’s majority
from Anglo in 1970 to not Anglo, with no single group filling the
majority void, by about the year 2000. Thus, at the same time that
low-wage urban and rural industries could profitably exploit
substantial pools of workers who lacked both union and citizenship protections, the social structure as a whole began to come
apart because of the raw, numerical threat to white supremacy
represented by unorganized, but densely concentrated, new and
old Californians of color.
After a brief infusion of federal job funds in 1977, the interscalar federal-state consolidation of the postwar era started to
come apart in such key areas as education funding and employment opportunities for “individuals without strong marketable
skills” (CDF-CEI December 1977: 6). The federal retreat required subnational polities and institutions to take responsibility
for social problems whether they wanted to or not, forcing them
to deal with the newly dispossessed, who ranged from unemployed youth to financially needy students to homeless families.
The contemporary rise of the local state, celebrated by so many
geographers, represents in part a generally reactionary move to
reexternalize, or keep external, such social burdens and fiscal
costs (see, e.g., Lake 1992, 1994).
When voters initiated the taxpayers’ revolt with 1978’s Proposition 13, California municipal and state treasuries had substantial surpluses (as was the case throughout the United States as a
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 43
whole), with annual revenues comfortably exceeding expenditures (CDF-CEI November–December 1977; Gramlich 1991).
Proposition 13 shielded real property from periodic reassessment and set a maximum tax rate, thus depriving municipal governments of a prime source of revenue; as a result, whereas in
1977–78, K–12 school districts received 51.7 percent of their budgets from property taxes, the percentage was only 18.1 percent in
1988–89 (Chapman 1991: 19). The compensatory implementation of regressive taxes such as sales tax and user fees helped ensure that as local governments drew down their reserves and
then tightened their belts, the poor would have higher relative
costs and fewer services than their richer neighbors.
California’s reliance on military-industrial outlays increased
steadily from 1976–77 forward, when the value of DOD prime
contracts hit one of many high marks (fig. 3; CDF-CEI December
1977, December 1985). Highly paid DOD-funded positions were
concentrated in research and development (Markusen et al. 1991);
this, combined with a decline in military assembly-line work
(Oden et al. 1996), constituted another wedge in the long bifurcation splitting apart the state’s industrial, racial, and political structures (fig. 3). The location of defense and other high-technology
jobs (Soja 1989; Oliver et al. 1993) exacerbated the state’s residential and income segregation (Walters 1992; Mike Davis 1990;
Bullard et al. 1994). Between 1980 and 1984, DOD prime contracts
achieved new highs and California continued to command a disproportionate share of income from the trillion dollar arms
buildup under the Carter and Reagan administrations, most of
which went to higher-wage workers (Oden et al. 1966).
Thus, in advance of the 1980–82 recession, the ensuing boom,
and the great recession of 1990–94, the path bifurcating Califor-
44 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
32 460
440
420
400
380
360
340
320
300
72 74 76 78 80 82 84
Year
86 88 90 92
30
28
26
24
22
20
18
16
14
Contracts ($ billions, 1987 = 100)
Jobs (000)
Jobs
Contracts
FIGURE 3. Defense prime contracts and manufacturing jobs, 1972–1992.
Source: Kroll and Corley 1994.
nia into richer and poorer had already deeply grooved the
political-economic landscape. Between 1969 and 1979, while voters schemed to make tax revenues stick in smaller and smaller
territories to ensure minimal income redistribution, poverty
among California’s children rose 25 percent (Teitz 1984). The rising cost of shelter undermined the buying power of flat wages,
and the sum of these effects carried forward into the 1980s
(CDF-CEI 1975–82).
In 1980, the prime rate hit 21 percent; in 1982, unemployment
surged to 10.5 percent. These stunningly high figures repeated,
with a difference, the state’s experience of the mid 1970s, when the
prime reached 12 percent (1974) and unemployment 10.5 percent
(1975). Economists competed to explain the high interest–high
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 45
unemployment coupling once thought to be mutually exclusive
(Krugman 1994). The importance of the explanatory transition
lies not in whether a new theory would serve as a reliable guide
for action, but rather in how the public, high-profile scramble for
a new theory served popularly to delegitimate the Keynesian approach to mitigating crisis, and set the stage for more deliberately
undoing the welfare state (Krugman 1994; Grant et al. 1996).9
The safety net came under attack at two levels: technically, it was
condemned as a device that distorted markets by providing an
employment disincentive for low-wage workers, who, in the aggregate, keep wages—and therefore prices—under control. Colloquially, the safety net was characterized as a hammock in which
the undeserving poor (like Ronald Reagan’s much-publicized
welfare queen) lounged while industrious Anglos labored or
looked for work.
The structure of manufacturing employment started to
change dramatically during the 1980–82 recession. There are
two general explanations for job losses in high-wage sectors. Either, as in the case of automobiles, plants had reached full amortization and management decided not to reinvest in place (Bluestone and Harrison 1982); or, as in the case of some primary
metals, management either made the wrong investments or invested in labor-replacing technologies (Walters 1992; Arnold
and Levy 1994). High-growth sectors, such as apparel, command
wages of only about 60 percent of the average wages paid to employees in all industries (Arnold and Levy 1994).
California continued to be a manufacturing state, but it produced a different mix of goods, which meant that manufacturers
drew from different labor market segments (David Gordon et al.
1982; Storper and Walker 1984). The disorganizing effect of
46 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
structural change further undermined union power that had
been disintegrating since the previous decade; of the few 1980s
strikes around the country that capital and state took note of as
possible precedent-setters, California’s sole entry was the Kaiser
Permanente strike of October–December 1986 (CDF-CEI
1989).10 It was not until 1988, for example, that labor advocates
could muster sufficient political authority to increase the state’s
minimum wage from $3.35 to $4.25 per hour; while for the typical household in 1984 and 1985, the average annual cost of rent
and utilities ranged from $5,386 in Los Angeles to $6,983 in the
Bay Area (CDF-CEI 1989).
Areas outside the major urban cores also experienced the intensified division between richer and poorer. Statewide, in 1982,
the median house price exceeded $100,000 (CDF-CEI 1982)—62
percent higher than the national average—while per capita income, at $13,410, was only 15 percent over the national measure
(California State Public Works Board 1993a–d). High housing
prices, tied to and exacerbated by the high cost of money, pushed
many middle-income earners seeking homeownership to move
to counties where farmlands were rapidly converting to suburbs
(Walters 1992; Sokolow and Spezia 1994). The desert counties
east and southeast of Los Angeles and Stanislaus County in the
Great Central Valley east of the Bay Area appealed to priced-out
metropolitan housing markets. Developers built bedroom communities for commuters willing to drive two hours or more each
way (Walters 1992; fig. 4).
Beset by unemployment and poverty rates running 67–200
percent above metropolitan levels (CDF-CEI 1982; Walters
1992), rural counties and towns not located on the commuter
path tried to diversify their economies by recruiting small man-
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 47
50
40
30
20
10
0
Growth (%)
California
Los Angeles County
Orange County
All other Southland
Counties
Central Coast
Great Central Valley
San Francisco
Growth control
Bay Area
All other Bay Area
Mountains and
Northern Counties
FIGURE 4. Population growth by region, 1980–1990. Source: Walters
(1986) 1992.
ufacturing or back-office work (Bradshaw 1993). At the same
time, California’s food exports, which had been competing in the
burgeoning “global food regime” (Watts 1994b), lost market
share as a strong dollar forced up prices, increasing farmer bankruptcies and farm consolidations (Sokolow and Spezia 1992;
Walters 1992). At the end of the day, places passed over for development fell even further behind, while development projects
in high-unemployment localities summoned new entrants to the
disorganized, low-wage segment of the labor market, diluting
the chances for residents most in need of jobs (Bradshaw 1993; cf.
Bartik 1990, 1991; Storper and Walker 1984; Chinitz 1960).
Money capital played a major role in restructuring California’s built environment. Astronomical interest rates encouraged
48 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
savings and loans directors to lend well beyond their capacity and
falsify the value of collateral in order to look solvent for auditors
and shareholders, as well as to pay themselves hefty fees (Henwood 1997). The building boom of the 1980s included both residential and nonresidential development; and the latter’s overvaluation, combined with a sluggish rental or sales market for such
spaces, plunged major institutions such as Lincoln Savings into
bankruptcy. In rural areas, the Bank of America, a major agricultural lender from the 1920s onward, had a rash of foreclosures
on farms in the Great Central Valley (Gottlieb 1988). Meanwhile,
federal Farm Credit System loans aggressively marketed in the
1970s came due in the 1980s, when farmers could not pay, forcing debtors to sell collateral or default. The farm debt crisis was
so severe that the Farm Credit System Board asked Congress for
a $74 billion bailout (for nationwide defaults) in 1985—at the
same time that failed savings and loans were tapping theirfederal
insurance fund. But if unruly capital had recourse to governmental guarantees, both unruly and docile labor had a harder
row to hoe.
California’s safety net unraveled rapidly in the hands of Reagan’s ideological successor in Sacramento, George Deukmejian.
During the run-up to the 1982 gubernatorial election, it had appeared that the Democratic candidate, Tom Bradley, a retired
policeman and African American in his fourth term as Los Angeles mayor, would prevail against the Republican candidate, a
Sunbelt lawyer with deep roots in the Central Valley. Running
against taxes, spending, and crime, however, Deukmejian won,
although by a margin of less than 1 percent; in the rematch four
years later, he won by a landslide. In his first term, Deukmejian
achieved one of the nation’s first workfare programs: whereas in
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 49
1977, 20 percent of the state’s job growth was funded by cooperative federal and state programs guaranteeing employment for
youth who wanted work but could not find it (CDF-CEI 1978),
by 1985, California started to require paid jobs of women who
were already full-time mothers, and often full-time students as
well (Paddock and Wolinsky 1985). Indeed, although education
seemed to be a protected arena during the campaign, the Deukmejian administration’s actual spending undermined the Master
Plan for Postsecondary Education. Education fees rose dramatically at nominally tuition-free institutions, and the continuity
and coordination between the educational segments—community colleges through research universities—while not altogether
abandoned, were displaced in favor of product specialization, efficiency, and competition (R. W. Gilmore 1991).
Planning for state and regional growth foundered in the Republican administrations of Governors George Deukmejian
(1982–90) and Pete Wilson (1990–98). Indeed, the Democratic
administration of Governor Jerry Brown had produced the last
general plan in its first term (1974–78), and thereafter Sacramento produced no unified vision for, or coordination among,
the many planning agencies in the government (Bradshaw 1992;
Arnold and Levy 1994). As they had done with Proposition 13,
voters stepped into the breach, and used initiatives to try to control change; but their reach grasped symptoms rather than causes
of the state’s disorder. In essence, California’s voters—dominated by Anglos with jobs—were trying to reconcile the disjuncture between the state’s 1984–89 boom and the insecurity
more and more people experienced in their everyday lives. Ironically, though unsurprisingly, they looked to state power to resolve contradictions even while telling themselves, and elected
50 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
officials, that government was the problem (Mike Davis 1993b,
1993c; Walker 1995).
When the California economy crashed in 1990–91, the crisis
overlapped and interlocked with the previous periods of deep restructuring that reached back into the early 1970s. Premonitions
of the state’s crash cropped up as early as the October 1987 stock
market bust, and the recession proper lasted for three years. California lost 730,000 jobs—548,000 of which were in the Southland
(CDF-CEI 1996). The Los Angeles basin job-loss concentration
reflected the dual dilemmas of defense industry downsizing and
a stagnant market for commercial airplanes (Oden et al. 1996).
Fifty years of defense dependency is hard to undo. The shift in
available employments from high-wage to low-wage manufacturing (especially apparel) and service-sector jobs (Oden et al.
1996) brought into potential competition workers whose traditional labor market niches had been destroyed in twenty years of
restructuring (table 1). The 1992 Los Angeles uprising shared
some elements of spontaneity with the 1965 Watts riots, but what
made it politically powerful was its “multicultural” nature (Mike
Davis in Katz and Smith 1992); while the 1992 uprising against police brutality resulted in more police control of the streets, it also
lowered segregation among grassroots activists (GoodingWilliams 1993; R. W. Gilmore 1993b; Madhubuti 1993). Activist
voters responded as well and tried to enclose the effects of restructuring—and poor people’s responses to it—by implementing extreme measures. They voted to exclude immigrants from social
services with Proposition 187 (1994); to imprison more people for
life with Proposition 184 (“three strikes” [1994]); and to monopolize opportunities in public sector education, employment, and
contracts with Proposition 209 (anti–affirmative action [1996]).
TABLE 1 EMPLOYEES IN PRINCIPAL CALIFORNIA
MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES, 1980–1995
(thousands)
Sector 1980 1995 Percentage Change
Instruments 102.4 166.5 61.5
Textiles 12.4 19.1 54.0
Apparel 102.4 146.9 43.5
Print and publishing 124.5 149.8 20.3
Rubber, misc. 61.2 70.9 15.8
Lumber and wood 46.3 52.2 12.7
Chemicals 65.7 69.1 5.2
Paper and allied products 37.3 38.8 4.0
Food and related items 182.5 179.5 1.7
Furniture and fixtures 49.0 44.5 9.1
Stone/clay/glass 50.4 44.2 12.3
Industrial machinery 227.6 191.9 15.7
Fabric. metal prod. 138.8 118.1 14.9
Transport. equip. 266.3 163.2 38.7
Primary metal 47.6 32.2 32.4
Petroleum and coal 31.7 20.7 34.7
Leather products 10.5 6.6 37.1
Electric and electronic 358.0 219.6 38.7
Miscellaneous 43.2 38.5 10.9
Totals 1,957.8 1,770.5 9.6
source: California State Controller, Annual Report, 1995.
52 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
TRANSITION
California functioned as “the principal engine of U.S. economic
growth” (Walker 1995: 43) during the postwar “golden age”
(Glyn et al. 1990) and used resources from defense-dependent
prosperity to provide state residents with broadening protections
from calamity and opportunities for advancement. While the legitimacy and use of welfare-state strategies to soften the effects of
crises declined rapidly starting in the 1980s, the downhill path
was blazed by the depression of the mid 1970s, the diminution of
the Anglo majority, and the efforts by taxpayers to govern more
directly through voter-made law that focused on fiscal control.
An indicator of changes to come was the 25 percent increase in
children’s poverty between 1969 and 1979. The abandonment of
the weakest members of society bespoke a fundamental change
in the state’s future responsibility for the alleviation of adversity
and inequality. And, in fact, the poverty rate jumped again, rising 67 percent between 1979 and 1995, to afflict one in four of the
state’s children (Walker 1995).
The loss of high-wage, well-organized blue-collar jobs, and
their replacement by high- or low-wage disorganized work,
meant that an important platform from which to struggle in the
realm of workplace and electoral politics had disappeared as well
(Storper and Walker 1984; Katznelson 1985). Radical opposition
had been crushed in the early part of the 1970s, and the disciplining power of underemployment and inflation, combined
with discouraging memories of lost battles, may well have conspired to produce general quiescence, even when the state’s economy boomed from 1984 to 1989, and again from 1993 to 2000.
Thus, while workers did not agitate for activist state intervention
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 53
in the form of Keynesian guarantees, activist voters demanded
that the state become leaner and meaner, except when directed to
do otherwise.
Although they claimed to pay strict attention to the will of the
voters, the state’s power blocs followed only half the instructions,
becoming meaner but not leaner. Relocations of capital and labor
meant that successful electoral candidates would have to build
new political relationships across sector and space; for example,
the suburbanizing inland counties were not the same places, politically, socially, or economically, that they had been when ruled
by citrus or other grower elites. Tom Bradley’s twin defeats suggested that most voters at the gubernatorial level rejected the
urban welfare state.
The postwar pragmatic care once unevenly bestowed on labor
was transferred, with an icing of solicitude, to capital. The state
focused on capital’s needs—particularly on how to minimize
impediments, and maximize opportunities, for capital recruitment and retention.11 However, having abandoned even the
shadow of a Keynesian full employment / aggregate guarantee
approach to downturns, the power bloc that emerged from the
1980s on faced the political problem of how to carry out its
agenda—how, in other words, to go about its post-Keynesian
state-building project—in order to retain and reproduce its victories (Hobsbawm 1982; Gregory Hooks 1991). Capital might be
the object of desire, but voters mattered. The upheavals of the
prior twenty-five years had idled many productive capacities, including labor, land, and finance capital. Having been elected
under crisis conditions, Governors Deukmejian and Wilson consolidated their administrations around the anticrime theme they
54 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
had popularized. The state built itself by building prisons fashioned from surpluses that the newly developing political economy had not absorbed in other ways.
CRISIS AND SURPLUS
In “Questions of Theory” (1988) Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz
provide a useful definition of crisis. “Crises occur when the social
formation can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the preexisting system of social relations” (96). The pivotal verb “to reproduce” signifies the broad array of political, economic, cultural, and biological capacities a society uses to renew itself daily,
seasonally, generationally. Crisis is not objectively bad or good;
rather, it signals systemic change whose outcome is determined
through struggle. Struggle, which is a politically neutral word,
occurs at all levels of a society as people try to figure out, through
trial and error, what to make of idled capacities.
For example, when a major employer leaves a place, the individuals and households dependent on it for wages face a crisis, as
does the state—at all levels—dependent on tax revenues paid by
capital and workers. What are possible outcomes of crisis?
Households can reorganize internal relations of authority and
dependence according to who can find work or receive income
assistance, creating both tensions and opportunities that significantly alter “traditional” household hierarchies. Community institutions, such as churches, unions, or street gangs, can gain or
lose adherents and experience new pressures because of excessive
or vanished reliance on the services and security they provide. Indeed, the expansion of community-based institutions can be a direct result of the state’s reduction of social services—such as
school programs. The state can also step up policing, under its
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 55
mandate to maintain internal order, due to actual or imagined
antisocial behaviors among idled workers or disenchanted youth.
New power blocs can form around the remaining legitimate
areas in which the state’s power can be exercised, such as law and
order, local development, or moral directives for civilian behavior. Indeed, the weakening of old social, political, and cultural
forms opens the way to a wide variety of new alliances, institutions, movements, all of which are coaxed, but not directed, by already existing practices. Nothing is guaranteed, but tendencies
are hard to buck.
Crises are spatially and sectorally uneven, leading to different
outcomes for different kinds of people in different kinds of
places (cf. Smith 1984; Walker 1995). The devaluation of the
Golden Gulag’s four key components created the conditions of
possibility explored in “The Prison Fix” (chapter 3), “Crime,
Croplands, and Capitalism” (chapter 4), and “Mothers Reclaiming Our Children” (chapter 5).
What is surplus, and how is it related to crisis? In political
economy, surplus and crisis derive from a single, extremely complicated, relationship. The purpose of capitalist business activity
is to make a profit, and profitability is dependent on both keeping wages as low as possible, while selling all goods produced. In
fancy terms, this means that implicit in capital’s imperative to accumulate is an equal necessity to disaccumulate (Wolff 1984).
Systemic failure to disaccumulate constitutes crisis.
In an economy that is driven by individual consumers whose
capacity to buy is tied to the fortunes of regional industrial sectors, ups and downs are likely to occur with some regularity—
what’s known as the business cycle. The problem is that the
“down” part of the cycle does not have a guaranteed bottom; and
56 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
when the bottom falls out, what’s left is a mess of surpluses—in
short, a crisis. The worker-consumer, who has to work to buy and
buy to work, is central to this drama—and hence to this book.12
The actual effects of crisis in a particular society are not necessarily paralyzing; rather, they invite remedies that take many
forms, and therefore produce varying outcomes that are as likely
further to shake up, as to settle, the original political-economic
upheaval. Such remedies include moving capital out of a region
altogether, or moving it out of production (research, development, or manufacture) into other investment venues such as land
or financial markets, where short-term returns seem predictable
(Harvey [1982] 1989). Since such investment decisions are not
centrally coordinated, they might provide relief for individual
investors or firms but not do much to resolve the crisis for the
broad mass of people who are vulnerable to its effects. By contrast, the government can step in, as a “collective capital” (Negri
[1980] 1988; Harvey [1982] 1989; cf. Foglesong 1986) to remedy
crises by borrowing surplus money capital and using the proceeds to guarantee aggregate demand by way of income supports
or similar programs—thereby restoring to capital its expansive
momentum (Keynes [1936] 1973). The limits to the power of
such collective action are found in (but not necessarily produced
by) the complexities of political boundaries (borders, tariffs, and
racial, gendered, and international divisions of territories and
labor markets).
Surplus and crisis, then, are two sides of the same coin. The
problems arising from overaccumulation—what makes surplus
crisis—are not only economic, but also political, and therefore social. The idling of workers, the development of far-flung (labor
or commodity) markets, and the immobilization of capital in de-
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 57
valued land are problems that require political organization—
such as state building (Gregory Hooks 1991) or subaltern activism (Pulido 1996)—to solve. Political organizing produces
new social relations that can, if reproducible, form the basis for a
new social order (Hall and Schwarz 1988).
So far we have reviewed how capitalism as a mode of production produces the conditions for its own undoing; the production of surplus is necessary, or else there’s no profit, while the
overaccumulation of surplus is crisis. The system does not, however, mechanically function irrespective of time and place; crises
are historically specific and their generalities play out in particular ways in particular places. Next I review the theoretical and
empirical evidence for the existence of four surpluses that were
key to the size and strength of the California prison expansion
project.
The deepening division of California into richer and poorer is
a function of what Richard Walker (among others) identifies as
three “central contradictions” (Walker 1995): (1) the changing
mix of jobs and industrial and residential location; (2) Anglos’
fear of their demotion to minority status, coupled with capital’s
differential exploitation of labor market segments defined by
race, gender, locality, sector, and citizenship; and (3) the state’s
failure to put idled capacities back to work through infrastructural, educational, employment, and other projects. As the multigenerational abandonment of California’s children to poverty
shows, wealth does not circulate the way it used to. “Some power
resources appear to be increasing within the system, while others
appear to be declining” (Mike Davis 1986: 181). It is to this summary contradiction, expressed as four surpluses—of finance capital, land, labor, and state capacity—that we now turn.
58 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
THE FOUR SURPLUSES
Surplus Finance Capital This section looks at the political
economy of surplus finance capital as it emerged in California in
the form of municipal finance capital. Municipal financiers design and sell bonds to raise money for public, and certain private
nonprofit, projects that contribute to the public good.
We have seen that as the golden age of U.S. capitalism drew
to a close, the major changes in the forces, relations, and geography of accumulation that rocked the capitalist world in general had specific regional effects in California. Between 1973
and 1989, according to David Gordon (1996: 80–81), the share
of gross domestic product (GDP) paid out as property income
increased (dividends by 25 percent and interest by 67 percent),
and the share of GDP invested in plant and machinery halved
(from 4.4 to 2.2 percent). Gordon’s evidence substantiates the
general theory, outlined in the previous section, that when the
rate of profit falls, capital works differently than when the rate
is on the rise. The shift is not immediate, because there is a lag
between the profit peak and the peak of productive investment
(Sherman 1997). However, value that is not in motion is not
capital; thus, when productive investment opportunities wane,
owners of surplus move their wealth into nonproductive
income-generating investments in order to be assured of constant returns (Harvey 1989a; cf. Arrighi 1994). The credit system, the province of finance capital, is such a venue. Whereas in
times of expansion, credit complements reserves, in periods of
overaccumulation, “speculative fever . . . in paper assets of all
kinds” emerges as a means to activate idled capital (Harvey
[1982] 1989: 325).
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 59
The ratio of property and proprietors’ income (interest, dividends, rent, and profits) to total income grew by 40 percent in
California between 1977 and 1996, as illustrated in figure 5. Although there have been peaks and valleys along the route, what
is striking is the surge in the late 1970s, the pivotal plateau of the
early 1980s, the subsequent surge in the mid 1980s, and the overall steadiness of the upward trend. For those in command of the
growing property surplus in the late 1970s and early 1980s, California’s productive investment opportunities were limited by the
45
Percent
40
35
30
25
77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87
Year
88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96
20
15
10
5
0
FIGURE 5. Growth in the ratio of property/proprietors’ (profit) income to
total income, 1977–1996. Source: CDF-CEI 1977–97.
60 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
fact that the state’s corporations, along with U.S. corporations as
a whole, were financing declining plant and equipment expansion from retained earnings (CDF-CEI 1977; Flanigan 1996;
Brenner 2002). And, in the case of major industries such as aerospace and electronics, the Carter-Reagan boom in federal defense
outlays generously supplemented cash on hand (Oden et al.
1996). As a result, the burgeoning surplus required other investment outlets if it was to keep expanding. Between 1980 and 1989,
interest as a share of total property income expanded from 73
percent to 85 percent, even as the prime rate declined from 21
percent in 1980 to 10.5 percent in 1989 (fig. 6). During the speculative fevers of the 1980s, municipal bonds were attractive
sources of tax-exempt, mid- and long-term income, serving to
balance portfolios weighted by short-term, or high-risk, investments such as junk bonds.
While as a category of capital, finance capital is highly mobile,
individual firms that match surplus with borrowers are often, if
not always, “embedded” (Granovetter 1985) in particular
political-economic geographies (cf. Chinitz 1960). Such limitation is particularly true of firms that specialize in municipal finance. Federal law requires state governments to regulate municipal finance; thus firms in the municipal sector must organize
their work on a state-by-state basis (Sbragia 1996). Because public finance capital is raised by, or with the direct approval and
control of, the state, the key issue for finance capital is public policy as it establishes and maintains legitimate areas for the accumulation of public debt (Sbragia 1996; see also Gramlich 1994).
More than 80 percent of public infrastructure in the United
States is owned by state and local governments, and its “net value
per person” increased steadily for twenty-five years in the
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 61
90
85
80
75
70
65
60
55
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89
Percent
Interest income
Prime rate
Year
FIGURE 6. Rise in interest income as a percentage of property/proprietors’ income and decline in the prime rate, 1980–1989. Source: CDFCEI 1980–89.
post–World War II period (Gramlich 1994).13 From 1949 to 1973,
the principal components of the stock owned by state and local
governments were highways, streets, and educational buildings.
The total value of this stock doubled in real terms, with the per
capita value of the principal components double that of all other
62 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
facilities and equipment—respectively, $4,000 and $2,000. As in
so many other categories of political-economic analysis, 1973
represents a turn: the share of public wealth located in highways,
streets, and educational building began to diminish, while other
capital investment rose at a modest rate. Twenty years later, their
values converged at about $3,000 per category per capita—indicating both that the type of spending changed and the volume of
spending flattened, suggesting a possible investment opportunity
for private capital.
California’s infrastructure did not escape the general trend of
neglect starting in the late 1970s (Kirlin and Winkler 1984;
Walker 1995). Stunned by the successes of the Jarvis-Gann “taxpayer revolt” launched in 1978, the Brown administration defaulted on its constitutional duty to formulate general plans for
development—a political omission that extended throughout
the Deukmejian administration and well into that of Governor
Pete Wilson (Bradshaw 1992; Trombley 1990; CDF-CEI 1997).
At the same time, the California constitution requires that voters
approve any debt that encumbers their full faith and credit (California State Public Works Board 1985).14 In the “revolutionary”
times of the late 1970s and early 1980s, elected officials at both the
state and local government levels became increasingly unwilling
to ask, much less able to persuade, voters to commit to long-term
debt, even for previously popular improvements such as parks
(Trombley 1990).
In this context, the crisis for finance capital specializing in
public debt centered on remedying the new political difficulty of
directing surplus, via municipal bonds, into the nation’s largest
state economy (Sbragia 1996; see, for examples, Hurtado 1995;
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 63
Gilpin 1995; Flanigan 1996; Truell 1995). In addition to California’s sheer creditworthy size, Sacramento’s attractiveness to finance capital lies in the fact that historically most of the state’s
bond deals have been negotiated rather than competitive. Until
the stock market crash of 1987, the profit municipal financiers
made on negotiated deals was considerably higher—as much as
double—than on competitive issues (Simonsen and Robbins
1996).15 In a competitive deal, the state designs and documents
the issue using its own staff and then puts out an invitation to all
eligible underwriters to bid for the opportunity to sell it. In a negotiated deal, the state brings in expert firms who shape the issue,
negotiate a price with the state, and take the deal to market—
pocketing their profits. Therefore, not only do successful firms
make more money in negotiated deals, but they also become
deeply embedded as political players in state institutions (legislature, Department of Finance, Treasurer, Public Works Board)
where the issuance of debt is an unevenly legitimated exercise of
social and political power.
Like all capital, finance capital is amoral yet politically active;
growth rather than purpose leads. The expansion of privately
held surplus value in California occurred on the heels of longterm public disinvestment and reduced opportunities for private
investment. California-based municipal financiers could solve
the economic problem by developing public markets for private
capital. Given the state’s long neglect of infrastructure, and its
overall wealth in spite of crises, California’s potential capacity for
public debt was quite large. The emergence of Keynesianism in
the 1930s was designed to mitigate this mismatch. However, in
the post-Keynesian 1980s and 1990s, the situation was different,
64 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
with severe political limitations constraining the state’s ability to
exercise its capacity and keep private capital in motion—a topic
further examined below. But first we shall take a different view
of the problems inherent in the spatial control of capital by looking at surplus land.
Surplus Land Uneven development is both a process and a
product of capitalism’s creative destruction (Smith 1984, 1996).
As capital migrates spatially or sectorally in order to enhance its
capacity to expand, whatever capital abandons—buildings,
machinery, labor power, land—is devalued and its price
consequently goes down. Neil Smith details the structural
determinants of the flow of capital through urban land in order
to illuminate how the movement of “capital rather than people”
is a leading indicator whose sociopolitical symptoms include
both gentrification and official racial class war carried out
through criminalization and policing (Smith 1996: 70). The
movement of capital across and through rural land follows
similar rhythms of disinvestment and revaluation (Harvey [1982]
1989; Bradshaw 1993). Rural economies, no less than urban
manufacturing and service centers, are integrated into broader
economic flows, via transnational social divisions of labor (Robin
Cohen 1987; Sayer and Walker 1992; Meiskin-Wood 1995) and
global consumption regimes (Watts 1994a and b). Resource
depletion, mechanization of agricultural labor processes, and
closure of manufacturing and other employment establishments
can devastate rural economies that lack flexibility due to their
tendency to be dominated by monopolies or oligopolies
(Markusen 1985, 1987; Storper and Walker 1989; cf. Chinitz
1960).
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 65
Politics, demographics, previous rounds of investment, and
other factors affect where capital goes and when and why it accumulates (Smith 1984, 1996; Massey 1984). As Smith argues,
capital’s movement is contradictory, tending simultaneously toward equalization and differentiation. Equalization, a function
of the necessary expansion of capital, is the process through
which the “earth is transformed into a universal means of production” (Smith 1996: 78; Harvey [1982] 1989). The transformation is not even across all space at all times, and differentiation results from the “spatial centralization of capital in some places at
the expense of others” (Smith 1996: 79). The phenomenon of surplus land lies in the nexus of these contradictory tendencies. In
California, while the population of nonmetropolitan areas has
been growing faster than the urban centers of Los Angeles and
San Francisco (see fig. 4), not all rural land taken out of production has been converted to suburbs (Walters 1992; Bradshaw
1992; Kuminoff et al. 2001; cf. Smith 1996).
Changes in the extent of California farmland provide evidence for the existence of surplus land and its relation to disinvestment. Figure 7 shows the change in California farmland in
the postwar period. Some 80 percent of California’s annual developed water output goes to croplands (Howitt and Moore
1994), which account for 92 percent of all irrigated acreage, with
the balance of farm acres being grazing land (Sokolow and
Spezia 1992). While total farmland declined after 1954, the number of irrigated acres increased until 1978. Since the peak, approximately 100,000 acres of irrigated land have been taken out
of production each year. The literally “sunk” capital in irrigated
lands includes the technologies by which water is carried to
crops: wells, ditches, pipes, pumps, rainbirds, and so forth. When
66 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
farmers take irrigated land out of production, they abandon, or
disinvest in, water-bearing infrastructure as well as other improvements—such as soil enhancement, or tiling to prevent subsidence—that made the land productive.
But why take irrigated land out of production? The interre40
45 50 55 60 65 70
Year
75 80 85 90
35
Acres
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Farmland
Total irrigated acres
FIGURE 7. California farmland and irrigated land, in millions of acres,
1945–1987. Source: Sokolow and Spezia 1992.
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 67
lated forces of drought, debt, and development serve as explanatory factors. The severe drought of 1976–77, preceded by several
dry years, raised the specter of a permanent water shortage.
Farmers responded to the crisis in different ways. Some took part
in federal programs that pay farmers who agree to idle lands on
which they would otherwise have grown federally designated
“surplus crops” (Howitt and Moore 1994; Gottlieb 1988). Other
growers used land as collateral to borrow money so that they
could invest in the latest irrigation technologies or drill deep
wells to supplement aqueduct-provided Sierra snowmelt with
fossil water from ancient aquifers. Investor-farmers included
both those who planned to keep growing the same commodity,
such as cotton, and those wishing to change crops (Reisner 1986;
CDF-CEI 1978). And finally, some farmers got out of the business altogether, discouraged by the prospect of expensive water.
The efforts employed in the late 1970s did not stabilize the situation as hoped. By the early 1980s, both state water planners and
independent analysts proposed that some acres temporarily idled
during the drought should be taken permanently out of production (El-Ashry and Gibbons 1988). In 1982, voters defeated a
measure to build a new water system, the Peripheral Canal,
whose rejection undermined any expectations that the state
would soon provide a subsidized solution to water scarcity as it
had in the past (Gottlieb 1988).16 At the same time, a string of sodden El Niño winters (1981–83) destroyed many crops, forcing
heavily indebted farmers into bankruptcy (Reisner 1986), while
debt drove others out of business when a surging dollar priced
their products out of the export food market (Gottlieb 1988;
Hundley 1992). Some bankrupt farmers were bought out by
larger solvent ones, resulting in even greater centralization of
68 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
agribusiness (Walters 1992; see also chapter 4). In other cases,
lending institutions took title to land through foreclosure, without necessarily having a market in which to sell the seized collateral (Gottlieb 1988). And finally, some farmers sold to developers, consigning the land to suburban conversion (Sokolow and
Spezia 1992).
While more than 80 percent of irrigated farmlands are in the
Great Central Valley and the Inland Empire desert counties,
where suburbanization has been most intensive, not all of the
100,000 acres taken out of production each year have been automatically converted to suburban development. As a corollary, not
all growers who have left agriculture have been forced to do so
by debt or drought. Some, such as those in the Fresno-Clovis
area, found it counterintuitive to continue investing in farmland,
however productive, when residential developers were paying
up to five times the price that land traded for farming could command (Walters 1992; see also Carey Goldberg 1996).17 And yet
not all lands taken out of production lay in development’s immediate path. Why did farmers who could invest stop? Perhaps
the intensification of Fresno-Clovis area suburbanization, and
Fresno County farmlands’ 50 percent decline in price (in real dollars) between 1978 and 1982, is partly explained by the phenomenon of anticipatory disinvestment, with owners figuring that
further improvements to farmland destined for development
would be wasteful (Walters 1992; Smith 1996). The combination
of these forces—drought, debt, and development—was a central
means by which land surpluses emerged in the 1980s amid massive suburbanization.
The removal of irrigated lands from production far exceeded
the rate of land use for suburbanization. Some 76 percent of the
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 69
irrigated land in California is in the Great Central Valley. The
surge in the gross population in the valley over ten years added
1.1 million people to the area. The average California household
in that area is 2.8 people (CDF-CEI 1989). If all new households
represented new houses built on suburbanized farmland, at the
average of three houses per acre (Sokolow and Spezia 1994), residential development over ten years would absorb about 122,000
acres, or about 16 percent of the idled acres in the Great Central
Valley. Thus we can see that the idling of land, and the coming
of suburbanization, did not produce a transfer of land uses, but
rather stiff competition between places trying to attract developers’ capital to absorb the surplus land.
The second source of surplus, related to but not identical to
the first, is the land in and about depressed towns throughout
rural California; this is the counterpart to the surplus land produced in central cities upon which gentrification capitalizes
(Smith 1996). Surplus land is not empty land. Devalued residential, retail, manufacturing, and other built improvements are
symptoms of stagnant or shrinking local economies (Bradshaw
1993). High unemployment can serve as a guide for locating surplus land, because it is an indication that capital has reorganized
in, or withdrawn from, the area. An example of reorganization
is investment in labor-saving technology: capital is still there,
value is still produced, but less value circulates as wages. In other
words, the local production of surplus land—or labor—can go
hand in hand with a rise or a fall in the local production of surplus value, as we shall see in chapter 4.
The 1980s ushered in a period of intense suburban/exurban
development of rural land at the same time that an unprecedented surplus of land also emerged. For some, the surplus con-
70 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
verted into capital, because developers bought the farm. For others, the surplus constituted crisis, in the form of both “fictitious”
costs (declining income produced from land use) and real costs
(taxes, insurance, maintenance) necessary to maintain a nonproductive asset. The relative (and in some cases absolute) abandonment of this land, as capital concentrated and centralized elsewhere, also constituted for rural areas—as for urban—the
simultaneous abandonment of labor, to which we shall now turn.
Relative Surplus Population California’s restructuring since
the early 1970s included the reorganization, or the termination,
of many capital-labor relationships that had been secured
through struggle during the golden age. All kinds of workers
experienced profound insecurity, as millions were displaced
from jobs and entire sectors. Poverty more than doubled. Racist
and nationalist confrontations heightened, driven by the widely
held—if incorrect—perception that the state’s public and private
resources were too scarce to support the growing population, and
that some people therefore had to go. But as has always been the
case, more people came, with immigrants reconfiguring the
state’s demographic composition. The ferment produced a
growing relative surplus population—workers at the extreme
edges, or completely outside, of restructured labor markets,
stranded in urban and rural communities. In this section, we
shall review the theoretical basis for why this surplus developed.
Then we shall look at the raw dimensions of California’s surplus
population: its size and how it has grown. And finally we shall
zero in on some more detailed characteristics of the relative
surplus population in the five counties of the Los Angeles region,
where 60 percent of state prisoners are produced.
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 71
Capital must be able to get rid of workers whose labor power
is no longer desirable—whether permanently, by mechanical or
human replacement, or temporarily by layoffs—and have access
to new or previously idled labor as the need arises. These necessities, as Marx’s ([1867] 1967) science of capital accumulation
demonstrates, are not due to the personalities or preferences of
heads of firms: CEOs who resist such “adjustments” to the labor
force jeopardize profits. The progressive nature of capitalism requires the essential commodity—working people’s labor
power—in varying quantities and qualities over space, sector,
and time.
As systemic expansions and contractions produce and throw
off workers, those idled must wait, migrate, or languish until—
if ever—new opportunities to sell their labor power emerge.
While Marx formulated the category “abstract labor” in order to
theorize the origin of value, his writings acknowledge that workers have specific social characteristics drawing them into, or locking them out of, specific labor markets. Marx’s analysis concerning capitalism’s long-term tendency to bifurcate, with increasing
wealth for the few and immiseration for the many, centers on the
production of what he called the “pivot” of labor power supply
and demand—the “relative surplus population” or “reserve
army of labor” (Marx [1867] 1967: 640–48).18
One indicator of the “relative surplus population” in the U.S.
political economy is the hegemonic principle of a nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). According to the theoretical framework that guides the Federal Reserve
Bank—the nation’s gatekeeper against inflation—unemployment should “naturally” hover above 6 percent of the labor force
that wants to work (Corbridge 1994; Krugman 1994). Main-
72 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
stream economists no longer assume that an interventionist state
can determine the acceptable mix of unemployment and inflation, as was argued by A. W. Phillips in 1958. At the same time,
again, in mainstream economics, tight labor markets indicate
possible price rises, due to labor’s power to raise up wages under
conditions of labor shortages (Sherman 1997; Hunt and Sherman
1972; Krugman 1994).
Table 2 is a macro snapshot of California’s growth from 1973
to 2000 in five categories: total state population, labor force, employment, unemployment, and prisoners. The relative surplus
population is represented in the latter two categories.19 Two
striking trends have developed over time. In the 1970s, the rate
of increase in the labor force and employment was about equal,
even though unemployment hit extremely high levels during the
period. In the period 1980–94, with two additional recessions,
employment failed to keep up with the labor force, and the number of prisoners goes off the chart. The overall trend is for labor
force growth to exceed employment growth by about 4 percent.
The sum of the state’s average annual number of unemployed
persons, plus the average annual number of prisoners, is about 1
million. These million constitute the empirical minimum of California’s relative surplus population, because the number does
not include anybody who wants to work but is not registered
with either the California Employment Development Department (EDD) or the CDC.
If NAIRU explains the systemic existence of the relative surplus population in the most abstract neoclassical macroeconomic
terms, its sociological presence is bounded by the fatal coupling
of power and difference, which resolves relationally according to
internally dynamic but structurally static racial hierarchies.20 In
TABLE 2 CALIFORNIA POPULATION, LABOR FORCE,
JOBS, UNEMPLOYMENT, AND PRISONERS, 1973–2000
(thousands)
Total Labor Unemployed
Year Population Force Jobs People Prisoners
1973 21,250 8,910 8,286 624 22.5
1974 21,646 9,317 8,638 679 24.7
1975 22,042 9,539 8,598 941 20.0
1976 22,438 9,896 8,990 906 21.0
1977 22,834 10,367 9,513 853 19.6
1978 23,235 10,911 10,137 775 21.3
1979 23,700 11,268 10,566 702 22.6
1980 24,006 11,584 10,794 790 24.5
1981 24,278 11,812 10,938 875 29.2
1982 24,805 12,178 10,967 1,210 34.6
1983 25,337 12,269 11,095 1,187 39.3
1984 25,816 12,503 11,631 980 43.3
1985 26,403 12,981 12,048 934 50.1
1986 27,052 13,332 12,442 890 59.5
1987 27,717 13,737 12,946 791 66.9
1988 28,393 14,133 13,385 748 76.1
1989 29,142 14,518 13,780 737 87.3
1990 29,976 14,750 13,747 1,003 97.3
1991 30,575 14,833 13,714 1,119 102.0
1992 31,187 15,187 13,805 1,382 104.3
1993 31,810 15,700 14,130 1,570 115.5
1994 32,155 15,450 14,122 1,328 124.8
1995 32,291 15,412 14,203 1,209 131.3
1996 32,501 15,512 14,392 1,120 141.0
(continued)
74 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
the rubble of extensive restructuring, individuals and families
have developed alternative modes of social reproduction, given
their utter abandonment by capital. These modes include informal economic structures for the exchange of illegal and legal
goods and services (W. J. Wilson 1987); social parenting, especially by women, in extended families of biological and fictive kin
(Collins 1990; Stack 1996); and the redivision of urban space into
units controlled by street organizations (Bing 1991; cf. Fanon
1961). The “concentration effects” (W. J. Wilson 1987) of sociospatial apartheid (cf. Massey and Denton 1993) also include
high rates of intentional and accidental violence, leading to premature death from a wide range of causes (Greenberg and
Schneider 1994; Bing 1991), and persistent but hostile interaction
with state agencies, especially welfare, family services, courts,
and the police (W. J. Wilson 1987; R. W. Gilmore 1993).
At the most abstract level, about a million people in California have been locked into isolated enclaves by being locked out
TABLE 2 (continued)
(thousands)
Total Labor Unemployed
Year Population Force Jobs People Prisoners
1997 32,985 15,947 14,943 1,004 152.5
1998 33,387 16,337 15,368 969 158.2
1999 33,934 16,597 15,732 865 162.1
2000 34,480 17,091 16,246 845 161.5
sources: SPWB 1986, 1993, 2001; CDC 1994b; CDC, 2002.
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 75
elsewhere. Changes in labor-market structures have had particularly harsh effects on African American men in the prime of life
(Miller 1996), while displacing other workers as well (Grant et al.
1996; Leiman 1993). Underemployment and worklessness are
higher among men than among women of similar demographic
profile. The lower-echelon jobs produced by more recent rounds
of investment in regions where jobs making and moving things
have disappeared are either native-born women’s (low-paid,
nonbrawny) work, or secondary market jobs targeting recent
male or female immigrants (Sassen 1988; Grant et al. 1996). The
lower a man’s income, the more likely he is to have been unemployed, and a disjuncture of skills and expectations exacerbates
the difficulty of marginalized workers finding new jobs. Finally,
Black men are 30 percent more likely than their white counterparts to have lost permanent jobs between 1979 and 1989, with
the long-term effect that only 51 percent of Black men have
steady employment, compared with 73 percent twenty-five years
ago—although 90 percent of all Black men work at least part of
the time (Nasar 1994).
The five-county Los Angeles region is the origin of 60 percent
of state prisoners.21 A comparison of census data for 1970, 1980,
and 1990 reveals that while the region’s Black men who work
have closed the racial wage gap, all but the most highly educated
have experienced steady declines in employment. The lower the
educational attainment, the more precipitous the drop (Grant et
al. 1996). Black women who have moved out of traditional labor
market niches (such as domestic service) have gained higherpaying clerical and technical employment in the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) and governmental sectors. However,
the correlation between education and employment still holds,
76 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
with steadily declining workforce participation among Black
women with less than high school diplomas. The organization
discussed in chapter 5 constitutes a gradually and self-consciously
politicized consequence of these bifurcations.
Increased underemployment and joblessness is not an exclusively African American domain, however, although Black
people are disproportionately represented in it. Between 1970
and 1980, the earnings of Chicanos22 aged 25–34 in the Los Angeles region declined from those of the previous decade, and although earnings improved in the 1980s, they did not regain the
old highs. At the same time, Chicanas did not experience a compensatory gain serving to maintain household income levels
(Ortiz 1996). During the same period, overall joblessness for
young adult Black men increased 25 percent, while that of white
males in the cohort decreased. However, when education is factored in along with age, a different picture emerges: among the
less-educated, joblessness increased for both groups—by 84 percent among Black men and 30 percent among white men (Ong
and Valenzuela 1996).
The spatial configurations of Los Angeles’s secondary school
dropout rates, heavy industry closures, and technopole development show how rates of underemployment and joblessness,
while meeting a need for capital, are not apolitically visited upon
workers (Oliver et al. 1993; see also Massey and Denton 1994): the
“market” did not do it. Rather, the post-Keynesian state participated in the production of the relative surplus population
through specific actions and inactions. Twenty years of laissezfaire economic policy have politically and ideologically freed
capital to move (Oliver et al. 1993; cf. Bluestone and Harrison
1982). Defunded community-based organizations no longer pro-
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 77
vide services and training to youth, and abandoned educational
programs no longer provide opportunity for advancement
(Oliver et al. 1993). The state registers its indifference in the
growing dropout rate—as high as 63–79 percent in some Black
and Latino high schools (Oliver et al. 1993; cf. Horton and Freire
1990). Changes in public policy with respect to the working poor
have contributed to the abandonment of entire segments of labor,
with the result that the “social safety net has been replaced by a
criminal dragnet” (Oliver et al. 1993: 126). Examining California
by region, Dan Walters ([1986] 1992) arrived at similar findings
for all of the state’s metropolitan areas.
These selected examples indicate who is in the relative surplus
population. The numbers do not include the unemployed fraction of California’s half-million agricultural workers—mostly
immigrant and native-born Latinos—who migrate through the
state’s annual harvests (Walker 1995; Landis 1992).
Capital’s requirement for a relative surplus population, in one
of the world’s richest political-geographic formations, provokes
crisis on a number of levels. For each jobless individual and
household, the crisis centers on daily and intergenerational reproduction. For voters, the crisis centers on how to ensure that
the surplus population, who rebelled in 1965 and 1992, is contained, if not deported. In tightening labor markets through deportation of reserve labor force cadres to prison or abroad, feardriven voter-made laws may seem contradictory for capitalism
(cf. Foglesong 1986); but the contradiction may only be an illusion when employers are able to exploit actual and implied undocumented workers’ political powerlessness. Voter-made
laws—which imply an identifiable stratum of electorally expressed “common sense”—can also provoke new struggles in a
78 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
rapidly restructuring state, where newly dominant blocs seek to
exercise power in an era characterized by a crisis of state legitimation. This brings us to our fourth and final surplus, that of
state capacity.
Surplus State Capacity Insofar as the capitalist state must both
help capital be profitable, and keep the formal inequality of
capitalism acceptable to the polity (Habermas 1972; Hirsch 1983;
Negri [1980] 1988), it develops fiscal, institutional, and ideological
means to carry out these tasks. These means—or capacities—are
made up of laws and lawmakers, offices and other built
environments, bureaucrats, budgets, rules and regulations, rankand-file staff, the ability to tax or borrow, and direct access to mass
communication and education to produce “primary” definitions
of social reality (Skocpol 1985; Stuart Hall et al. 1978; Gramsci
1971). The historically specific arrangements of these capacities—
how they are combined, and to what end—indicate the “balance
of power relations” in the social formation as a whole (Negri
[1980] 1988; Mike Davis 1986).
The balance of power, in turn, is explained—or legitimated—through politically fought-out interpretations of seemingly neutral overarching principles (the Constitution, individual freedom, equality) that, in common sense and law,
ideologically bind state and society (MacKinnon 1989; O’Connor
[1973] 2000; Stuart Hall et al. 1978; Stuart Hall 1986).23 When a
new bloc attains state power, it must “renovate and make critical
already existing activity” by using the ideological and material
means at hand to transform its intervention from an ad hoc to a
durable presence in society (Gramsci 1971; Hobsbawm 1982).
The short-lived Keynesian state had secured a general balance
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 79
of power by developing agencies that promised to guarantee uses
for surplus when markets failed. Keynesian institutions congealed legitimacy and revenues into highly differentiated, but reproducible, units of state power (Piven 1992). Income and employment programs for workers, infrastructural programs for
capital, and subsidy programs for farmlands were designed to
keep surpluses from again accumulating into the broad and deep
crisis that had characterized the Great Depression.
The uneven development of the New Deal’s “creative government” (Baldwin 1968) resulted not only from the uneven capitulations of capital to a massive social wage but also—and perhaps more so—from the desperately dense relationships between
southern (and western) and northern Democrats. The racial, industrial, gender, and regional divisions reflected in eligibility for
and the scope of New Deal agencies and programs institutionalized Jim Crow without speaking his name (see, e.g., Mink 1995;
R. W. Gilmore 2002b). In other words, the anomaly that
emerged in the 1930s was not only the welfare-warfare state, but
also the extension of regional norms to national relationships
(e.g., county-determined eligibility for federal aid to dependent
children). The political remains of those agencies form the armature of the workfare-warfare state.
The peculiar welfare-warfare, or military Keynesian, state
form began to lose its legitimate ability to manage crisis, and thus
to reproduce itself and endure, at about the time the profit rate
started to flatten and then fall in the mid to late 1960s. As we saw
in chapter 2, we can witness the delegitimation of redistribution
of income via the welfare function in any number of positions espoused from 1965 on, from revisionist liberal to New Right. Another way to look at the problem is to investigate shifts in the
80 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
structure of taxation, which both reveal profound reconfigurations of power (understood here as responsibility, which is also
authority and autonomy) between levels of the state, and newly
emerging relationships between all kinds of capitalists and all
kinds of workers. These dynamics exhibit no less unevenness
than what characterized the interlocking and overlapping periods of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War
through the mid 1960s. The point here is a simple one: now
things are different, but the difference is grounded in history, not
conspiracy or mechanical certainty.
Marx observed that “tax struggle is the oldest form of class
struggle” (1867; cited in O’Connor [1973] 2000: 10). When examined abstractly, tax struggle appears to be a general indicator
of state illegitimacy. However, the historical specificity of actual
tax revolts is evidence of opposition to the particular means by
which the balance in power relations is realized as a particular
state form.24 The way the New Deal bureaucracy and agency formation happened indicates the complexity of “class struggle” and
also points to how inter- and intraclass antagonisms are waged
through, in, and as the state. In other words, the rejigging of
power, dynamically played out in tax struggle, is not achieved
along pure lines of capital and labor. For example, businesses
stuck in particular political geographies (e.g., tourism or agriculture) might support different tax schemes from firms that are
more mobile, while multinational corporations can promote
hikes or cuts inimical to small business interests (O’Connor
[1973] 2000; Foglesong 1986). High-wage labor might try to
shield its relative prosperity from low-wage and unemployed
workers. In the aggregate, however, tax struggle is a struggle
over who gets to keep the value that produces profit. The strug-
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 81
gle is decoupled from the economic point of production (the factory or firm) and often explosively recoupled in the political milieu of the state.
In the California case, the rhythms of tax reduction are strong
indicators of structural change and, as table 3 demonstrates,
show how the Keynesian state’s delegitimation accumulated in
waves, culminating, rather than originating, in Tom Bradley’s
1982 and 1986 gubernatorial defeats. The first wave, or capital’s
wave, is indicated by the 50 percent decline in the ratio of bank
and corporation taxes to personal income taxes between 1967 and
1986 (California State Public Works Board 1987). Starting as
early as 1968, voters had agitated for tax relief commensurate
with the relief capital had won after putting Ronald Reagan in
the governor’s mansion (Mike Davis 1990). But Sacramento’s efforts were continually disappointing under both Republican and
Democratic administrations (Kirlin and Chapman 1994). This
set in motion the second, or labor’s, wave, in which actual (and
aspiring) homeowner-voters reduced their own taxes via Proposition 13 (1978).25 The third, or federal wave, indicates the devolution of responsibility from the federal government onto the
state and local levels, as evidenced by declines of 12.5 percent
(state) to 60 percent (local) in revenues derived from federal aid.
The third wave can be traced to several deep tax cuts the Reagan
presidential administration conferred on capital and the wealthiest of workers in 1982 and again in 1986 (David Gordon 1996;
Krugman 1994).
The sum of these waves produced state and local fiscal crises
following in the path of federal crisis that James O’Connor
([1973] 2000) had analyzed early in the period under review
when he advanced the “welfare-warfare” concept. As late as
TABLE 3 THREE WAVES OF STRUCTURAL CHANGE IN
SOURCES OF CALIFORNIA TAX REVENUES, 1967–1989
First Wave: Bank and Corporate Taxes per Dollar of
Personal Income Taxa
1967 72 cents
1986 36 cents
Second Wave: California State and Local Government
Revenue Sourcesb
Source and Year Percentage
Personal income
1977–78 12.5
1988–89 16.8
Sales and use
1977–78 16.1
1988–89 16.5
Property
1977–78 25.1
1988–89 12.7
Fees and charges
1977–78 6.8
1988–89 15.8
Enterprises
1977–78 19.6
1988–89 22.3
Other taxes
1977–78 15.4
1988–89 15.8
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 83
1977–78, California state and local coffers were full (CDF-CEI
1978; Gramlich 1991). By 1983, Sacramento was borrowing to
meet its budgetary goals, while county and city governments
reached crisis at different times, depending on how replete their
reserves had been prior to Proposition 13. Voters wanted services
and infrastructure at lowered costs; and when they paid, they
tried not to share. Indeed, voters were quite willing to pay for
amenities that would stick in place, and between 1977–78 and
1988–89, they actually increased property-based taxes going to
special assessment districts by 45 percent (Chapman 1991: 19).
In this historical context, old markets for certain fractions of
finance capital, land, and labor were dying, while new ones had
not yet been born that might absorb the surpluses. The central
contradiction for the waning welfare-warfare, or military Keynesian, state was this: the outcomes of tax struggle translated into
delegitimation of programs the state could use to put surpluses
back to work, while at the same time, the state retained bureaucratic and fiscal apparatuses from the golden age. The massive
TABLE 3 (continued)
Third Wave: Federal Aid to California State and Local
Governments (% of general revenues)c
Year State Local
1981 25.8 6.7
1988 22.6 2.7
sources: a
SPWB 1987; b
Chapman 1991: 19; c
Chapman 1991: 16.
84 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
restructuring of the state’s tax base in effect made surplus the
Keynesian state’s capacities. However, the state did not disappear—just as surplus workers, or land, or other idled factors of
production do not disappear. Rather, what withered was the
state’s legitimacy to act as the Keynesian state. The state’s crisis,
then, was also a crisis for people whose protections against
calamity, or opportunities for advancement, would be made surplus by the state, into which their hard-fought incorporation
was only ever partial and therefore contingent. A related crisis,
for the entire surplus population, rested on how absolutely they
would be abandoned and whether their regulation would take
new forms.
It is possible, of course, that the post-Keynesian state could
shrink. Figure 8 shows the trends for the state’s general fund and
the numbers who voted for governor in elections from 1978 to
1994. Legitimacy diminished, and the state budget grew. The
best explanation for the budget expansion is that the underlying
conditions that led to the waves of tax revolts on the part of capital, labor, and the federal government continued to be in flux,
and therefore the challenge for maintaining a general balance of
power required an excess of resources at the California level.
This would suggest that the new power bloc’s intervention has
not achieved hegemony. But a corollary to such an explanation
might be that the new power bloc cannot rejig power in the figure of the state with any greater cost-efficiency than it has already
exhibited. The “big stick” approach used by U.S. capital to discipline labor requires an enormous, expensive industrial bureaucracy (David Gordon 1996); the same thing may be true of the
capitalist state in crisis.
THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY 85
9
General Fund Expenditures
Votes Cast (millions)
($10 billion, 1987 = 100)
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
78 82 86
Year
90 94
Votes
General fund
expenditures
FIGURE 8. Votes cast for governor and general fund expenditures,
1978–1994. Sources: Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1978, November
3, 1982, November 6, 1986, November 8, 1990; Martin 1994; California
State Controller, Annual Report, 1982, 1995.
CONCLUSION
As we shall see in the detailed analysis that follows, the new state
built itself in part by building prisons. It used the ideological and
material means at hand to do so, renovating its welfare-warfare
capacities into something different by molding surplus finance
capital, land, and labor into the workfare-warfare state. The result was an emerging apparatus that, in an echo of the Cold War
Pentagon’s stance on communism, presented its social necessity
in terms of an impossible goal—containment of crime, understood as an elastic category spanning a dynamic alleged contin-
86 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
uum of dependency and depravation. The crisis of state capacity
then became, peculiarly, its own solution, as the welfare-warfare
state began the transformation, bit by bit, to the permanent crisis workfare-warfare state, whose domestic militarism is concretely recapitulated in the landscapes of depopulated urban
communities and rural prison towns. We shall now turn to the
history of this “prison fix.”
87
THREE
THE PRISON FIX
The rhetoric of imprisonment and the reality of the cage are often in stark
contrast.
NORVAL MORRIS AND DAVID J. ROTHMAN, THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE
PRISON (1995)
You know, in my life I’ve rarely been amazed. Rarely been amazed. But I’ll tell
you what amazed me is the last time I was in [prison, in 1992]. I thought, you
know, look at all these guys in here. I thought, all these guys were in there for
something, you know, that they had done something. But then people started
telling me what they were in for. More than half the guys, they were in for
drugs, for possession. I mean, for nothing. That was truly amazing, you know,
to me.
40-YEAR-OLD EX-GANGSTER, PERSONAL COMMUNICATION (1994)
88 THE PRISON FIX
H
ow did California go about “the largest prison building
program in the history of the world” (Rudman and
Berthelsen 1991: i)? We have already seen that California’s
political economy changed significantly in the 1970s, due
both to changes in the location of industrial investment—
capital movement—and to “natural” disasters. Those changes,
and responses to them, provided the foundation upon which new
rounds of capital movement and new natural disasters were
played out. These shifts produced surpluses of finance capital,
land, labor, and state capacity, not all of which were politically,
economically, socially, or regionally absorbed. The new California prison system of the 1980s and 1990s was constructed deliberately—but not conspiratorially—of surpluses that were not
put back to work in other ways. Make no mistake: prison building was and is not the inevitable outcome of these surpluses. It
did, however, put certain state capacities into motion, make use
of a lot of idle land, get capital invested via public debt, and take
more than 160,000 low-wage workers off the streets.
FROM REFORM TO PUNISHMENT
Just as the rounds of disinvestment and calamity that occurred in
the 1970s political economy set the stage for how the 1980s crises
proceeded, so changes in California’s prisons in the 1970s formed
the basis for the system’s expansion. Not once, but twice, the rising power bloc of “tough on crime” and antiurban strategists
seized hard-won reforms designed to make the prisoner’s lot less
desperate and transformed them into their inverse mirror images. Efforts to make the California Department of Corrections
(CDC) take rehabilitation seriously wiped rehabilitation from
THE PRISON FIX 89
the books. Efforts to free prisoners from crumbling prisons led to
the construction program that has never ended.
In 1977, California ended its sixty-year commitment to use the
state prison system as the sociospatial means to rehabilitate all but
the most intransigent prisoners (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991;
Cummins 1994). The 1977 Uniform Determinate Sentencing
Act was the legislature’s response to a series of executive branch
courtroom losses during a twenty-five year struggle with state
prisoners. Prisoners had successfully used the federal bench,
under the 1867 Habeas Corpus Act, to demand that California
treat prisoners equitably, relieve overcrowding, and respect constitutional rights (Cummins 1994).1 Prisons have never been
pleasant places, and overcrowding was not a new phenomenon.2
Prisoners have always fought both legally and extralegally to secure decent conditions (Cummins 1994; Wicker 1975). However,
the post–World War II civil rights movement’s courtroom successes encouraged prisoners to use the system against itself; and
the growing fraction of Black people in the prison population
was cause for identification with struggles in the streets (Jackson
1970; Angela Davis 1971; Wicker 1975; Cummins 1994). The
movement also influenced prisoners from behind bars, because
the criminalization of political activists brought them into the
prison population (Cummins 1994; Angela Davis 1971).
The key issue was sentence length. California’s 1917 Progressive rehabilitation scheme had been coupled with indeterminate
sentences, on the theory that technically qualified “corrections”
professionals would help prisoners become useful and reliable
and that the “corrected” prisoners would then persuade local parole boards of their readiness to rejoin society (Norval Morris
90 THE PRISON FIX
1995; E. B. Freedman 1996). In practice, parole boards were
capricious and racist, representing local elites; prisoners sentenced to one year to life languished in the penitentiary for
decades, petitioning at prescribed intervals for a chance to talk
their way out of cages (Jackson 1970).3 California’s Progressives
had argued that they were devising a new system vastly different
from both the exploitative plantation models of Mississippi and
Louisiana (Oshinsky 1996; Lichtenstein 1996) and the Golden
State’s older, punitive system (Bookspan 1991; Rudman and
Berthelsen 1991). However, the Progressive movement was generally committed to preserving racial and property hierarchies,
while creating institutions that would turn out people who respected authority and knew their own limits (Thelan 1969; Allen
1994; Linda Gordon 1994; see also Don Mitchell 1996). In practice, California’s indeterminate sentences extended to life sentences for Black, Latino, and white prisoners whose failures to be
rehabilitated translated as their refusal to learn their proper
places in the social order (Irwin 1985; Jackson 1970; cf. Himes
[1945] 1986, 1971).
A second class of issues that prisoners litigated centered on
conditions of confinement. State, media, and intellectuals of the
late 1960s and early 1970s participated in the ideological production of “moral panics” (Stuart Hall et al. 1978) to explain the social and political disorder sweeping the United States. At all levels, states worked hard to characterize people agitating for justice
as morally wrong rather than politically dissident. The ensuing
criminalization of such activists swept what were then record
numbers of men and women off the streets and into custody,
with California in the vanguard (Miller 1996; Donner 1990; cf.
Stuart Hall et al. 1978; Bean 1973). The state’s prison population
THE PRISON FIX 91
grew from about 16,500 to just under 23,000 between 1967 and
1971; the number rose and fell within a fairly narrow band over
the next few years, peaking at 24,700 in 1974 and bottoming out
at 19,600 in 1977 (CDC 1992; Rudman and Berthelsen 1991;
Cummins 1994). In addition to, or as a result of, problems of
sheer physical incapacity, the CDC could not or would not respect the rights of inmates to “adequate life safety, health care
and recreation, food, decent eating . . . and sanitation standards, . . . visitation privileges, and access to legal services” (Silver 1983: 118; cf. Cummins 1994). Thus, the hostility, density, and
confusion that characterized state prison environments at the
time undermined any rehabilitative capacity prisons might have
had (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991; Cummins 1994).
Federal courts throughout the United States in the 1970s favorably evaluated many prisoners’ writs of habeas corpus and put
state corrections departments under federal order to remedy
constitutional wrongs (Benton 1983). Courts directed California
to relieve overcrowding and also to group prisoners according to
a transparent system of classifications in order to enhance the potential for every individual’s reform (SPWB 1985; Cummins
1994; Rudman and Berthelsen 1991; see also Bookspan 1991 for
earlier attempts at prisoner classification). If the purpose of these
federally demanded social and spatial remedies was to carry out
the mandates of Progressive-era lawmaking, the legislature responded by voiding the 1917 statute. The 1977 Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act was California’s formal abdication of any
responsibility to rehabilitate, stating neatly: “[T]he purpose of
imprisonment for crime is punishment.”
In the 1977 Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act, and again
in that year’s Budget Act, the legislature directed the CDC to
92 THE PRISON FIX
forecast prison bed need (LAO 1986).4 The CDC’s initial attempts to predict shortfall were quite modest and focused on renovating aging facilities and replacing the two oldest prisons—
San Quentin (built in 1852) and Folsom (opened in 1880). The
department’s 1978 Facilities Planning Report proposed renovating 3,000 prison beds around the state. In 1980, the Facilities Requirement Plan expanded the number of new and replacement
beds to 5,000, and forecast an increase in the capital needed to
carry out the project (LAO 1986).
In the turbulent years of his second and final term (1978–82),
Governor Jerry Brown took up the initial CDC analysis and
started work on designs for new facilities to replace the tier-andcatwalk-style gothic structures at San Quentin and Folsom
(Morain 1994c; LAO 1986). Brown’s new prisons were supposed
to be used for rehabilitation, in spite of the legislature’s 1977 declaration. The 1977 statute did not forbid rehabilitation; rather, it
excised its central importance (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). By
his own testimony, Brown could have used his power as the
state’s chief executive to relieve overcrowding by ordering parole
for indeterminate-sentence prisoners who had served time equal
to the new sentencing requirements and by commuting sentences for others who had been in the system a long time.5 Instead, he began to investigate the best way to improve plant and
modestly expand capacity, intending—or so he claimed—to use
state-of-the-art prisons for the benefit of prisoners and society
(Morain 1994c).
By 1980, the legislature had already approved replacing San
Quentin with two 500-bed, maximum-security units. In the
summer of 1982, Brown brought in a premier prison architectengineer, Paul Rosser, to design small, program- and common-
THE PRISON FIX 93
space-oriented prisons that would focus on education and other
rehabilitative activities (Morain 1994c; LAO 1986). Brown’s planning combined vestiges of the early twentieth-century Progressive sensibility—seeking to produce social peace through old and
new institutions and techniques of control—with a late
twentieth-century political shrewdness—seeking to convert the
moral panic over crime into an opportunity by having a skeptical electorate support the exercise, rather than the restraint, of
state expansion (cf. L. M. Friedman 1993).
There were so many contradictory processes at work in the
1982 transition year from the lapsed welfare-state Democratic to
the supply-side Republican gubernatorial regime that it is sometimes difficult to grasp how they all coincided. The split widened
between Brown’s commitment to what had become, in law, secondary (rehabilitation), and the primary purpose enshrined in
the new penal code. Without opposition from the lame-duck
chief executive, the legislature gave the CDC permission to build
on a larger scale than Brown had envisioned (Morain 1994d).
Brown had financed prison design studies out of reserve funds
appropriated by the legislature and initiated the era of new facilities construction by approving a $25,000,000 expansion at the
California Correctional Institution in southern Kern County.
But in 1982, new commitments to the CDC started to rise steeply,
and the department revised its forecast—for the first time
proposing several major capacity-expanding facilities instead of
concentrating on renovation and replacement (LAO 1986). To
meet needs forecast by the CDC, the 1982 legislature approved
siting new facilities in Riverside, Los Angeles, and San Diego
Counties. That same year, the legislature successfully petitioned
voters to approve $495,000,000 in general obligation bonds
94 THE PRISON FIX
(GOBs) to build new prisons—based on the argument that more
prison cells would enhance public safety and punish wrongdoers
(Morain 1994d).
Also in 1982, the legislature reorganized the statutory relationship between itself, the CDC, and the prison expansion project by forming a new entity, the Joint Legislative Committee on
Prison Construction and Operations (JLCPCO).6 Thereafter, the
CDC stood apart from all other state agencies in two ways. First,
its capital outlays would not be managed by the Office of General Services, which meant that its bidding and budgeting practices varied from long-standing procedures for construction of
state physical plant. Indeed, the CDC was explicitly exempted
from a competitive bidding process and instead allowed to assign
work to outside consultants (BRC 1990; LAO 1986).7 The explanation for this extreme deviation from normal procedure focused
on the CDC’s unique new charge to build an unspecified number of similar, expensive, highly specialized facilities in rapid succession (R. Bernard Orozco, interview, 1995; Rudman and
Berthelsen 1991; BRC 1990; LAO 1986). Second, the establishment of the JLCPCO kept the CDC’s ordinary and extraordinary activities under close scrutiny and direction by elected officials (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991; LAO 1986). The latter
appeared to keep the expansion of the prison system in the public eye, insofar as the JLCPCO was required to hold hearings before either Department of Finance disbursement of appropriated
funds or Public Works Board implementation of CDC plans
(BRC 1990).
George Deukmejian’s gubernatorial victory in 1982 completed the turn to the right California had begun under Ronald
Reagan in the 1960s. Deukmejian used the accumulating illegit-
THE PRISON FIX 95
imacy exemplified by tax revolts to attack the status quo—starting with the weakest targets, such as persons receiving welfare
(cf. Piven 1992). He followed, rather than led, the tax struggle,
and at the end of California’s second straight year of wellreported declining crime rates, he proposed budget increases to
fight crime, appealing to voters’ insecurity. It is more than ironic
that he campaigned against big government by arguing how the
government should grow. Deukmejian’s gubernatorial opponent, Tom Bradley, had as mayor of Los Angeles successfully
controlled the rising share of the city budget that the LAPD and
the police and fire pension fund had commanded for more than
a decade.8 The police fought back by campaigning—statewide,
in uniform—for Deukmejian (Sonenshein 1993). Deukmejian
seized the issue and used the Los Angeles dispute to project race,
crime, and the need for state-building as a single issue, claiming
that the African American mayor’s tightening of the LAPD
budget could only be the work of a man who was soft on crime.
Once Deukmejian took office in 1983, the administration
broadened Jerry Brown’s new prison plan but dropped rehabilitation as the reason for new buildings. With punishment, in the
form of “incapacitation,” now the rationale for prison, the administration, the legislature, and the CDC (all three partially
consolidated via the JLCPCO) joined forces to expand the state’s
built capacity for incarceration. But the state still had two immediate problems: first, how better to guarantee potential prisoners,
and second, how to finance the facilities to cage them. Toward solution of the former problem, the legislature changed the classification of certain offenses—such as residential burglary (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991) and domestic assault (E. G. Hill
1994)—to felonies requiring prison terms upon conviction. Sim-
96 THE PRISON FIX
ilarly, new drug laws—to some degree modeled on New York’s
Rockefeller minimum mandatory sentence laws enacted in the
early 1970s (Flateau 1996; Miller 1996)—also enhanced the likelihood of prison time for people not formerly on the prison track
(Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). The legislature further authorized a State Task Force on Youth Gang Violence to study what
it called “street terrorism”—a topic to which we shall return.
The Board of Prison Terms, overseeing parole officers, made
common cause with the legislature, and instructed its field staff
to be liberal in revoking parole—an option used sparingly before
the new prison era; as a result, since 1983 people on parole have
had great difficulty remaining out of custody through their supervisory period, with about 70 percent being returned to prison
for some portion of that time without having been convicted of
new crimes.9
With these legal measures in place, the CDC deepened and
widened its planning. Beginning with the 1983 Facilities Master
Plan, it projected shortfalls in available beds as a crisis (LAO
1986). It is surprising neither that the CDC bed shortage estimates varied considerably nor that they tended to climb. The estimates ranged from 16,100 to 55,000 throughout the 1980s to a
1994 all-time high of 151,641 for 1998, generated by the “three
strikes” law (SPWB 1985, 1986a, 1987, 1991; LAO 1986; CDC
1993, 1994, 1996). Under Deputy Director James Gomez, who
moved to the CDC from the Department of Social Services
Adult and Family Division in 1983, the department expanded its
planning staff (from 3 to 118), honed its forecasting, and from
1984 on began to produce five-year master plans that combined
technical number-crunching skills with a flair for emphasizing
the drama inherent in the “crisis” (LAO 1986).10 Projected need
THE PRISON FIX 97
moved in tandem with the judiciary’s legislature-produced capacity to remand persons to CDC custody. With the problem of
identifying wrongdoers partially solved, the question was how to
pay for all the new beds; and it was the new beds, rather than
court commitments, that led the system’s growth.
CAPITAL FOR CONSTRUCTION
Although Sacramento had successfully persuaded taxpayers to
vote for the 1982 Prison Construction Bond Act, most elected officials were susceptible to an ongoing fear, inspired by Proposition 13, of asking voters to approve too many general obligation
bonds. GOBs pledge the full faith and credit of the state of California, and the state constitution requires that any such debt be
approved by the legislature and ratified by the electorate (SPWB
1985). GOBs also provide a way to circumvent the constitutional
requirement of a balanced budget, because debt service for voterapproved bonds is exempt from the rule (SPWB 1985). The
problem became how to expand a politically popular program
(prisons) without running up against the politically contradictory
limit to taxpayers’ willingness to use their own money to defend
against their own fears.
Frederic Prager of L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin
(LFRUT),11 one of the most creative and well-connected underwriters in the California world of municipal finance, and his new
associate Tom Dumphy, came up with a plan approved by a bipartisan power bloc, including Democrats Jess Unruh (treasurer) and Willie Brown (Speaker of the Assembly), the Republican governor, George Deukmejian, and prison-expansion
activists in the legislature, led by State Senator Robert Presley
(R–Riverside) and Assemblyman Dick Robinson (R–Orange
98 THE PRISON FIX
County). The capitalists and the statesmen crafted a new way to
borrow money for prisons from existing debt-raising capacities.
The scheme involved using lease revenue bonds (LRBs) to supplement GOB debt.
Prager’s savvy and experience had led LFRUT to dominance
in California’s private college facilities market. The state’s independent, not-for-profit postsecondary institutions could borrow
in the tax-exempt markets to develop or renovate infrastructure;
for California, these debts constitute “off-book” or “no-commitment” loans, because their repayment does not entail any taxing
or other fiscal capacity of the state (SPWB 1985; Sbragia 1986).
Under Prager, LFRUT put together LRBs for the state’s richest
and most powerful private universities—Stanford, the University of Southern California, and the California Institute of Technology. The creative firm also devised successful bond issues for
schools with more modest debt capacity, such as St. Mary’s, Moraga, Cal Lutheran, and the University of the Pacific, so that they,
too, could improve their facilities. In 1981–82, Prager worked
with the Association of Independent California Colleges and
Universities (AICCU) to issue an innovative revenue bond
whose proceeds would constitute a forward-funded market for
student loans. Thanks to an exposé in the San Jose Mercury News
(September 5, 1982), the voters got the incorrect idea that only
rich schools (and by inference, rich students) had access to these
public funds. Treasurer Unruh, looking to be reelected that fall,
demanded that public institutions be included in the deal. The
spike in interest rates in the early 1980s made it difficult for
middle-income families to borrow for college in the private sector, while at the same time, mounting energy and other costs
pushed up tuition (R. W. Gilmore 1991). The loan deal was ex-
THE PRISON FIX 99
tended to all students in the state; and Unruh used the program
during his campaign to reassure the state’s 1.5 million students
and their parents—presumed members of the voting class—that
his office was looking out for their interests.12 A blunt politician
of the old school, Unruh also knew when to reduce flows to the
public trough; and in the early 1980s, a bad economy and a transitional gubernatorial regime kept the old power broker’s fist
tight on the spigot.
Prager brought Dumphy to LFRUT in 1983 to exploit his talents and connections in city government; he had previously been
a planner in Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration
and had also served as a youth probation officer in Massachusetts
early in his career (Dumphy 1996). Together, Prager and
Dumphy worked hard to develop new California markets for
public debt (cf. Sbragia 1986). The private college business was
already starting to tighten, because of most institutions’ limited
capacity to increase tuition—the major source of operating revenue for all expenditures, including student aid and debt service,
at all but the wealthiest schools (R. W. Gilmore 1991). They were
the pivot men between surplus private capital available for investment in the not-for-profit and public sectors and decreasing
state-approved outlets where the capital could be put to work.
The new prison construction program, in its infancy in 1983,
constituted an excellent long-term opportunity for capital investment. Sacramento’s old and new guards were ready to unite
behind the prison program, but they had to raise much more
money than anyone was brave or foolhardy enough to request
from voters.
Lease revenue bonds were the solution. LRBs are issued by the
Public Works Board of the state of California, established in 1946
100 THE PRISON FIX
to help smooth crisis as California adjusted to the postwar economy (SPWB 1985). Typical LRBs issued by the Public Works
Board are for real property loans for veterans and farmers, as
well as loans for public college and university facilities and hospital buildings. In all cases, nongovernmental borrower payments or user fees are used to pay back the debt. While in all cases
the Public Works Board is forbidden to pledge California’s full
faith and credit, in the case of public debt for public use, there is
an implied moral obligation that the state will exercise due diligence to avert defaults (cf. Sbragia 1996). It was a risky but successful political suspension of disbelief to use the state’s implied
moral obligation to script a scenario in which the Public Works
Board and the CDC were characterized as entities buying, selling, and leasing property and rights between them (SPWB 1985).
For the prison LRBs, the “revenue” has consisted of general fund
appropriations authorized by the legislature to the CDC annual
operating budget, designated as “rental payments” to the Public
Works Board, which is the actual issuer of the debt (SPWB 1985,
1986a, 1986b, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1993d). Unlike with mortgage, postsecondary, or hospital issues, there is no
potential or actual nontax revenue stream at all.
The economics of prison LRBs is almost identical to the economics of prison GOBs; the greatest difference between them is
political—the scope of approval needed to borrow huge sums.
The economic downside is that LRBs are slightly more expensive
than GOBs precisely because they do not pledge the state’s taxing power; for any debt, the higher the risk of nonpayment, the
higher the interest. However, in order to persuade all members
of the prison power bloc to exploit the LRB option, Prager and
Dumphy underscored the sole positive economic difference—
THE PRISON FIX 101
one that is in large part political as well. LRBs do not have to be
placed before the voters in general elections, and on approval by
the legislature, they can be relatively quickly organized and issued in order to maximize favorable credit conditions, enabling
the CDC to build prisons closer to the time the facilities are bid
on, thus theoretically avoiding cost hikes. The capitalists and the
statesmen agreed that the trade-off between slightly higher interest costs and quicker cash availability would balance the economic difference and provide an effective political shield from
organized antitax activists.
In less than a decade, the amount of state debt for the prison
construction project expanded from $763 million to $4.9 billion
dollars, a proportional increase of from 3.8 percent to 16.6 percent of the state’s total debt for all purposes (SPWB 1985, 1993).
During the same period, state debt service (annual expenditure
for principal plus interest) increased from 1 percent to 2.8 percent
of per capita income (California State Controller 1996: 161).
The new source of capital enabled the CDC to follow the second of two approaches it had proposed. The earlier of these, in
the late 1970s, had centered on keeping people convicted of nonviolent offenses in their communities and providing treatment
programs for the 70 percent or so of all convicted persons who are
addicted to drugs and alcohol (BRC 1990; LAO 1986; PRCC
1996). The state-of-emergency approach, which started to
emerge in 1982–83 (in Gomez’s first year as deputy director for
CDC operations), sought simply to build as many prison cells as
possible. The end run around taxpayer-voters in order to raise
what turned out to be more than $2.5 billion in LRBs—in addition to nearly $2.5 billion in GOBs—was thus not only a political strategy of economic subterfuge but also one of social policy
102 THE PRISON FIX
that set the Golden State in a new direction (SPWB 1985, 1986a,
1986b, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1993d).
SITING THE PRISONS
In order to realize the prison expansion program, the state
needed space in which to build the facilities.13California acquires
from one to three sections of land (640–1,920 acres) for each approved site. For a typical facility built since 1982, the buildings,
yards, parking lots, roads, perimeter, and fences incorporate
300–350 acres.14 Initially, too, there was some concern that siting
might prove a challenge because communities would be afraid to
have prisons in their midst (BRC 1990). There was ample evidence from around the United States that prison siting could be
difficult, with the facilities constituting highly contested locally
unwanted land uses (LULUs), producing “not in my back yard”
(NIMBY) dramas (see, for examples, Lake 1992, 1994; Krause
1992; Sechrest 1992; Carlson 1988, 1992; Travis and Sheridan
1983; cf. Lake 1992, 1994). As a result, the state was prepared to
exercise its right of eminent domain and condemn lands in order
to accumulate sufficient acreage for project development (LAO
1986; State of California 1990).
In anticipation of future siting struggles, the legislature at first
determined that new prisons should be located south of the
Tehachapi Mountains, whence, at the time, 59 percent of prisoners originated. The reasoning was that those who produced the
prisoners deserved the LULUs. However, the regional edict was
almost immediately revised, starting in 1982. The legislature approved new maximum security facilities adjacent to the expanded California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi (a tiny,
high-altitude, sod-producing agricultural valley in southern
THE PRISON FIX 103
Kern County) to replace San Quentin (which was in any case
never closed). The legislature also approved a new hospital
prison to supplement the crowded and deteriorating hospital
prison at Vacaville (Solano County) in the Great Central Valley,
forty-five minutes’ drive southwest of Sacramento. As word of
these authorizations traveled back to legislators’ constituencies
from 1982 on, word returned by way of delegations of community boosters, “But what about us? Why not right here?”
In 1983, the CDC established a Prison Siting Office under the
general direction of the department’s Government and Community Relations Branch. A nasty fight in Los Angeles over the
siting of the prison authorized for that county provided the
backdrop for the political and marketing work of the siting office. The legislature had selected a site in East Los Angeles, the
heart of the city and county’s Mexicano and Chicano community. The characterization of Los Angeles as a county producing
criminals but unwilling to shoulder its responsibility to house
them played well across the state political map, especially in the
suburbs and the inland valleys. At the same time, both the governor and legislature presumed that the promise of jobs would
offset the hesitancy of a working-class community of color to
have a prison located in its midst. The state was surprised by the
vehement political opposition to the prison organized by neighborhood mothers (“Las Madres”) in the area’s public housing
project and an activist Roman Catholic priest (Pardo 1998; Krier
1986; Pulido 1995b). The political danger in imposing the prison
on East Los Angeles against the will of the area’s residents lay in
the fact that any elected official, Democrat or Republican, was
increasingly vulnerable to the voting power of California’s expanding Latino population (Paddock 1986). The governor thus
104 THE PRISON FIX
retreated before the potential identitarian political bloc presented by protesters, even though he had vowed that the prison
would be sited in the city. Eventually, the owner of the tract sold
the land to a nonstate entity (Paul Jacobs 1986), although it was
another year before the project was officially shelved (Wolinsky
1987).15
The LA prison battle gave legislators from other state regions
the chance to voice their constituents’ willingness to have a prison
in their midst, and the siting office helped by sending representatives—usually women—to talk reassuringly at town meetings
about the benefits and costs associated with such a development
plan. An anti-LA righteousness, which turned on an almost patriotic notion of duty, cloaked the eagerness of small-town delegations who came to Sacramento looking for prisons to revive
isolated, flagging economies (Wolinsky 1987). Industry closures,
downsizing, and capital abandonment left large tracts of land
available for development. Contrary to contemporary folklore,
the towns where prisons were sited, while deeply divided by
class, are not all Anglo communities, and unlike in Los Angeles,
the political opposition to prison development was more easily
managed by pro-prison forces, aided by the CDC’s persuasive
prospectuses promising jobs and other amenities. In largely rural
areas with few employers, opposition to the prisons did not galvanize so readily. In Avenal, Corcoran, Coalinga, and Del Norte,
for example, the major opposition came from those materially, or
romantically, dependent on the traditional economy.16 At the
same time, with few or no alternatives available to raise income
(such as rent) generated by real property, smallholders in the
towns and most workers, then and now, have clung to the gen-
THE PRISON FIX 105
erally unsubstantiated belief that the benefits of a prison outweigh the negative effects.
The concentration of new prisons in the Central Valley, and
along the state’s southern and southeastern perimeter from Rock
Mountain (southern San Diego County) to Blythe Valley (Riverside County), is the result of the confluence of political and economic forces embedded in, and built on, the historical power of
agriculture and resource extraction in the state. Although agricultural and resource extraction activities account for only about
3 percent of total state product, these sectors, running at about
$30 billion annually, have commanded great power in Sacramento, not least because they dominate the districts and counties
where they are located, controlling many local legislators and
county and town governments, in part through making substantial campaign contributions (Walters 1992; Don Mitchell 1996;
Pisani 1984).
In the midst of the LA prison debacle, the CDC Siting Office
determined that rural communities would be the most easily
managed sites.17 The 640 to 1,920 acres sought for each site would
not come laden with costly political opposition in small towns.
Those that were eventually successful in having prisons sited in
their vicinity had well-organized delegations and very few objections to or demands on the CDC’s proposals. They also had
large landholders willing to sell nearby surplus acres that the
towns could incorporate in order to reap the imagined harvest of
state subventions, sales tax, and other incomes. We have already
seen that 100,000 acres per year of irrigated agricultural land had
been coming out of production starting in 1978; eighteen of the
twenty-four new prisons sited between 1982 and 1998 were (or
106 THE PRISON FIX
are being) built on formerly irrigated agricultural lands, and all
but four of the twenty-four at the time of their siting lay outside
the swathes of suburbanization moving into the Central and Inland Valleys.18
It seems contradictory that large, powerful landholding capitalists, accustomed to activating the state’s capacity in enormous
profit-enhancement projects, such as water development, would
relinquish acres to the state. What was in it for them? First, they
sell land—often the worst—that would otherwise be idle and
more often at an inflated price (CCPOA n.d. [1996]; BRC 1990).
Second, the state improves the land, and those improvements,
coupled with the promise of employment, in the short run increase nearby land values. These two goals were summarized by
a former head staffer of the JLCPCO concerning a dispute between the CDC and a site where the owners had surreptitiously
extended the state-owned infrastructural improvements—at
state cost—onto an adjacent parcel they intended to develop into
a shopping mall: “They have all this land, and they are trying to
bring up the values so they can develop it. That’s how they hope
to save their town.”19
Surplus land connects to surplus labor; as in the past, rural
capital has successfully externalized to the state costs associated
with changes in production. Prison development has had the intended, although rarely realized, effect of providing jobs, and
therefore supplementing household incomes for workers, who
presumably would be less likely to organize for jobs, higher
wages, or more radical goods, such as land reform, that can be
gained only at capital’s expense (Woods 1998). Rather, the actual
and almost dispossessed (Jacqueline Jones 1992) have in this instance, as in so many others, been deflected to petitioning the
THE PRISON FIX 107
state for benefits within the narrowing scope of prison development and related opportunities.
PRODUCING MORE PRISONERS
The state initiated new rounds of criminalization as elected officials scrambled to sponsor new laws. The rationale for the laws
purported to be reducing violence in communities. The means
was sentence enhancement, or intensified “incapacitation”—to
prevent people from committing crimes by keeping them in cages
for as long as possible. Sentence enhancement adds fixed amounts
of extra time to standard sentences for certain offenses. The legislature relieved the judiciary of the responsibility to determine a
wide range of sentences by writing the specifics into the law. Legislators from across the political spectrum, from Robert Presley
(R–Riverside) and Bill Jones (R–Fresno) on the right to Jim Costa
(D–Fresno) in the center to Maxine Waters (D–Los Angeles) on
the left, sponsored sentence-enhancing legislation; almost everybody sponsored some law, collectively creating a plethora of new
crimes for the state’s fifty-eight district attorneys to prosecute.
The legislature had commissioned a State Task Force on
Youth Gang Violence in 1984, whose findings, reported back to
the legislature in 1986, resulted in the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention (STEP) Act of 1988, as subsequently
amended. With that law, California established a mandate directing all local law enforcement agencies to identify street gang
members and enroll them in a statewide database. The law enhances sentences imposed on those whom enforcement has identified as street gang members.20 Upon future encounters with law
enforcement, listed persons face additional charges based on
their alleged status as gang members. Thus, while a non–gang
108 THE PRISON FIX
member arrested for a particular offense would be charged only
with that offense, a gang member would be charged both with
the offense and with being a gang member who had committed
the offense. Upon conviction, the sentence for the original offense
would be “enhanced” by from one to five years of extra time.
The decriminalization of controlled substance possession in
the 1970s had caused the number of people in prison on drugrelated charges to plummet (CDC 1992, Historical Trends). Drug
recriminalization, coupled with mandatory sentences for drugs
that had not been decriminalized and for new drugs such as
crack cocaine, pushed controlled substance commitments back
up throughout the 1980s. Whereas in 1977, drug offenses had accounted for only some 10 percent of new admissions to the CDC,
by 1990, they accounted for 34.2 percent (Rudman and
Berthelsen 1991; CDC 1992, Historical Trends), although all drug
use peaked in 1978 and fell thereafter (Tonry 1995).
In addition to new laws designed to control drugs and gangs,
the state launched a high-profile “three strikes” campaign. Although, as in most other jurisdictions in the United States, California had had sentence enhancement for repeat convictions for
many years, the legislature passed the nation’s second “three
strikes” law in March 1994, and an initiative on the following
November ballot solidified the statute into an expression of “the
people’s” will (Reynolds et al. 1996).21 More broadly written than
any law of its type in the United States (John Clark et al. 1996),
the California version includes nonviolent prior convictions
among eligible “strikes,” sets no age, temporal, or jurisdictional
limitations on priors, and allows prosecutors to use their power
to “wobble” charges in order to make current misdemeanors into
felonies and therefore strikable.22
THE PRISON FIX 109
From 1980 onward, crime was objectively and subjectively
different from what it had been prior to the 1977 Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act and the subsequent authorization,
funding, and siting of new prisons. Politicians of all races and
ethnicities merged gang membership, drug use, and habitual
criminal activity into a single social scourge, which was then used
to explain everything from unruly youth to inner-city homicides
to the need for more prisons to isolate wrongdoers. The media
amplified the message by giving crime reporting top billing
(Hadjor 1995; Males 1996; Miller 1996; Glassner 2000). Inner-city
residents were, indeed, seeking relief from fearful disorders in
their communities, and they, like their suburban counterparts,
tended to accept the primary definitions of what crime was and
what should be done about it—until direct experience of the
law’s unevenness raised questions about the actual intent of the
legislation in the first place (chapter 5).
The legislature and initiative-passing voters handed prosecutors powers once reserved for judges—such as evaluation of mitigating factors or eligibility for diversion programs (Tonry 1995;
Miller 1996; Reynolds et al. 1996; for federal precedents, see
Baum 1996). While prosecutors could decide not to exercise the
full extent of their new powers—and some did—such agents of
law enforcement were in a contradictory position. As elected officials, prosecutors were expected to run “against” crime, and if
they failed to do so, they risked being thrown out of office, and
their bureaucracies risked losing ground in county-level budget
competitions.23 The largest jurisdictions in the Southland, especially Los Angeles County, eagerly embraced the legislative rulings and began vigorous enforcement campaigns, paid for by
both state and federal funds (Sengupta 1992).24 Police forces
110 THE PRISON FIX
throughout the state, from tiny rural sheriffs’ offices to the highly
capitalized LAPD, systematically fulfilled their mandates
through enhanced surveillance of neighborhoods and individuals suspected of extralegal activity (Sengupta 1992).25
Concentrating power through the use of status determinations (gang/not gang; prior/no prior) and minimum mandatory
sentences, the new laws widened and deepened the capacity of
police, prosecutors, and judges to identify, arrest, charge, and
convict people and remand them to CDC custody. Indeed, the
legislature embarked on a criminal-law production frenzy, passing more than 100, and sometimes as many as 200, pieces of new
legislation each year since 1988—up from the former output of
20–25 pieces, which included routine amendments of existing
statutes (Greenwood et al. 1994). As a result, by 1994, the backlog had become so great that it was impossible to clear the legislative calendar by the end of each term, and the criminal law
subcommittees of the judiciary committees in both houses of the
legislature had become regular standing committees dealing exclusively with criminal legislation. The establishment of the new
committees also produced powerful legislative niches for their
chairs in the two houses, because legitimizing the prison expansion and operation program of the state’s fastest-growing department directly depended on the path taken by criminal legislation (SPWB 1985, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1993d; LAO 1986,
1996).
Working-class African Americans and Latinos—especially
Chicanos—experienced the most intensive criminalization
(Schiraldi and Godfrey 1994), trailed by urban and rural Anglos
of modest means. As we can see in table 4, Anglos dominated the
prisoner population in 1977 and did not lose their plurality until
THE PRISON FIX 111
TABLE 4 CDC PRISONER POPULATION BY RACE/ETHNICITY
Total Anglo African Latino Other
Year Number (%) (%) (%) (%)
1977 19,623 43.0 34.0 21.0 2.0
1982 34,640 36.0 36.0 26.0 2.5
1988 76,171 30.8 37.1 27.8 4.3
1995 135,133 29.5 31.3 34.1 5.0
2000 162,000 29.4 31.0 34.8 4.8
sources: CDC 1992, table 4; CDC, Characteristics of Population, 1995, 2002.
1988. Meanwhile, absolute numbers grew across the board—
with the total number of those incarcerated approximately doubling during each interval. African American prisoners surpassed all other groups in 1988, but by 1995, they had been
overtaken by Latinos; however, Black people have the highest
rate of incarceration of any racial/ethnic grouping in California,
or, for that matter, in the United States (see also Bonczar and
Beck 1997).
The structure of new laws, intersecting with the structure of
the burgeoning relative surplus population, and the state’s concentrated use of criminal laws in the Southland, produced a remarkable racial and ethnic shift in the prison population. Los
Angeles is the primary county of commitment. Most prisoners
are modestly educated men in the prime of life: 88 percent are between 19 and 44 years old. Less than 45 percent graduated from
high school or read at the ninth-grade level; one in four is functionally illiterate. And, finally, the percentage of prisoners who
worked six months or longer for the same employer immediately
112 THE PRISON FIX
TABLE 5 CDC COMMITMENTS BY
CONTROLLING OFFENSE
(%)
Violent Property Drug
1980 63.5 24.2 7.4
1995 41.8 25.3 26.4
2000 25.3 26.0 39.0
sources: CDC 1992; CDC, Characteristics of Population, 1995, 2000.
before being taken into custody has declined, from 54.5 percent
in 1982 to 44 percent in 2000 (CDC, Characteristics of Population,
various years).
At the bottom of the first and subsequent waves of new criminal legislation lurked a key contradiction. On the one hand, the
political rhetoric, produced and reproduced in the media, concentrated on the need for laws and prisons to control violence.
“Crime” and “violence” seemed to be identical. However, as
table 5 shows, there was a significant shift in the controlling (or
most serious) offenses for those committed to the CDC, from a
preponderance of violent offenses in 1980 to nonviolent crimes in
1995. More to the point, the controlling offenses for more than
half of 1995’s commitments were nonviolent crimes of illness or
of illegal income producing activity: drug use, drug sales, burglary, motor vehicle theft.
The outcome of the first two years of California’s broadly
written “three strikes” law presents a similar picture: in the period March 1994–January 1996, 15 percent of controlling offenses were violent crimes, 31 percent were drug offenses, and 41
THE PRISON FIX 113
percent were crimes against property (n = 15,839) (Christoper
Davis et al. 1996).
The relative surplus population comes into focus in these
numbers. In 1996, 43 percent of third-strike prisoners were
Black, 32.4 percent Latino, and 24.6 percent Anglo. The deliberate intensification of surveillance and arrest in certain areas,
combined with novel crimes of status, drops the weight of these
numbers into particular places. The chair of the State Task Force
on Youth Gang Violence expressed the overlap between presumptions of violence and the exigencies of everyday reproduction when he wrote: “We are talking about well-organized,
drug-dealing, dangerously armed and profit-motivated young
hoodlums who are engaged in the vicious crimes of murder, rape,
robbery, extortion and kidnapping as a means of making a living”
(Philibosian 1986: ix; emphasis added). The correspondence between regions suffering deep economic restructuring, high rates
of unemployment and underemployment among men (cf. S. L.
Myers 1992), and intensive surveillance of youth by the state’s
criminal justice apparatus present the relative surplus population
as the problem for which prison became the state’s solution (see
also Males 1999).
INDUSTRIALIZING PUNISHMENT
As should be clear by now, surplus state capacity is not an absolute thing, but rather a quality that can emerge over time as a
result of the difference between what states can do technically and
what they can do politically. Technical capacity does not disappear even when certain practices lose legitimacy in the eyes of
voters, or capitalists, or other key interests. The idea here is not
that there are idle bureaucrats on “pause” waiting for someone to
114 THE PRISON FIX
hit “play,” but rather, more modestly, that power is not a thing
but rather a relationship based on actually existing activities.
Thus, the renovation of surplus state capacity, the putting into
motion of its potential power, is grounded in contradictory political economic conditions—conditions that are at once enabling
and constraining. The successful political promotion of fear of
crime as the key problem, and the ideological legitimacy of the
U.S. state as the institution responsible for defense at all levels, allowed California to act (cf. R. W. Gilmore 2002a). The state
could build prisons, but not just anywhere. The state could borrow money, but not always openly. The state could round up persons who correspond demographically to those squeezed out of
restructured labor markets, but not at the same rate everywhere.
After twenty years, $5 billion in capital outlays, and the accumulation of 161,394 prisoners (as of April 2004),26 the CDC has become the state’s largest department, with a budget exceeding 8
percent of the annual general fund—roughly equal to general
fund appropriations for postsecondary education.
The rapid growth of the CDC in the 1980s, aided by the cooperation of police, city councils, county supervisors, district attorneys, and legislators, prompted agency critiques that focused
not on justice but rather on efficiency. Was the CDC fulfilling its
mandate in the most cost-effective manner? The critiques did
not discuss whether crime was, indeed, the central social problem
for state action, nor did they refer to the post-1980 decline in
crime rates—even incorrectly to claim that prisons work. The
Legislative Analyst’s 1986 report “The New Prison Construction
Program at Midstream” proposed streamlining features of the
CDC’s design, bid, and build system in order to gain cost savings
and have new beds available when the projected shortfalls were
THE PRISON FIX 115
expected to occur. The report also criticized the department’s
planning and productivity, whose weaknesses, according to the
analyst, derived in part from variables associated with consulting, siting, and scheduling problems. The report revealed the dialectics of politics and economics that shaped the prison expansion program from the start. It characterized the department’s
productivity shortfall as the result of an insufficiently rationalized process and recommended that the legislature take charge
of moving the department into greater efficiency through “milestones” (or “speedup”) from concept through occupancy—in effect, by legislating efficiency (LAO 1986: see esp. 43–45).
The year 1990 saw a major turn in the political atmosphere:
voters approved a prison construction GOB in April but then
roundly defeated another prison GOB the following November.
In 1990 and 1991, reports prompted by the Legislative Analyst’s
1986 report suggested that the CDC could do a better job of forecasting the types of prisoners it would have in custody, and therefore do a better job budgeting for expanded capacity. As noted
earlier, the CDC has consistently forecast high growth in highestsecurity (Level IV) prisoners, and, according to both the Blue
Ribbon Commission on Prison Population Management (1990)
and Rudman and Berthelsen (reporting to the legislature in
1991), it consolidated the tendency to classify those in custody as
higher risks than they might actually be.27 Level IV beds are the
most expensive to build; and Level IV prisoners are the most expensive to maintain, because of low guard-prisoner ratios.
In 1991, California experienced what turned out to be a temporary decline in the number of arrests leading to felony convictions, but when James Gomez, who had assumed the CDC director’s mantle the year before, was asked by a reporter to
116 THE PRISON FIX
comment on the news, he expressed concern that a drop in actual
prisoners from forecast numbers might adversely affect the department’s construction program (Hurst 1991b). Growth and efficiency were the primary considerations in the view of this career bureaucrat, who had been hired by the department for his
experience managing large budgets and staffs and for his planning skills (SPWB 1985). The ideological and material processes
at work made Gomez’s shocking response on some level an expression of common sense.
Crime topped most polls as public anxiety number one in
1991—perhaps because of the sudden rise in violence following
the U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf (R. W. Gilmore 2002a;
Archer and Gartner 1984)—even though California was deep
into its worst recession since the Great Depression (Walker
1995). Indeed, the recession brought about a temporary decline in
arrests, because urban police forces under emergency budgetary
constraints decided not to pursue drug users and some other categories of arrestable people (Hurst 1991a, 1991b). The lull in arrests did not last, however, and law enforcement around the state
reintensified across-the-board surveillance and arrests in 1992,
prompted by the general crackdown following the Los Angeles
uprising in April of that year (Mike Davis 1993b, 1993c). The
CDC ratcheted up forecasts again, and the legislature approved
$985 million in LRBs, which were issued in 1993 (SPWB 1993a,
1993b, 1993c, 1993d). Consistently, from 1982 to 1996, the CDC
had six to ten new prisons in some stage of planning, design, or
construction, at an average cost per establishment of a quarterbillion dollars.
The size, cost, and complexity of CDC construction and operations prompted a new round of critical studies, published in
THE PRISON FIX 117
the spring of 1996. The California Department of Finance Performance Review cited the department for lax attention to budget lines and for outsourcing functions, such as medical care, that
could more efficiently, and cost-effectively, be internalized by the
department inside prison walls (CDF 1996). The CDC’s enormous operating budget is also a rather flexible one, and the department has been able to move costs among line items during a
fiscal year. Thus, funds designated for prisoners’ medical expenses can be used to pay guards’ overtime, when guards escort
prisoners to outside facilities for treatment. In the CDF report,
guards’ overtime constituted a general cause for concern, with
the department following U.S. big-firm industrial practice by requiring lots of overtime rather than expanding the size of
benefit-basis staff (CDF 1996; cf. Harrison 1994; David Gordon
1996; Henwood 1997). The CDF pointed out that straight-time
pay to permanent part-time guards (reserves) would be cheaper
than overtime pay to the average rank-and-file benefit-basis
guard (CDF 1996). The overtime issue focused both on the cost
of overtime and on the CDC’s failure adequately to plan for
staffing needs.28 The issue of planning was, for the CDF, a sign
that the CDC, the state’s agency of control, was itself out of control, and might require the kind of direct oversight by another
agency—such as the CDF—that it had been exempted from for
the previous fourteen years (CDF 1996; LAO 1986; cf. Gregory
Hooks 1991).
The second critical study published in 1996, commissioned by
the University of California, brings into sharper focus the intrastate competition that the CDC’s growth had produced (Ashley and Ramey 1996). The report demonstrates how rival agencies tried, via critique, to situate themselves at the CDC’s trough.
118 THE PRISON FIX
David Ashley and Melvin Ramey, professors of civil and environmental engineering from UC Berkeley and UC Davis, respectively, took on the question of capital cost reduction. As with
the earlier studies, the central problem remained crime and its
mitigation through imprisonment, and the solution turned on
cost-effectiveness in the design-bid-build sequence for prison
construction—rather than any reevaluation of, for example, the
relation between crimes (old or new), education, and recidivism
(Ashley and Ramey 1996; cf. Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). The
unspoken power of this study lies in the way the university presents itself, via its sober, analytical engineering faculty, as an eminently efficient institution. Certainly, the university had been
struggling to transform its image from that of a product of Progressive Era–through–Cold War social welfare activism to that
of a competitive knowledge factory increasingly responsive to
market forces (R. W. Gilmore 1991).29 To that end, in 1995 the
Regents of the University of California formally shed affirmative
action over the objections of faculty, staff, students, and senior
administration at the university’s nine campuses, because, in the
race-neutral language of racism, affirmative action is an inefficient (nonmarket) mode of resource allocation. The pitched
competition between the CDC and all others dependent on the
general fund seems to have prompted the university to criticize
the CDC in such a way that the university itself would become a
necessary player in the CDC project as a supplier of efficiency expertise, while freeing up funds for other productive state activities.
Community colleges approached cooperation more straightforwardly than did the elite University of California. The num-
THE PRISON FIX 119
ber of applicants for prison guard jobs was consistently high during the 1980s and 1990s, with as many as 200 competing for each
apprentice slot. To tighten the pool, and to enhance the professional specialization associated with being a guard, the CCPOA,
in conjunction with the CDC, determined that new recruits
after July 1, 1995, should be minimally armed with an approved
A.S. degree in correctional science before reporting for basic
training at the department’s Richard McGee Training Facility.
Community colleges throughout the state in the immediate labor
market of new prisons, such as West Hills College in Coalinga,
instituted A.S. degree programs with the explicit aim of both
preparing new applicants for apprentice appointments and educating current guards, who become eligible for raises and promotions after completing the program (West Hills Community
College District 1996). The colleges hoped that in addition to enhancing enrollments, the program would give local residents a
better chance of filling one of the state’s best working-class career
slots. They also provided basic orientation for all new guards and
some training for reserves (permanent part-time officers); for all
enrollments, they charged the state general fund according to average daily attendance (ADA), as they would do with any other
academic program (West Hills Community College District
1996; LAO 1996).30
The new degree requirement for guards, with a prescribed
curriculum, illustrates one tendency of the state’s burgeoning
punishment system to both specialize and centralize staff and
functions (cf. Chandler 1990). Professional expertise and technical specialization in the governmental sector is not new, having
evolved over several generations from the Progressives’ move-
120 THE PRISON FIX
ment to make the state at once immune to corruption and more
active in people’s everyday lives (see, for examples, G. E. Gilmore
1996; Linda Gordon 1994; Hooks 1991), and from capital’s need
to spread out the costs of developing productive infrastructure
and controlling labor to as many pockets and balance sheets as
possible (O’Connor 1973; Piven and Cloward 1971; Woods 1998).
We have seen that the legislature established permanent committees to review the proliferating crime bills. In addition, after
1993, the legislature slowly moved toward rationalizing and unifying the state’s trial court system, with the goal of making the jurisdictions more uniform, efficient, and cost-effective (LAO
1993, 1996).
In the manner of a modern industrial enterprise (Chandler
1990), the CDC further embraced the move toward centralization and functional specialization by establishing an internal finance capital department headed by Tom Dumphy, the underwriter who helped devised the LRB solution to the politics of
debt issuance. Dumphy’s appointment responded to allegations
of inefficiency by having an expert on staff who could guide the
structure and sale of either LRBs or GOBs and enable the CDC
to issue competitive rather than negotiated bonds. The move
came at a time when the difference between negotiated and
competitive bond costs, while still measurable, had dropped (Simonsen and Robbins 1996). However, the key argument for setting up the office was the CDC’s forecasting, which continued to
project severe shortfalls in prison capacity a decade into the
twenty-first century (CDC 1996; LAO 1996). The “midstream”
in the title of the Legislative Analyst’s 1986 report seems to have
been a moving metaphor, with the CDC never more than
halfway to completion of its project.31
THE PRISON FIX 121
PIGS GET FATTENED, BUT HOGS GET SLAUGHTERED
In the summer of 1996, rival power blocs staged a showdown in
Sacramento. On one side were Governor Pete Wilson, James
Gomez, director of the California Department of Corrections
(CDC), and Don Novey, president of the California Correctional
Peace Officers’ Association (CCPOA), who sought to issue $1.6
billion dollars in lease-revenue bonds to build six new prisons.
The other bloc, led by the powerful Democratic State Senators
Bill Lockyer (Hayward) and Dan Boatwright (Contra Costa),
had rejected the CDC’s request, approved by the governor and
promoted by the CCPOA.
On the heels of the deeply critical performance reviews by the
CDF and the University of California, the Los Angeles Times
published an exposé about the extraordinary number of prisoners shot dead by guards in Corcoran, one of the state’s two new
supermax facilities. Such sudden, intense, and unfavorable
scrutiny puzzled the CDC director. For most of the prior fifteen
years, the CDC had been California’s fastest-growing department, with an operating budget that had grown to nearly 10 percent of the state’s general fund. The CDC prison construction
project was, according to a number of analysts, the largest in the
world. Strategists envisioned packaging the design, engineering,
and contracting successes that emerged from the experience of
building nearly two dozen new small-city–sized complexes, and
selling the Golden State prison plan to the rest of the United
States and abroad.
Director Gomez asked his political boss, Senator Boatwright,
then JLCPCO chair, what the department could possibly be
doing wrong suddenly to attract so much negative attention—
after so many years as the state’s darling agency. According to an
122 THE PRISON FIX
eyewitness, the senator replied in his dry, Arkansas-bred drawl,
“Aw Jim! Don’t you know? Pigs get fattened, but hogs get
slaughtered!” (R. Bernard Orozco, interview, 1996).
But was it yet a fully grown hog? Surpluses that accumulated
in California, combined with the state’s need to legitimate itself
in the face of profound fiscally expressed voter disapproval, enabled the CDC to expand into the state government’s largest department. As in the rest of the United States, crime became
firmly established as a permanent problem, for which the solution is the continued proliferation of laws, courts, judges, bailiffs,
law enforcement personnel, technologies of surveillance, helicopters, and other means of domestic warfare, including, of
course, prisons. And yet, as Dan Boatwright pointed out to the
dispirited James Gomez, something that got as big as the CDC
would sooner or later come up against a limit to growth. Why?
At least theoretically, because the variably assessed returns on investment—in legitimacy, in safety, in securing the Central Valley voters or local economies, or big-rancher contributions—
would dwindle to a margin no longer worth the costs.
The combatants who lined up on opposing sides in Sacramento represented several perspectives on the future of the CDC
hog. Some thought it should reproduce smaller versions of itself
at lower levels around the state. Others thought it should be sold
while the market for hogs was good. And still others thought it
should just grow as big as it might. How to decide? Those who
favored putting the GOB on the ballot wanted the voters to tell
them what to do. The opponents of that plan insisted that the
voters had spoken again and again and unequivocally empowered the state to determine the correct path.
Bill Lockyer and Dan Boatwright were determined to test the
THE PRISON FIX 123
CDC’s (and their own) legitimacy by putting the first prison
GOB in six years on the November 1996 ballot. Don Novey and
his union, the CCPOA, aligned with Governor Pete Wilson,
were afraid that if the voters said no, the prison expansion program would be hamstrung, because few legislators would be
brave enough to pass an LRB immediately after a negative referendum on prison debt. Wilson decided not to fight Lockyer
and Boatwright, Gomez started to look for a new job, and the
CCPOA, one of the state’s largest political donors, circulated a
400-page report on the most efficient way to build and staff new
facilities, endorsed by testimonials from CCPOA-funded victims’ associations, the National Rifle Association, and other such
experts around the nation.32
Lockyer formed a bipartisan, bicameral Prison Reform Conference Committee to figure out how Sacramento could free itself from across-the-board primary responsibility for punishment (PRCC 1996). In the scenario that Lockyer proposed,
“reform” meant both rationalizing and extending the system further, filling in the gaps between the homes and streets where prisoners come from, and the state cages where they serve time, with
an assortment of community and county-based surveillance, custody, punishment, and treatment structures and programs
(PRCC 1996). The vertical integration envisioned in the reform
plan returned the responsibility for dealing with certain types of
convictions, such as drugs, routinely committed as felons to the
CDC, back to local law enforcement, promising that Sacramento
would foot the bill, at least at the outset.33 The CDC’s average
daily cost of keeping a prisoner in the system has hovered around
$59; Lockyer intended to give that amount to local and county jurisdictions that come up with plans for dealing with people who
124 THE PRISON FIX
might be supervised outside CDC facilities. There was an incentive; successful jurisdictions would not need to spend the full $59
per prisoner retained. Thus, if a prisoner were sentenced to a
program of drug testing and day reporting, at a daily cost of $12
for staff, equipment, and facilities, the jurisdiction could keep the
balance and use it for whatever law enforcement needs it might
have (PRCC 1996).34
While the Lockyer plan seemed to promise an end to the endless expansion of prison cells, it still depended on forecasts of
ever-growing numbers of criminals eligible for the lockup. The
plan also called for construction of two more state facilities (E. G.
Hill 1996, in PRCC 1996). The plan also recapitulated, at the
state level, the ways and means that federal programs, from welfare to crime control, are being pushed down the political scale
with near-term funds attached. In the case of crime, legal, fiscal,
and programmatic linkages form an unbroken criminalization
armature across every conceivable landscape of the future. In
other words, surplus and crisis reemerged, at this conjuncture, in
the form of too many prisoners on the one hand—products of the
earlier surpluses—and on the other, a changing sense of the
CDC’s ongoing legitimation to expand, rather than simply refine, technologies of incarceration.
For Dan Boatwright, who “termed out” of the Senate at the
end of 1996, and other fiscal conservatives in the legislature, privatization was the proper route to take. In April 1996, the Senate held hearings on SB 2156, a bill to establish a “Correctional
Facilities Privatization Commission” to sell bonds to build private prisons, and to lease private space for prisoners (SB 2156,
April 16, 1996). Those in attendance to support privatization included representatives from the United States’ largest prison op-
THE PRISON FIX 125
erators in the private sector: Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America, both of which hired former state employees to lobby Sacramento (Morain 1994c). When the bill got to the
Senate floor later in the spring, it failed to pass, because, according to one observer, the “Republicans did not line up”—perhaps
because the CCPOA had registered its unalterable opposition to
privatization.35 The CCPOA feared, rightly, that if the private
sector were brought in, the new guards would be low-wage,
nonunion workers, as is the case throughout the private security
industry (Greene 2001; cf. Christie 1993).
The guards published their own plan, titled Meeting the Challenge of Affordable Prisons: A Plan to Reduce the Cost of Building
and Operating California Prisons to Ensure Incarceration of Violent
and Habitual Offenders without Bankrupting Taxpayers (CCPOA
n.d. [1996]). The report’s long title managed to condense, onto a
bright red cover, all the key words in mainstream prison debate.
The CCPOA’s plan was to build “megaprisons”36 that would
each hold 20,000 people—up from the 2,500–6,000. The
megaprisons would be built where there were already prisons—
in places such as Delano and Corcoran—creating intensive districts (of which there are already several, although none so big as
those proposed). Prisoners would do much of the building, thus
saving labor costs. And, finally, the state would continue to fund
prisons using LRBs, in the name of fiscal efficiency (CCPOA n.d.
[1996]).
CONCLUSION
California began to come apart during the world recession of
1973–75. After a false boom in the late 1970s, fueled by federal
outlays that created jobs in both the military and aerospace in-
126 THE PRISON FIX
dustries and at the community level, California entered a new
phase of political and economic restructuring in the early 1980s,
during which time the bifurcation between rich and poor deepened and widened. While profits rose, capital’s need for new infusions of investment dollars was increasingly met out of retained earnings. Deep reductions in well-waged urban jobs that
had employed modestly educated men of color—especially
African Americans and Chicanos—overlapped with changes in
rural industrial processes and a long drought. These forces produced surpluses of capital, labor, and land, which the state, suffering a prolonged period of delegitimation, manifested in the
taxpayers’ revolts, could not put back to work under its declining military Keynesian aegis (cf. Hall and Schwarz 1988). However, by renovating and making “critical already-existing activities” (Gramsci 1971: 330–31), power blocs in Sacramento and
elsewhere throughout California did recombine these surpluses—and mixed them with the state’s aggressive capacity to
act—by embarking on the biggest prison construction program
in the history of the world.
What has happened to each component, each surplus in this
story? Have their crises been resolved? Finance capitalists
achieved what they were after by issuing $5 billion in bonds for
new prison construction, with more issues in the wings; while
they did not make any more money than if they had raised the
funds by precisely the same means to build schools or parks or
anything else, state capacity to issue debt was circumscribed by
defensible categories as (and through which) the role of government changed. Landowners concentrated in the agricultural
counties have divested themselves of surplus acreage and
brought in the state as local employer and local government sub-
THE PRISON FIX 127
sidizer. Labor remained divided, by race, region, and income—
while “taxpayers,” who themselves are mostly working people,
used polling booth power inconsistently—sometimes but not always against “stranded communities” (Jacqueline Jones 1992) of
under- and unemployed people of color and white people who
have the highest risk of spending time in prison. Voter vagaries
suggest that even politician- and media-fueled fear embodies
contradictions, especially as prison and felony expansion touch
more and more households that once might have believed themselves immune. Did the new power blocs achieve total, unquestioned legitimacy?37 The answer is embedded in the kinds of
practices this operationalization of state capacity have produced.
The JLCPCO was disbanded in November 2003. Yet there is no
end in sight for the elaborate, expensive, and constantly multiplied apparatuses of coercion and control developed in harmony
with, and sometimes by the makers of, the weapons of destruction produced for hot and cold warfare throughout the twentieth century (cf. Bartov 1996; Guérin 1994).38
128
FOUR
CRIME, CROPLANDS, AND CAPITALISM
O
n Thursday, June 6, 1985, the Corcoran Journal (Kings
County) ran a picture on page 4 of César Chavez and a
local union organizer, César Arviszu, speaking to an attentive group of people, whose burnished faces, well-worn
visored caps, and deep squint lines around the eyes indicated they worked outdoors in the sun. The caption identified
“union organizers” and “Salyer employees” but did not mention
Chavez by name. The United Farm Workers (UFW) was trying
to organize field hands whose hourly pay had been cut from
$6.35 to $4.75. The state’s second-largest cotton grower with
77,000 acres in production, Salyer had recently defaulted on a
loan from the Bank of America. To reduce operating costs, the
family-owned firm dropped workers from direct employment,
offering to rehire them immediately via contractors who would
pay the lower rate.
In the same edition of the weekly newspaper, an enthusiastic
front-page story reported that the Kings County Board of Su-
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 129
pervisors had voted unanimously to ask the California Department of Corrections (CDC) to site a prison near Corcoran in
order to aid the town’s flagging economy. The crowd photographed at the supervisors’ meeting—including, no doubt,
some of the farmworkers who had met with Chavez and
Arvisu—looked as attentive and grim as those considering the
benefits and risks of voting to unionize. A few weeks later, Jim
Hansen, scion of one of Corcoran’s cotton oligarchs, drew an explicit connection between the two events during his speech at the
town’s annual Fourth of July picnic. “The community isn’t the
same as it was 15 or 20 years ago. . . . Agricultural mechanization
is not going to stop; the farm economy is as bad as I’ve ever seen
it. Corcoran needs another anchor as far as industry [is concerned]” (Corcoran Journal, July 4, 1985, 1).
As we have seen, the series of crises delineated in chapter 2
separated urban and rural communities from their industrial,
cultural, and political moorings and produced surpluses of land,
labor, finance capital, and state capacity. Chapter 3 showed in
general ways how power blocs partially resolved these crises of
surplus through prison expansion. Thirteen new prisons (plus
five old facilities) light the night sky along the Central Valley’s
“prison alley”—a 375-mile stretch from Tehachapi to Folsom.
The towns where the new prisons are located sought publicly
capitalized development projects to “fix” the trends relentlessly
surplusing significant segments of labor and land.
Corcoran, located in the depths of the alley, is typical of the
new prison towns. Long dominated by a few firms in a single industrial sector, the town is majority Latino, unemployment and
poverty are two to five times the statewide averages, and the land
converted to prison use was formerly irrigated cropland.
130 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
Why did particular kinds of places embrace the prison fix?
How does a peculiar new outlay of state expenditure refigure the
landscape? Both questions can best be approached for any locality by looking closely at already existing political and social—as
well as economic—geographies, which I shall do by examining
Corcoran’s history and transition in great detail. Then, after
looking at how unsatisfactorily prison-siting literature engages
locational conflict, I shall take up the strand of opposition—quite
slender in Corcoran—and follow it to other valley places where
different ways of thinking have emerged in the context of crime,
croplands, and capitalism.
Two prisons have been sited in Corcoran since 1985. The first
opened in February 1988, and the second received its first prisoners in the summer of 1997. Corcoran is one of four incorporated cities in Kings County (pop. 116,300). For more than forty
years, Kings has ranked with Madera, Kern, Tulare, and Fresno
among the six wealthiest agricultural counties in the United
States, as measured by capital investment and value of product
(Reisner 1986: 354). In the past quarter century, it has also consistently ranked near or at the bottom among the state’s fiftyeight counties in per capita income (CDF-CEI 1995). J. G.
Boswell Company, the world’s largest cotton producer, has its
California headquarters in Corcoran (pop. 8,800), where the California Department of Correction (CDC) facilities held more
than 12,600 in April 2000.
If, in order to understand the prison fix, we must develop
complex understandings of how prisoners became so massively
available as carceral objects, we must likewise figure out how the
ground the prisons stand on becomes available for such a purpose. In both contexts, changing relations of power and belong-
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 131
ingness, mixed with uneven capacities for mobility (another way
to think about political economy in an everyday way) set the stage
for ordinary working people to accept extraordinary measures in
hope of securing livelihoods. What is the history that produced
such a mismatch in wealth in Kings County? What were the
local manifestations of statewide restructurings? Why did the
city seek a prison as the solution? Who benefited? What were the
unforeseen consequences of the prison construction project?
How has the coming of the prison affected Corcoran as a place?
What else might have happened?
GROWTH
No matter how familiar one may be with “rural” California, it is always rather
surprising to note the manners and appearance of the gentry who step forward
to speak in the name of “the farmers” at Legislative hearings in Sacramento.
The California “farm industrialist” . . . wears a neat Stetson, travels in an airplane, and has the breezy manners and the swagger of a Texas cattle king.
CAREY MCWILLIAMS, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: AN ISLAND ON THE LAND (1946)
The history of Kings County cotton features rapid centralization
and concentration in an industry that began to expand throughout the southern San Joaquin Valley shortly after World War I.
The boll weevil’s long devastation of the traditional cotton belt
across the U.S. South (Marks 1989) presented an opportunity for
western growers to seize a share of an enormous transnational
market, provided they could match California’s capacities to the
requirements of the crop (Daniel 1981; Pisani 1984; Weber 1994).
The firms that achieved dominance, and absorbed their competitors, were the first in the cotton industry to develop the attributes of the modern industrial enterprise (cf. Chandler 1990).
Large firms’ access to capital enabled them to install the large-
132 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
scale irrigation systems necessary for mass production of the
water-intensive crop; the resultant economies of scale, enhanced
by labor-saving machines such as tractors (Weber 1994), lowered
unit costs, while keeping competitors out with high entry costs
(Pisani 1984; Reisner 1986; Gottlieb 1988; Hundley 1992). They
also successfully coordinated California cotton into a highly standardized crop; the uniform use of Alcala seeds removed some of
the uncertainty from agricultural production, enabling producers and dealers to promise customers the same type and quality
of cotton year after year (Weber 1994). And vertical integration
of functions and operating units, overseen by professional managers, allowed producers to control supplies, financing, processing, sales, marketing, and distribution of the product to national
and international markets (Pisani 1984; Weber 1994).
The region’s extensive agricultural workforce was key to the
industry’s growth: although cotton production shifted steadily
toward machines, in the years the crop came to dominate Kings
County, it was both capital- and labor-intensive (Daniel 1981;
McWilliams 1946; Mitchell 1996).1 In the nineteenth century, the
thousands of Chinese and other workers who had mined gold
and built railroads and infrastructure, Mexicans dispossessed by
U.S. colonials, and Anglo homesteaders ruined by the high cost
of acquiring water or moving products from farm to market by
railroad, formed the nucleus of the region’s agricultural proletariat. These workers were, in turn, augmented by twentiethcentury long-distance migrants of all ethnicities (Daniel 1981).
Four families gained control of the Tulare Lake Basin productive landscape by the end of World War I (Preston 1981;
Weber 1994; Mitchell 1996). The Boswell, Salyer, Hansen, and
Guiberson clans achieved the transformation “from family farm
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 133
to agribusiness” (Pisani 1984) by mixing private capital with social and political power. State intervention was crucial to guarantee the basin’s geography of accumulation. Indeed, under federal, state, and railroad land ownership schemes and public and
private irrigation projects, the geography into which they introduced cotton had already been extensively reworked by rural
wage laborers into a region increasingly characterized by extensive holdings (Preston 1981; Mitchell 1996). The Jeffersonian
ideal of white family farmers tending small, general-production
farms, struggled against, but lost out to, the parallel development
of large capitalist farms producing commodity crops (Preston
1981; Daniel 1981; Pisani 1984).
Boswell emerged as the most powerful of the cotton capitalists (Arax and Wartzman 2003). The firm’s founder, Colonel
J. G. Boswell, was a cotton merchant descended from a Georgia
plantation family that had become rich in the slave economy. He
worked in Arizona and Los Angeles cotton trading centers before settling in Corcoran in 1924, where he bought a 400-acre
ranch, at a time when 90 percent of San Joaquin Valley farms
were smaller than 160 acres (Weber 1994; Hundley 1992). The
company expanded, integrating backward from distribution into
ginning and financing, as well as growing (Weber 1994). Well
capitalized from the start, Boswell acquired thousands of acres
during the 1920s and 1930s through purchases, mergers, and tax
sales, as well as by taking title to lands securing defaulted loans;
by 1940, the company was the biggest business in the county.
Thenceforward, the family was the dominant political and philanthropic force in Corcoran, while the company became a powerful agribusiness on a national scale (Gottlieb 1988; Weber 1994;
Arax and Wartzman 2003).
134 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
By 1933, 45 percent of cotton crops were financed by the ginners, who themselves had direct access to bank-based capital.
Financier-ginners exerted direct control over small growers: the
annual loan fixed the price of the product and guaranteed business for the gins (Weber 1994). Under these debt relations,
smaller growers could not compete, and many were “proletarianized” on their own land—when they did not lose it altogether—growing cotton for a preset price, not unlike a wage
(Weber 1994; cf. Watts 1994b). Other small producers lost their
land via tax defaults when their profits were too meager to satisfy both financiers and tax assessors (Weber 1994; Goldman
1991).2
In 1925, the big cotton interests were able to squeeze out
smaller competitors and other crops by skillfully exploiting the
state’s regulatory capacities. Kings County ginners, merchants,
and large growers, along with their counterparts in Kern and
Fresno Counties, the utility companies, and dominant valley
lender, the Bank of Italy,3 persuaded the California legislature to
pass the “one variety law” making Alcala cotton the Central Valley’s only legally cultivable strain (Weber 1994). Alcala had been
developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for use in
World War I matériel—tires and airplane wings. Those who
promoted the single-variety rule praised Alcala for its long,
strong staple, which made ginning and milling it easy. Processors
could be assured of a product that would not gum up their
works, and with standardization, they would not have to rejig
the machinery for each grower’s load. With input costs set by the
ginners’ financing mechanism, and speedy processing set by the
one-variety law, the larger industrialized cotton firms could as-
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 135
sure their customers of more reliable prices and delivery than
could any smaller growers (Weber 1994; Bean 1973; cf. Chandler
1990).
As California cotton became an enormous, concentrated, and
centralized commodity crop, it became more vulnerable to labor
and other market fluctuations, and also to labor militancy
(Daniel 1981; Weber 1994). Growers organized privately, as well
as through the state’s coercive and infrastructural capacities, to
push the agricultural proletariat into and out of fields on schedule (Mitchell 1996; Weber 1994; Bulosan 1983; McWilliams
[1939] 1969), and to take hiring and wages out of competition
(Weber 1994).4 To supplement the material powers of state and
capital, governmental activists—such as California’s Progressives (Mitchell 1996)—and agricultural industrialists employed
the ideological capacity of white supremacy to justify the degradations of farmworker life and to produce or reinforce divisions
between and among Mexican, Chinese, Filipino, Anglo, African,
and Japanese workers (Bulosan 1973; Gregory 1989; Almaguer
1994; Weber 1994; Mitchell 1996; cf. Saxton 1971). Some workers, particularly dispossessed dustbowl Anglos (“Okies”), promoted these divisions to advance their own belongingness as enfranchised white Americans (Gregory 1989; Morgan 1992). But
there were others who had participated in radical, nonagricultural industrial politics, not only in the United States
(McWilliams [1939] 1969; Weber 1994) but in U.S. colonies such
as the Philippines (Bulosan 1983) and in the ongoing struggles of
revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico, who formed alliances in the Central Valley fields (Weber 1994).
In Kings County, Mexican, Anglo, and African workers allied
136 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
to fight deadly battles for adequate wages, for decent temporary
living conditions, and for the right to establish permanent residence in the area (Weber 1994; Mitchell 1996). Strikes shut down
harvests in 1933 and again in 1938–39. In the early years of the
New Deal, California agricultural labor activism and its brutal
suppression by county, state, and farmer vigilante forces
(McWilliams [1939] 1969) provoked some movement toward extending the Wagner Act to farmworkers, and the conditions at
Corcoran provided an occasion for congressional investigation
(Weber 1994; see also Mitchell 1996). However, the investigation
produced no statutory changes, in part because the New Deal
had already excluded agricultural labor from the right to organize. The federal failure to sanction suppression in effect
strengthened the industrialists’ position (Weber 1994). The outcome in cotton’s favor resulted in part from how the overarching
New Deal labor compromise had operationalized reformist politics by renovating structures of the racial state: the division of the
rights to organize and bargain between agricultural and nonagricultural workers was also a normative (although by no
means absolute) division of rights between workers of color and
white workers (Jacqueline Jones 1992; Linda Gordon 1994).
World War II drew most of the Anglo farmworkers from the
fields into wartime industries or uniforms (Gregory 1989; Morgan 1992). To replace them, California’s farmers persuaded the
federal government to institute the bracero program (1942–65)
supplying contract Mexican “guest workers,” which undermined the last major California organizing effort in the 1940s
and kept agricultural labor on its knees for nearly two decades
(Calavita 1992).
As Boswell, Salyer, and other major cotton growers expanded
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 137
production in the 1940s, they needed to secure abundant water in
the relatively dry valley. Nineteenth-century California growers
had tried to enter the undersupplied cotton market during the
Civil War, but failed to bring more than 2,000 acres into production because of inadequate irrigation (Caughey 1940). The Tulare Lake Basin of the southern San Joaquin Valley overlies a
deep fossil aquifer derived from glacial meltwater and rain, with
a mean annual precipitation of about ten inches, ranging from
four to nineteen inches (Preston 1981). All that means is that the
water table needs surface water from rivers and canals to supplement—and perhaps in the long run replace—the subterranean supply (Reisner 1986; El-Ashry and Gibbons 1988;
Howitt and Moore 1988).5
Prior to cotton’s ascendancy, the 1902 Federal Water Reclamation Act changed the scale and cost of water production by developing “surplus” (i.e., not yet domestically or commercially exploited) water for farmers throughout the arid West (Reisner
1986; Hundley 1992). Water districts seeking cheap development dollars cropped up everywhere (Pisani 1984). Early on, the
act’s acreage limitation (160 per farmer, or 320 per farming couple)6 for purchasers of subsidized developed water drove down
the average farm size (Pisani 1984; Hundley 1992), but it crept
back up again as politically astute capitalist growers—including
Boswell and Salyer—disguised their illegal holdings within contractual blinds such as “land lease out lease back agreements”
(Reisner 1986) and “farm management arrangements” (Gottlieb
1988; see also Pisani 1984; Hundley 1992).7
At the beginning of World War II, in order to supplement the
water developed by the 1935 Bureau of Reclamation Central Valley Project (Reisner 1986), Boswell and Salyer exploited federal
138 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
interagency strife between the Departments of the Interior and
War to get what they wanted. While Interior, responsible for administering the Reclamation Act, continued to press for acreage
limitations—whether or not they were complied with—War, responsible for the Army Corps of Engineers (“the Corps”), was
looking for large-scale projects to raise its profile and legitimacy
on the domestic front (Reisner 1986; Hundley 1992; Arax and
Wartzman 2003).
Boswell and Salyer and their Kern County counterparts,
Miller-Lux and the Kern Land Company, persuaded the Corps
that the Kings and Kern Rivers (which drained, respectively, into
the Tulare and Buena Vista Lakes) were flood hazards that
threatened the economic well-being of southern San Joaquin
Valley agriculture. According to spheres of influence established
by the 1902 Federal Reclamation Act, surplus water constituted
a national public good, and any federal project to dam and divert
water in the western United States came under the aegis, and
acreage limitations, of the Bureau of Reclamation (Hundley
1992).8 However, the Corps agreed to handle the “problem,” and
without prior authorization from the Roosevelt administration
or Congress, built the initial diversion gates in 1942 (Reisner
1986).
Armed with evidence showing no flood danger, and a study
showing the culturally depressive effects of large capitalist farmers on small towns, the bureau was prepared to fight the Corps,
believing it could activate East-West animosity in Congress in
support of its position. But in wartime Washington, the bureau
could not summon much interest in a domestic problem, against
the War Department, or against productive capitalists (Hundley
1992; cf. Hooks 1991). The Corps, in turn, backed by Senator
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 139
Sheridan Downey (D–Calif.), accused the bureau of communism
for fighting against big capital on behalf of small family farmers
(Reisner 1986; Hundley 1992; see also Downey 1947). The controversy did not stall Boswell and Salyer’s growth; since they already owned the lake, its drainage gifted them 80,000 fecund
acres. The political struggle over the water was finally resolved
when they paid $14,250,000 as a “one-time user fee” for Pine Flat
Dam, built by the Corps at a cost of $48 million in 1948. The payment entitled them to all the water, because it was not surplus developed for irrigation but rather a by-product of flood control
(Preston 1981; Reisner 1986; Hundley 1992).9
In the 1960s, the California State Water Project, conceived
and built during the administration of Governor Edmund G.
“Pat” Brown, was designed to guarantee adequate water for the
rapidly growing Southland well into the twenty-first century
(Hundley 1992; Howitt and Moore 1988; Reisner 1986). However, since the California Aqueduct carried more water than Los
Angeles Metropolitan Water District (Met) customers could use
in the short run, valley growers persuaded the Met to sell them
the surplus for the energy cost of delivery (Reisner 1986; Gottlieb
1988). Eligible purchasers were limited to those whose lands
overlaid the San Joaquin aquifer, so that, in the long run, once
Met customers required all the water, farmers could revert to
well water and therefore not lose the capital they had sunk in
their lands (Gottlieb 1988; Reisner 1986). As part of the agreement, the Met charged Southland customers the difference between the growers’ cost ($4.50–$7.00 per acre foot) and the cost
of production ($35 per acre foot) via a property assessment
charged on top of monthly water bills.10 In the Westlands Water
District, encompassing Kings County, corporate growers bene-
140 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
fiting from the lower cost included agricultural establishments of
the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Standard, Bellridge, Tidewater, and Richfield Oil Companies, and the J. G. Boswell Company (Preston 1981; Reisner 1986; Hundley 1992).
Boswell and other Corcoran-based cotton producers used the
state’s capacities at the federal, California, and regional levels to
transform their family firms into modern industrial enterprises.
They exploited state power and social connections to standardize product and to move surface water and workers into their
fields. They used interagency rivalries and patriotic rhetoric to
gain position and renovated race ideology to secure what they
had created. To the greatest extent possible, they externalized
substantial costs to the state, to ratepayers in other regions, and
to workers in order to guarantee the geography of accumulation
for their “white gold” (Weber 1994; see also Arax and Wartzman
2003).
Workers in turn fought back, but their real gains as agricultural laborers in the cotton industry were difficult to sustain. The
end of the bracero program (1965) coincided with the rise of the
United Farm Workers, which, in spite of agriculture’s specific
exclusion from New Deal legislation, began to organize in ways
reserved by law for nonagricultural industrial workers (Edid
1994; Pulido 1995). In its early years, the UFW targeted laborintensive crops such as grapes and lettuce. Cotton was a much
more difficult crop to organize in the mid 1960s than it had been
in the prewar period, because the level of mechanization inaugurated in 1942 by the International Harvester reaper (table 6)
had undermined labor’s ability to shut down cotton fields at harvest time.
Some Mexicano/Chicano and African American workers
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 141
TABLE 6 MECHANIZATION OF COTTON PRODUCTION,
1940–1980
Number of Labor Hours to Produce
Year One Bale of Cotton
1940 423
1960 26
1980 8
source: Preston 1981.
who had migrated to the Central Valley during the depression
settled in Corcoran during World War II (Weber 1994). Displaced by machines, and disorganized by the Bracero program,
they were increasingly dispossessed as workers. But at the same
time, their local residence established potential ground for future
political struggles—at least in the realm of formal representation—as Mexicanos/Chicanos became Corcoran’s numerical majority by the end of the golden age.
CRISIS: DEBT, DISASTERS, AND RESTRUCTURING
Sixty months of drought, commencing in 1973, culminated in
California’s third driest (1976) and driest (1977) years on record.
The drought forced improvements in groundwater pumping
and surface irrigation systems. Growers who could afford the
capital outlays both upgraded existing fields and, hoping to eke
out additional return from investment dollars, extended irrigation infrastructure to previously unimproved acres (Sokolow
and Spezia 1992; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Census of
Agriculture 1992). Experts warned, however, that expanded ir-
142 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
rigation would lead to excessive use of groundwater (already in
evidence during the drought), and eventually require some land
to be permanently removed from production (Howitt and Moore
1988, 1992; El-Ashry and Gibbons 1988).
Salyer had become financially overextended in its bid to keep
up with other corporate growers, particularly Boswell, in production intensity and efficiency. The company’s investment timing was wrong; it had sunk borrowed capital into equipment and
irrigation improvements right before a series of devastating El
Niño winters (1978–79; 1979–80; 1982–83) when torrential rains
delayed plantings, reduced usable acreage, and flooded crops
(Reisner 1986).11 The combined costs of dry years, flood years,
and bigger and better John Deere harvesters pushed Salyer into
default.
Boswell prospered through ten years of crazy weather, but
drought-idled acres caused the firm to take action against future
water shortages that would undermine the productivity of its
206,000-acre empire. In 1982, Boswell and Salyer formed a
strategic political alliance, spending more than $1 million to defeat the Peripheral Canal—a California ballot initiative seeking
voter approval for bonds to develop more water for the Southland. They opposed the measure because it included a constitutional amendment, fought for by some environmentalists, to
shield all key Northern California rivers from future damming
or diversion (Reisner 1986; Gottlieb 1988; Hundley 1992).
While the Peripheral Canal’s defeat squelched the plan to protect the rivers, it also bespoke voters’ unwillingness to pay for
new water development projects. In the short run, then, Boswell
and Salyer could not use the victory to get more subsidized water
to the Tulare Lake Basin. At the same time, some water econo-
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 143
mists proposed that water scarcity would best be solved by a selfregulating water market, in which unsubsidized prices would
compel users to be more efficient in the selection of crops and irrigation techniques (Howitt and Moore 1988, 1994). The growers did not want that solution either. Growers voluntarily or involuntarily took acres out of production in the 1980s because of
problems with water supply, high debt, and, in some cases, federal payment-in-kind subsidies for not growing certain surplus
crops (Reisner 1986).
Table 7 shows the extent to which Kings County farming was
in the process of restructuring in the 1980s. Between 1982 and
1992 nearly 150,000 irrigated county acres came out of production. Salyer did not default alone; the valley’s dominant lender,
Bank of America, took title to thousands of collateral acres
throughout the Central Valley in the early 1980s (Gottlieb 1988).
At the same time, farms—especially those planted in cotton—
concentrated in ownership. The contradictory movement of
market value per acre (down) and productivity per acre (up)
shows the general decline in nonurban income from the use of the
land lamented by every county’s farm bureau (Walters
[1986]1992). The movement also suggests that the improvements
to the land made at great expense during the 1970s drought
(Sokolow and Spezia 1992) were successfully exploited via cultivation and harvest technologies—the constantly evolving mechanization Jim Hansen envisioned as the future of agribusiness.
The explanation is supported by the fact that while there was virtually no change in the number of regular, year-round farm jobs
in the county between 1973 (5,405) and 1983 (5,371), there was a
small but significant increase between 1983 and 1993 (5,617) (U.S.
Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns). These jobs in-
TABLE 7 OVERVIEW OF KINGS COUNTY AGRICULTURE, 1982–1992
1982 1987 1992
Agricultural acres 808,084 702,173 775,829
Average farm size (acres) 681 583 710
Market value of land and 2,059 1,794 1,694
improvements per farm*
Farms, by acreage
1–9 254 246 224
10–49 344 360 297
50–179 245 236 241
180–499 189 194 139
500–999 68 85 94
+1,000 87 83 97
Cropland farms 1,033 1,037 934
Cropland acres 613,693 566,245 519,526
Harvest crop farms 942 936 844
Harvest crop acres 567,425 441,602 431,212
Irrigated farms 1,011 997 865
Irrigated acres 554,114 476,037 409,507
Market value of agricul- 478,412 486,912 581,846
tural production ($000)*
Cotton farms 464 481 364
Cotton acres 275,310 234,104 235,509
Cotton bales 589,237 535,565 627,189
source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Census of Agriculture.
*Constant dollars: 1982 = 100.
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 145
clude managers, mechanics, and other skilled or professional positions that typically accompany increased investment in machinery (Bradshaw 1993; cf. Harrison 1994; David Gordon 1996).
The reconfiguration of Kings County agriculture indicates
that the 1980s were crisis years both for growers—such as
Salyer—and for workers—among whom seasonal farm labor
unemployment ran between 30 and 50 percent (Walker 1995).12
Cotton’s deep delaborization was not offset by opportunities in
other agricultural sectors; there was no increase in demand for
seasonal agricultural labor, as measured in weeks of work, between 1970 and 1985 (Goldman 1991). On top of a stagnant job
market, farm wages, averaging only 55 percent of California’s
nonfarm wages, had been flat since 1973 (Goldman 1991; Greenhouse 1997).
Unemployment and poverty did not provoke many people to
move away permanently.13 Rents were low, and those who had
managed to buy modest houses and lots could not hope to sell to
their equally poor neighbors. Corcoran residents continued their
annual long-distance migration through the California and Pacific
Northwest harvests. Some traveled even further afield, both to
other states (onions in Utah, sugar beets in South Dakota) and sectorally (house framing in San Bernardino County). And finally,
some workers followed still other patterns of labor-reserve circular migration, with younger people—single men, siblings, married couples—going to the Southland to work and sending remittances home to aging parents and children (cf. Ferguson 1990).
However, the fragility of these various reproductive strategies is
highlighted by the fact that in 1980, nearly 18 percent of Corcoran
households were receiving public assistance—as compared with
13.7 percent for Kings County as a whole (Hornor 1988).
146 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
The decline in Corcoran’s retail tax revenues through the late
1970s is another indicator of the town’s diminished capacity to
sustain itself. Prior to 1976, the ratio of the city’s per capita sales
tax to that of California as a whole—the “pull factor”—had been
greater than 1, demonstrating that Corcoran retailers served a
wider market than the average state town (Parks et al. 1990).
Downtown’s post-1976 defunct furniture, apparel, and other
consumer goods establishments demonstrated both the dearth of
items for sale in the city, and the lack of shoppers able to pay for
the range and quantities of goods local retailers had once offered.
Corcoran’s empty downtown and significant poverty also
translated into declining property values for homeowners. Those
who worked at somewhat secure jobs—whether or not in
agribusiness—were concerned that they, like their poorer neighbors, could not sell even if they wanted to. In 1982, newspaper
classified ads for houses like their own asked for 35 percent to 50
percent less than in 1978. On the evening news, by contrast, they
heard how home equities in the Southland and the Bay Area, and
to a lesser extent in Bakersfield and Fresno, were climbing in
tandem with phenomenally high inflation.
People who lived in Corcoran stayed not only because economic adversity left them stuck in space, but also because they
had struggled to make Corcoran their home, building a community that, while organized in a race and class hierarchy, was
also a place proud of its small-town ethic of care. Mexicano/Chicano and African American subcultures flourished in the interstices of the dominant paternalistic Anglo social structure. Some
marriage between Okies and Mexicanos weakened, but did not
break down, the division between the two groups, who had, uneasily, allied at the forefront of the 1938–39 labor strikes (Weber
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 147
1994; Gregory 1989).14 A single middle school and a single high
school educated all the children who did not drop out; indeed,
the most academically ambitious kids rarely transferred from
Corcoran High School, because of the chance to compete for one
of two full-tuition (price unlimited) four-year Boswell scholarships. And finally, nearly every adult in town who was not a
Boswell, Salyer, Guiberson, or Hansen had, at some time in her
life, if only for a summer, chopped Alcala cotton in the southern
San Joaquin sunshine.
The restructuring of Corcoran’s economy produced local surpluses. Debt and drought forced growers to idle land, while
drought and mechanization made workers redundant. The
city’s built environment reflected the economic shifts. The tax
base dwindled, pushed downward by derelict retail establishments as well as declining paychecks. Proposition 13 had already shrunken the taxable basis of real property. Capital lacked
local markets because growers such as Salyer had pushed borrowing to the limit in the previous decade, whereas Boswell,
continuing the march toward monopoly, had money in the bank
and could finance expansion without recourse to crippling debt
(Reisner 1986). The local state could not act to connect California’s then-abundant finance capital with local surpluses because,
in spite of its legal capacity to issue debt for public works, it
lacked the tax base to pay off such loans: better-off homeowners
were too wary, agricultural workers were too poor, and the
dominant cotton empires were too impervious. Alternative
medium-run development schemes—such as residential suburbanization—were not an option, because Corcoran lay outside
Central Valley growth paths, as evidenced by the lack of commercial or individual takers for low-priced homes, empty build-
148 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
ings, and unbuilt land. In the aggregate, Corcoran’s surpluses
added to the city’s crisis.
THE SEARCH FOR A PRISON FIX
As Corcoran’s chronic unemployment translated into child
poverty rates running above 30 percent, the challenge to secure
the future propelled townspeople to request state intervention in
the form of a multimillion dollar prison. In 1983, Corcoran
learned that Avenal (pop. 4,137), in the nonproducing Kettleman
Plains oilfields of western Kings County, had had a 3,000-bed
prison authorized by the state legislature. That May, the Corcoran City Council directed the city manager, George Lambert, to
ask County Supervisor Joe Hammond whether Sacramento
might be amenable to siting a prison in Corcoran as well.
While appointed and elected officials lobbied in pursuit of legislative authorization for a Corcoran prison, the city also entered
into dialogue with CDC Siting Office staff to gain a better sense
of the costs and benefits of a prison as an economic development
project. In the 1980s and 1990s, the CDC marketing professionals presented every new prison establishment as an open-ended
good. The spiral-bound, clear-plastic-covered proposal they sent
out to inquiring townsfolk was not a slick, flashy publication;
rather, the photocopied document was simply written and neatly
illustrated with maps, plans, and timelines. In a consistently optimistic tone, it enumerated the kinds of benefits a locality would
gain from the facility, and what made the optimism persuasive
was the modesty of the promises. A struggling working-class
town such as Corcoran could make direct connections between
what it is and what it might be if a prison were added to the local
economic mix.
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 149
When the CDC promoted the economic development features of a prison, it promised both the short-term benefits associated with facility construction—jobs—and the long-term benefits derived from inserting a multimillion dollar allegedly
recession-proof industry establishment into the local economy—
growth. In the metaphorically twisted, but imaginatively catchy,
phrase of CDC community relations professional Theresa
Rocha, the “prison doors would unlock” the town from its persistent depression, by putting labor and real property back to
work (Drew 1984: 1).
The following summary of potential benefits shows what
Corcoran found so appealing about the prison, and why the
prison development project seemed an appropriate foundation
on which to rebuild the crumbling city (source for all items, unless otherwise noted: CDC 1994a):
. Land and construction. The CDC’s proposal stipulates
one section (640 acres) of relatively flat land per prison, but it ordinarily buys two or more (CDC 1990). While the benefit of the
land sale would go to the seller, the ensuing $250 million dollar
construction would create up to 900 temporary jobs of varying
skill levels, some of which could be gained by Corcoran residents. The number of permanent positions for a typical new
prison ranges from 800 to 1,600—depending on the completed
facility’s occupancy level—with the total split in half between
guards and all other positions; the corresponding annual payroll
is $30 to $50 million dollars. The CDC was frank with Corcoran concerning the prospects of current townspeople finding
jobs at the prison. At new prisons, management and correctional
officer (CO) work is assigned to veterans who apply for transfer
150 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
from other prisons around the state; the extra pay given to staff
at new facilities ensures that even an out-of-the-way location
such as Corcoran obtains ample experienced personnel. However, every facility has a number of well-paying jobs—from automobile mechanics to X-ray technicians—featuring a wide
range of skills that do not require prison experience.15 In addition, the CDC estimated that the local job market would also
gain 400–600 multiplier, or spin-off, employments—principally
in food service and retail.
. Onetime mitigation funds. Onetime mitigation funds offset the infrastructural costs associated with a town’s anticipated
near-term growth. These mitigation funds, each of which
would have to be legislated upon the recommendation of the
Joint Legislative Committee on Prison Construction and Operations (JLCPCO), would pay part or all of the cost of expanding
educational, sewage, water, road, and jail and courthouse capacities.
. Local purchases. The CDC annually spends from $1 to $4
million at area vendors for small but steady quantities of a broad
assortment of ordinary goods, ranging from auto supplies to
medical dressings, trophies, and signs. These expenditures
would both stimulate local retail business and enhance tax revenues.
. Annual subventions. Sacramento allocates vehicle license,
gasoline, and other taxes to counties and cities on a per capita
basis, and counties and towns count prisoners in their populations. The subventions allocated per prisoner constitute windfall
revenue, because prisons—and their occupants—receive all services directly from the state. The CDC estimated the city’s share
at $110,000 to $210,000.
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 151
. Donated labor. The CDC donates the labor of the lowest
security (Level I) prisoners to the towns and counties allied with
prisons. Typical tasks include cleaning parks and other public
spaces, sprucing up school buildings, and repairing public property.
With all of this information to evaluate, the city council appointed a five-person committee in June 1984 to do an in-depth
study of the proposed prison. The committee quickly expanded
to ten because of the workload and to ensure representation of
differing points of view. They met with Sacramento officials, siting consultants, and groups from other cities seeking prisons.
The committee also took field trips to see for themselves what a
prison town was like.
A delegation went to Susanville in Lassen County, site of the
California Correctional Center—one of the state’s last “original”
prisons (built in 1954). Meeting with town and county representatives, the Corcoran committee learned that their hosts attributed the area’s economic security to the facility and were actively
seeking a new one.16 In the report back to the city council, the
delegation emphasized that greater Susanville had three shopping malls, as compared with none in the immediate Corcoran
environs (the nearest was in Hanford, twenty miles away). The
delegates saw in Susanville what they envisioned for their own
town. These amenities included a wide variety of jobs suited to
the local skills mix, opportunity for those seeking to advance in
the CDC, and a broad middle-income stratum. What they failed
to see was how a wide range of public sector (federal, state,
county) jobs had for decades offset declines in ranching and
resource-extraction incomes.
152 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
A study commissioned by the CDC (Lofting and Linton 1985)
supported the view that well-paid prison-employed newcomers
would enhance the town’s economic and social profile and induce
retail, entertainment, and residential investment. The report
concluded that in the first two years of the prison’s operation,
Corcoran would gain more than 950 people in 353 households.
The study also projected countywide retail revenues of about $3
million per year—well within the range of the CDC’s proposed
expenditures—some of which Corcoran could expect to capture
if it had appropriate establishments in place. In short, it appeared that the prison would jump-start growth with a major infusion of new jobs and capital outlays and provide for sustained
local development by way of prison-based and growth-induced
jobs for both old and new residents.
But there was opposition. About 20 percent of the town formed
an antiprison coalition centered around a tiny group representing
some of the few remaining small Tulare Lake basin farmers. They
objected to introduction of an economic development project that
would change the nature of the town. Martha Owens lived south
of Corcoran on a Bureau of Reclamation–compliant 160-acre
ranch her grandfather had homesteaded, which the family had
consistently refused to sell to Boswell. She maintained that the
prison would make people who had always gotten along and welcomed strangers fearful of one another.17 Nobody, pro or con,
doubted that the prison would change Corcoran. However, as
other residents pointed out, the prevailing sense of place included
“our empty downtown! Why are you trying to preserve what’s already dead?”
Many were afraid that inviting presumably dangerous
people to settle in their midst, even behind a death fence,
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 153
barbed wire, towers, guns, and bars, was a recipe for disaster.
Owens, who lived alone, imagined escaped prisoners roaming
the countryside. Diana Johnson, the CDC marketing representative assigned to Corcoran, assured residents that CDC escapes were extremely rare, having peaked in 1942, and that
when prisoners do break out, they usually leave the area immediately (CDC 1992).18 A trustee of the Corcoran Unified
School District raised another fear—that the prison would
bring along with it extramural trouble in the form of prisoners’ families. “What support can we expect from the state with
these families, such as counseling?” he asked. “Are you just
going to dump them on us?” (Corcoran Journal, May 28 1987).
In that room, as in much of U.S. society, nobody objected to
stigmatizing prisoners’ families, even though the law convicts
individuals, not kin groups. The CDC spokesperson let the
stereotype stand. Her answer to the second question was yes,
but with a mitigating factor: because of the CDC’s policy of
moving prisoners among facilities with little or no notice, very
few prisoners’ families relocate to where their loved ones are
incarcerated (CDC 1994b).
Several farmers were particularly concerned about water. Agriculture in the mid 1980s was in a slump, and smaller growers did
not relish the prospect of competing with the CDC for water
should future scarcity raise prices or necessitate direct rationing.
The CDC assured the farmers that it would use fresh water sparingly and buy treated wastewater for most nondietary uses.
The antiprison activists, although few in number, were tenacious in trying to persuade others of the accuracy of their analysis. They held meetings at one another’s homes, attended all public forums and council meetings, and wrote letters to the
154 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
newspaper at every opportunity. Their activism provoked a great
deal of acrimony, and people who had ordinarily been civil with
each other engaged in public shouting matches at meetings, in
restaurants, and on the street. Some actual or imagined minor
acts of vandalism were tied to the prison controversy, and opponents of the project who complained of logs filched from woodpiles or fences tampered with accused their foes of unfair and unlawful escalation.
The prison proponents’ counteraccusations turned on status
and location. Townspeople suggested that ranchers whose
spreads were in unincorporated Kings County did not actually
care about Corcoran’s future but only about their own wellbeing and position. In other words, from the point of view of the
boosters, the small growers, while in the shadow of Boswell and
the rest of the cotton oligarchy, enjoyed economic independence
from the city and its problems. The small growers were themselves seasonal employers, generally hiring from two to twelve
people for two months or less (Reisner 1986; cf. Goldschmidt
1946). As the lead people seeking the prison were Anglos like
their opponents, charges of racism did not surface explicitly in
these confrontations. However, quietly and informally, people
began to talk about the opponents’ careless or willful disregard of
underemployed Chicano and Black workers who desperately
needed jobs. Issues of race and power surfaced openly later.
The pro- and antiprison forces in Corcoran were emphasizing
different aspects of the city in their respective evaluations of a
prison’s likely impact on the town. The antiprison fears combined the stereotypically anticipated dangers with nostalgia for a
town that in some ways had never existed. Prison boosters saw a
development project commensurate with the locality’s charac-
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 155
teristics. The confrontations between factions were structured by
already existing relations, although not all of the town’s hierarchies were spotlighted as a result of the controversy. While small
farmers came under some critical scrutiny, the powerful cotton
clans did not; while poverty and joblessness were constant subjects of discussion, race and class were not.
CORRECTIONS COMES TO CORCORAN
The CDC identified three sites outside the city boundaries that
appeared suitable—two to the north and one to the south. The
sites to the north had the advantage of being close to the railroad
and to the major east-west artery that runs between Interstate 5
and Highway 99—the Great Central Valley’s principal roads
running northwest. The third site, two miles south of town, was
less suitable from a cost perspective because of the added distance along which materials for the facility would have to be
hauled. In addition, while the south parcel was, indeed, relatively flat, its west side was plagued by a tendency to sink; to fix
the problem, the CDC would have to spend extra money to lay
drainage tile.19
In 1985, the CDC bought the least desirable of the three
parcels from the J. G. Boswell Company. The sale enabled
Boswell to get rid of 1,920 relatively poor acres that had been
idled during the drought and again during the flood years at an
estimated ten times what the sale price as farmland would have
been.20 The only other way of achieving such a markup would
have been to sell to a residential or retail developer in the private
sector, and developers would not have been attracted by unstable
land. In any event, there had been no developers shopping for
land in and about Corcoran for any reason, because in the mid
156 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
1980s, it was too far away to be a suburb of the growing FresnoClovis area to the northeast or the greater Bakersfield area to the
south and much too close to compete with Hanford and
Lemoore in the county. Boswell’s problem in making a sale was
the company’s size; there was no larger competitor to take the
land off its hands, and no smaller farmers could make this difficult area pay any better than the dominant cotton firm. Sacramento was a noncompeting entity large enough to absorb
Boswell’s surplus acres.
If the CDC’s problem was simply to find relatively flat open
space on which to build a prison, it had ample alternatives both
around Corcoran and in the Central Valley as a whole. Corcoran
had the two northern parcels, and there were also thousands of
forfeited collateral acres around the valley that Bank of America
was trying to sell (Gottlieb 1988), including, about eighteen
months after the Boswell deal was complete, 40,000 of Salyer’s
77,000 to which the bank held title.21 Therefore, it seems not immoderate to conclude that the CDC’s siting dilemma was not
simply a problem of finding adequate space, but rather one of
politics and therefore of place. Corcoran was a struggling
working-class Tulare Lake basin town, populated by current and
former agricultural workers striving to maintain and renew it.
But Corcoran’s quality as place was shaped by agribusiness oligopolies that had worked closely with, and exploited rivalries
within, the state government at different levels over the century
to achieve land and labor control, resource subsidies, and other
forms of economic power, and that now sought a transformation
of the local geography of investment that would complement,
not compete with, cotton’s continued dominance (cf. Woods
1998; Preston 1981).
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 157
Boswell’s parcel came with Boswell power, which extended
from the Kate G. Boswell Senior Center, where meetings to debate the prison were held, to the state legislature, where the bill
to approve the Corcoran prison put the project on a fast track, so
that monies were appropriated, environmental review waived,
studies concluded, and construction begun before prisons with
earlier approval had even gotten out of the rudimentary planning stage (LAO 1986). In the legislature, Assemblyman Jim
Costa climbed the punishment ladder to the California Senate by
siting three prisons in his district in the 1980s (Corcoran, Avenal,
and Coalinga), sponsoring three more in the 1990s (Corcoran II,
Delano II, and California City), and co-authoring high-profile
pieces of criminal law—most notably the 1994 “three strikes” act.
The legislature’s approval of the prison propelled Corcoran
into a phase of anticipatory development that lasted through the
prison construction and into the first year of operation. The
CDC’s projections, set forth in a department-commissioned
study by a planning research firm (Lofting and Linton 1985), indicated that the city should prepare for higher than normal
growth in the near term. The expectation was that 20 percent of
CDC employees at the new facility would make their homes in
Corcoran. Developers put up new housing, and the city borrowed $1.2 million to build new civic buildings and spruce up
Whitley Avenue, the main thoroughfare, in advance of the retail
outlets that were expected to revive the empty storefronts there.
Shiloh Inns developed a motel on Whitley, and the Chamber of
Commerce started making inquiries into the possibility of getting a fast food franchise, such as MacDonald’s, in the city.
As was the case in Avenal, Corcoran ground rent rose during
the pre-prison period (just under two years), even as it fell in the
158 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
surrounding county. In both cities, lack of demand pushed prices
back down to pre-siting levels—although rents stayed about 15
percent higher than before the boom (Parks et al. 1990). Avenal’s
failure to attract prison employee-residents foreshadowed Corcoran’s failure to gain more than a 7.5 percent increase in population that could be attributed to the prison (Parks et al. 1990).
CDC employees shunned both localities because of their lack of
retail, entertainment, and educational amenities. In addition,
the towns’ isolation added several thousand dollars to the cost of
a new house—because of transportation charges—compared
with similar abodes in larger cities.
Corcoran is situated close to larger small cities—Hanford
(1985 pop. 24,450) and Lemoore (1985 pop. 12,000)—that have
malls, movie theaters, and other desirable amenities. It is within
an easy California commute (about fifty miles each way, no traffic) of major valley cities such as Fresno, Visalia, and Bakersfield.
Finally, for those who want to live in more picturesque surroundings, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to the east and the
Coastal Range to the west are also within a more challenging, but
still doable, California commute. Some of those who lived more
than fifty miles away rented apartments in Corcoran, which they
shared with other CDC employees for the typical four-day workweek, with all going home to their families for their staggered
three-day weekends (Parks et al. 1990).
Paradoxically, then, Corcoran is a fine location for the prison
from the employees’ point of view, but only because it is an easy
spot to get home from, not because it is from their perspective a
good place to live. As a result, rather than the prison inducing a
booming market for residential and retail real estate, as in Susanville, Corcoran’s modest increase in housing stock was met by
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 159
TABLE 8 ANNUAL CHANGE IN CORCORAN HOUSING STOCK
AND VACANCY RATE, SELECTED YEARS
Year Total Single Unit Multiunit Mobile Vacancy (%)
1977 1 1 0 0 3.31
1982 48 22 40 7 3.66
1984 20 13 4 3 4.85
1987 252 60 194 2 5.47
1988 83 74 0 9 7.40
1989 40 17 2 21 7.50
sources: Parks et al. 1990; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census, 1990, 2000.
an increased vacancy rate (see table 8). Prison employees new to
the area did not settle in Corcoran, and Corcoran residents did
not get prison jobs. About a year before the facility started receiving prisoners, the CDC held several job fairs at the Kate G.
Boswell Senior Center. At the largest fair, 823 people filled out
preliminary applications and talked with CDC representatives,
but only 178, or fewer than 10 percent of the jobs at the prison,
were filled by Corcoran residents; 40 percent went to residents
within a stretched local labor market—roughly, a seventy-fivemile radius—and 60 percent went to people from elsewhere
(Parks et al. 1990). These are results slightly worse than the average yield from local economic development projects (cf. Bartik
1991). The labor market stretched because of easily traveled terrain, mild climate, relatively high wages, and the proliferation of
amenities elsewhere.
Disappointment launched the city into an entrepreneurial
role. City boosters discovered that local job seekers found the pe-
160 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
culiarities of the state’s employment application system alien to
anything they had ever encountered when looking for work.
Thus, operating on the assumption that the lack of how-to-apply
skills was the principal barrier between Corcoran residents and
CDC positions, the city organized “how to” workshops at the
high school. Volunteer trainers, assisted by representatives of the
state Employment Development Department, painstakingly explained to prospective applicants how to complete state employment applications properly (leave no blank spaces!), how to register for and take the required tests, and how to provide adequate
proof of training, experience, creditworthiness, and licensing for
specialized positions. The workshops can, perhaps, be credited
with pushing Corcoran’s success rate up over 20 percent by the
mid 1990s; but it is not clear whether Corcoran residents who
gained the increasing share of jobs had lived there before the
coming of the prison or prior to getting a prison job. At any rate,
the number of Corcoran residents in poverty rose (Hornor 1993),
and the average Kings County public assistance caseload continued the gradual but steady climb that had started back in the late
1970s (Parks et al. 1990).
Since Corcoran is majority Mexicano/Chicano, with a significant African American population, it is tempting to explain the
failure of local people to gain jobs as symptomatic of racially exclusive hiring practices. While that may be true of other state departments, the CDC had the most aggressive affirmative action
hiring policies of any California state agency (PRCC 1996).
There are reasons for this, embedded in changes in corrections
policy on a national scale. In the early 1980s, white corrections
professionals debated whether demographically diversifying
corrections personnel, especially guards, might not help maintain
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 161
peace and thus enhance security in prisons’ increasingly caging
persons of color. The alternate view was that racial and ethnic
identification would have a stronger effective pull on a diverse
workforce than loyalty to the state (see, e.g., the special issue of
Corrections, October 1982). The forces for diversity won out in
many jurisdictions; and in California, even while the University
of California was preparing to void affirmative action, every
piece of prison legislation and regulation that involved expanding the CDC workforce explicitly stipulated that “minorities”
(people of color and white women) be actively sought out to join
the ranks at all levels.
A better explanation for Corcoran’s failure to capture jobs lies
with the educational system in farmworker communities, where
students “learn to labor” (Willis 1977) in specific ways. The disjuncture between the disappearance of agricultural jobs and the
inconsistent use of school time results in young people educated
for nothing at all: a fact as true of many urban as of rural
working-class youths. Corcoran’s reading scores in 1991–92 were
in the 61st percentile compared with the state as a whole; Avenal’s were in the 20th percentile (Hornor 1993).
Although the prison’s operating budget did not produce the
expected growth in income for either new or continuing Corcoran residents, it did, as promised, produce a small but steady level
of annual commodity purchases. The purchases, while high
enough to support a partial realignment in city political power—
a subject to which we will return—were not sufficient to push
the city’s tax pull factor above 1 (Parks et al. 1990), which meant
that retail in the city remained (proportionately) below the
statewide average.22 Indeed, while CDC expenditures in Kings
County as a whole were higher than predicted, the chief benefi-
162 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
ciaries were nonlocal electricity, gas, and water utilities (Parks et
al. 1990).23
In the south San Joaquin Valley, water is thecontroversial utility. Even as Boswell was organizing the land sale to the CDC,
smaller farmers in the Kettleman Plains on the west side of the
county, hit hard by groundwater depletion during the drought,
viewed the coming Avenal prison as a competitor for resources
rather than as a complementary employer. They brought a lawsuit against the CDC that indirectly pitted them against the big
landowners in the area—including Standard Oil, and the vegetable and grape grower Bill Mouren, who sold the three Avenal
sections to the state. The lawsuit resulted in a court order forbidding the CDC to use any groundwater for the facility. That
meant the prison had to use surplus water obtained under the
city of Avenal’s contract with the Metropolitan Water District of
Southern California (Met). At the lawsuit’s conclusion, the State
Attorney General’s office reiterated the CDC’s position in the
matter, indirectly acknowledging the general problem of surplus, to which the prison provided a solution: from the state’s perspective, Avenal or any other new prison would benefit farmers
and the water table by permanently removing land from agricultural production.24
At Corcoran, the CDC drilled a deep 1,000-foot well at the site
to supplement drinking water bought from the city and purchased surplus and treated effluent for other uses. Corcoran invested $3 million in a treatment facility and was prepared to sell
to any buyer at $5 per acre-foot, but presumed the prison would
be its biggest customer. The prison contracted instead to buy surplus water from the Corcoran Irrigation District (a regional utility) at $45 per acre-foot, and continued to do so until the city man-
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 163
aged to get word to the JLCPCO in Sacramento that the facility
was wasting money (CDF 1996). The charge of wasted funds,
lodged with the prison oversight committee, was the only way
Corcoran could compel the CDC to direct the local prison to buy
Corcoran’s treated water, since there was no rule requiring the
CDC to integrate with, rather than bypass, the local economy.25
The prison had to be territorially integrated with the city in
order for Corcoran to receive its share of annual tax subventions
from Sacramento, and the annexation proved more difficult than
prison boosters had imagined.26 Given that the subventions
would augment city revenues by approximately $65 per prisoner
per year, it seemed reasonable to expect that those who lived in
Corcoran’s sphere of influence in unincorporated Kings County
and used city amenities, such as parks and schools, would support shifting the political boundary to lasso in the southern site.
The Kings County Local Agency Formation Committee
(LAFCO) had approved the annexation in principle—viewing it
as a rational expansion of the city rather than a tax-hungry landgrab—but voters in the proposed annex, who included some of
the staunchest antiprison forces, defeated the measure in 1986.
The city succeeded in annexing the site in late 1987, by drawing
the new boundary close to the prison and the connecting road,
while skirting recalcitrant property owners’ intervening lands.
The move instantly increased the city’s revenues by about 6 percent the first year, thanks to the high number of prisoners locked
in the facility.
Because the prison had produced such disappointing results,
apart from the subvention money, some Corcoran residents, like
their counterparts in Avenal, Crescent City (R. W. Gilmore 1994;
Parenti 1997), and other new prison towns (Huling 2002; Gilmore
164 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
and Gilmore 2004), denounced the CDC for having made promises
it did not keep. But others, in Corcoran as elsewhere, viewed the
development failure as evidence of mistakes made by the city,
rather than misrepresentations made by the CDC. These political
entrepreneurs successfully prevailed upon the town to seek a second prison facility to be built adjacent to the first one on the unused
segment of the Boswell parcel. They intended to use their experience with the first prison to avoid errors the second time around.
The city was trying to develop a new image; while it continued to be a cotton town, it needed to project a strong alternative
industrial identity to diversify. Susanville, Corcoran’s model for
development, had several CDC offices in addition to its 1954 and
future prisons. In 1990, the CDC opened a regional accounting
office at Visalia, Tulare County; Corcoran fought successfully to
have the establishment relocated to its territory, where it reopened at the end of 1991. Corcoran argued that it was unjust for
Visalia to benefit from a “clean” office—with pink- and whitecollar jobs—when it did not at the same time serve public safety
by having a prison in its immediate environs. Corcoran’s victory
was somewhat Pyrrhic. The city borrowed $775,000 to build the
new office (using subvention money to pay back the loan), while
the people who got the jobs were mostly Visalians, who commuted to work and took their paychecks home.
Corcoran’s capture of the prison and the accounting office was
an example of how the city could use political power to form an
apparently distinctive space economy; but, as the accounting office struggle especially illustrates, spatial demarcation via political boundaries does not necessarily translate into economic stickiness. The city turned to its taxing capacities in the hope that by
selectively using those powers, it could get a piece of vulnerable
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 165
construction expenditures and induce new, as yet unidentified,
investment.
Since the payoff from the first prison was so much lower than
expected, and the city had spent quite a bit of time and borrowed
about $5 million in anticipation of a return that did not materialize, Corcoran decided in 1993 to assert its territorial prerogative
by taxing the second prison’s suppliers at the construction site.
Ordinarily, such items are taxed where they are bought, but
under California law, the city could seize taxing power for goods
purchased within the state.
While Corcoran was exerting greater than normal taxing
powers at the second prison building site, it was also trying to attract new employers by using the inverse strategy—tax abatements. Sacramento had awarded a California enterprise zone
(CEZ) designation to all of Kings County east of the Kettleman
Plains in 1993. CEZ status was a long way from direct subventions; Corcoran juggled the short-term remedy of taxing the second prison construction site with a risky long-term solution. The
risk was that employers would come to exploit up to fifteen years
of benefits and leave before they became mired in the local economy’s taxable ground. The wager was that sunk costs would
keep investors in place. Between 1993 and 1997, only one new
employer joined the city as a result of the tax incentive program
(cf. LeRoy 2005).
In housing, the city also discounted itself in the hope of future
revaluation by establishing the county’s lowest fees and fastest
approval rate. A single development proposal emerged: one
builder offered to construct ten to thirty 2,200-square-foot
houses. The new houses would be aggressively marketed to COs
transferring to the second prison, the key selling point being a
166 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
quasi-custom feature: COs had to move to their new assignment
within sixty days of CDC approval or forfeit the job (which usually entails a promotion), and the developer would finish the
house within sixty days to the specifications of the purchasing
CO and family.
In order to persuade COs to live in a town earlier CDC transfers had spurned, Corcoran had to figure out ways to make the
local atmosphere attractive, given the difficulty of developing retail and entertainment amenities. Some of the cosmetic problems
could be solved inexpensively by exploiting prison labor. The obvious contradiction in using donated labor for public works in a
town plagued by unemployment is underscored by the fact that
at that time the CDC “valued” prisoner labor at $7/hour, thirtyfive cents above the average Corcoran hourly wage.
Corcoran did not plan to limit its diversification from cotton
to corrections. The failed purpose of the CEZ status was to bring
other kinds of industries to town. Susanville provided a model,
because its corrections experience was positive. Thus, operating
from the mistaken assumption that the Lassen County city’s relative prosperity was a prison by-product, Corcoran concentrated
on prison-related development. This decision says more about
the path that $1 billion in CDC outlays over a decade cut
through the town than about a route plotted by city professional
and political planners, much less by community members. The
scale and scope of the CDC enterprise provided the first significant economic alternative to the oligopolistic cotton firms, even
if, from the agriculturists’ point of view, the prison simply provided them with some relief from the crises arising from unproductive land and potentially politically active surplus labor.
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 167
OPPORTUNITIES AND CONSTRAINTS
The UFW failed to organize the Salyer workers in 1986, but the
effort charged the city’s political atmosphere. The antagonisms
of race and class enacted in the struggle to fight wage cuts and
outsourcing surfaced in other arenas, and Corcoran’s Chicana/os
began to mount a concerted attack on the city’s racial hierarchy.
The Salyer workers, while fighting against a severely weakened
employer, were still fully caught up in the political economy of
cotton, and the UFW’s unsuccessful campaign showed the industry’s power, amassed over more than sixty years. But if cotton
had power, not all children of field workers belonged to that sector. Ironically, some activists were liberated by the coming of the
prison.
In 1986, the Corcoran City Council was desegregated for the
first time with the election of Daniel Léon. Léon was born in
Corcoran shortly after World War II. He attended UCLA and
Fresno State, where the Brown Power/La Raza Movement, inspired by the UFW and by Black Power (especially the Black
Panthers), was a principal feature of the political landscape. Léon
and his cohort came of age when federal and state programs had
“fixed” impediments to advancement by mandating postsecondary antiracist admissions policies and funding generous student aid programs. In those times, poor kids from rural towns
and inner cities who had decent grades and a modicum of decent
counseling could find a place in the state’s rapidly expanding
postsecondary system (R. W. Gilmore 1991). Many who left did
not return, seeing no opportunity to use their education and skills
in Corcoran save possibly in a middle-management position in
cotton or in the tiny city government.
168 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
Léon eventually moved back to Corcoran and commuted to
work at Fresno’s Office of Human Resources. Along with other
Chicana/os who had left and returned, such as auto parts store
owner Ruben Quintinilla, who attended San Jose State University, Léon began to denounce some of the town’s more egregious
inequities, such as school tracking. Not dependent on the cotton
industry or the city government for a livelihood, the reformers
were in effect insider/outsiders, their relative economic independence coupled with deep roots in the Mexicano/Chicano
community.
When the prison opened, Léon became its manager of community resources. The manager performed a number of tasks,
ranging from negotiating the uses of the Level I prisoner
“worker bees” on city beautification projects to bringing religious
and other volunteer-based city programs into the facility and
awarding contracts to city vendors for the prison’s locally purchased commodities. Quintinilla’s auto parts store became the
prison’s prime supplier for items such as batteries and spark
plugs. The coming of the prison enhanced vendors’ economic independence and stature, because they were outside cotton and
city government, yet both locally based and formally attached to
a higher level of the state. Léon, Quintinilla, and several others
became increasingly vocal concerning the need for structural
change in the social and political arenas.
In the late 1980s, the San Francisco–based Mexican American
Political Alliance (MAPA), under the leadership of the Brown
Power veteran Joaquin Avila, had been scouting for jurisdictions
around California where it could mount challenges to discriminatory electoral practices. In the manner of lawsuit-based
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 169
African American antiracist electoral organizing in the U.S.
South during the same period, MAPA evaluated sites whose Chicano majority populations had little or no representation on
elected bodies such as city councils and school and hospital
boards. The localities chosen for challenge were cities like Corcoran, Dinuba, and Watsonville—places with relatively stable
second- and third-generation Mexican American populations
who had developed, from within, the rudiments of a professional
managerial class.
In July 1993, MAPA launched an offensive against Corcoran
with a letter to the city council. Rather than fight the charges,
shallow-pocketed Corcoran decided to shift from at-large to
electoral district representation for the council and the school
board. Corcoran’s failure to attract new residents along with the
first prison might well have enhanced the power of Corcoran
Chicana/os to wage their political struggle. The lack of inmigrants meant that the city’s demographic profile had stayed
fairly constant, and that the social relations within the city, even
if stratified, had not been diluted by growth.
While the city capitulated to the MAPA challenge without a
court battle, it also instantly reenacted the national postwar racial
ritual, with paternalistic expressions of denial clashing with
angry denunciations of repression. Anglos suspected—not altogether incorrectly—that the new militancy was the result of
Chicana/os having gone off to college and encountered La Raza
(Brown Power) and other radical politics. But they failed to consider that some of the activists’ family members had a local history of radical labor activism in the 1930s strikes. At the same
time, the fact that the political battle was waged against the city
170 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
council, rather than against the cotton elites, bespoke both a status division within the Mexicano/Chicano community and a displacement of political economic struggles from the realm of production to the realm of representation.
During a ten-year period, from 1984 to 1994, the small city experienced two scandals involving the chiefs of police: first, an
Anglo accused of selective enforcement of laws by zeroing in on
youth of color, and subsequently a Chicano accused of harassing
an Anglo woman. The charges and countercharges were well reported in the weekly newspaper. Predictably, the Anglo seems to
have enjoyed a presumption of innocence, while the Mexican
American faced a cloud of presumed guilt. That difference
forced particular mobilizations, with the small cadre of the city’s
growing Chicano professional-managerial class joining together
in 1994 as the Coalition of Concerned Citizens. In response,
members of the coalition were themselves accused of wrongdoing. The point here is not to judge whether or not any of the accusations were justified, but rather to look at the peculiar ways
in which the topic of race and processes of racism get played out.
In Corcoran, as in the larger society at that time, racism was
viewed narrowly in terms of relative access, after the fact of development, to certain social and economic opportunities. In that
view, those denying racism argued that antiracist activists were
only trying to get “power”—conceived of as a thing, a crowbar
that would pry open formerly locked doors, rather than a new set
of local relationships. What fell out of the discussion was the
ways in which the development of the place created the ground
on which the crisis arose (cf. James Ferguson 1990). Just as the
cotton oligopoly was not on the agenda in these debates, the discussion of wrongful behavior, its prevention and remedies, did
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 171
not stretch to consideration of the thousands held in custody
down the road. The prison at the edge of town, then, while seeming to be a relatively autonomous solution to a long-standing
problem of structural inequality in the south San Joaquin Valley,
might have been seen as a threat looming against the children’s
futures as much as a disappointing employment prospect for the
city’s kids.
The city’s principal justification for both prisons centered on
the urgent need to fashion a future for Corcoran’s children. The
city’s high school dropout rate soared in the mid 1980s, and the
city was eager to find both reason and means to persuade young
people to stay in school. The coming of the first prison allowed
educators, parents, and city leaders to assert that CDC jobs could
be had by energetic young people who got their diplomas. Given
the dearth of CDC hires of townspeople of any age, however, the
school board devised a work credit program to enable students
who completed the minimum course requirements to stay enrolled—and graduate—while also holding down part- or fulltime jobs, although the high school lacked a full-time guidance
counselor to implement it by helping young people coordinate
their school and work lives and plan for their futures. When the
school board sought the city council’s permission to advertise for
an education professional to fill the critical position, it was rebuffed by the council, which claimed to have no money in the
budget to make the hire.
After more than a year of intensive, and sometimes acrimonious, negotiations between the school board and the council,
and between Anglo and Chicano council members, the city manager came up with a solution. Since criminal justice was the “hot,
sexy thing,” and 70 percent of Corcoran’s prison-derived sub-
172 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
ventions at that time went straight into an expanded city police
force, supplementing, not replacing, appropriations from other
revenues, the manager persuaded the council to hire a plainclothes policeman to serve full-time at the high school in the dual
capacity of career and substance abuse counselor.
The council justified the expense by treating secondary
school guidance—rather than secondary schooling—as crime
control. Furthermore, those enthusiastic about the new appointment expressed hope that the officer-counselor would help
students learn to talk with police respectfully before they got
into trouble and had to talk to less sympathetic uniformed officers. Given the apparent inevitability that Black, Brown, and
other poor youth will have encounters with the law, activists
against the criminalization of youth have written and distributed pamphlets and books in big cities throughout the United
States advising people on how to be arrested—not how to capitulate, but rather how to achieve a favorable outcome and protect one’s rights and one’s life. But Corcoran’s institutionalization of this activist practice changed the thrust by trying to
educate youth for surveillance and deferral to authorities—an
old story in an agricultural community threatened by “farm fascism” during the labor wars of the 1930s (McWilliams [1939]
1969; Bean 1973).
At that time, some students were wary of the new counselor,
and many were acutely aware of their own surplus status in the
California political economy as a whole. The best evidence for
their collective consciousness of what was happening around
them was the startling walkout of two hundred Corcoran high
school students in protest against California’s anti-immigrant
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 173
Proposition 187 in October 1994. These rural youths saw themselves as having few options given their understanding, on the
one hand, of Proposition 187 as an attack on all poor Latinos—
not only noncitizen workers—and the criminalizing effects of
anxiety about youth gang and drug culture, as figured by the new
officer-counselor, on the other. From that time on, young people
started to organize, while regional governments, such as Fresno
County, began enormous youth jail projects.27
Although in the 1980s and 1990s, Corcoran had a decrease in
its already low crime rates, as did California as a whole, several
million dollars in onetime state mitigation funds were used to expand the local jail and county courthouse when the first prison
was built. The expansion did not signify an anticipated explosion
in Corcoran crime; rather, it was a necessary external appendage
to a more or less self-contained city (the prison) located in the
county’s criminal justice jurisdiction. Every prison operates
within three spheres of sanction: CDC regulations, state law, and
federal law. The CDC has its own regulations, which are approved by Sacramento but enforced by the wardens at each facility, and their application to prisoners can include restricted
privileges, relocation, time in the security housing unit (solitary
confinement), and other punishments. However, any indictable
state law violation committed inside—whether by a CDC employee or prisoner—must be referred to the county grand jury
and, if necessary, tried in the county courthouse before a locally
summoned jury. Additionally, prisoners who wish to challenge
the conditions of their confinement in the federal courts must
first exhaust state remedies, starting in the local county courthouse.28
174 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
ALTERNATIVE VISIONS
Criminal justice is, literally, state power. It is the police, guns, prison, the electric chair. Power corrupts; and power also has an itch to suppress.
LAWRENCE M. FRIEDMAN, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY
(1993)
Contemporary prison-siting literature, exemplified in a special
edition of Crime and Delinquency (Gibbons 1990; see also Krause
1992), approaches the problem as a fairly narrow question of
whether all groups engaged in making the decision have adequate information about prisons. In this logic, the boundaries of
adequacy are limited by the presumption that prisons have to go
somewhere: the carceral is a given. The problem then is relegated
to a calculation, a technical exercise in weighing “fear” against
“finances” (Carlson 1988; see also Lake 1992), with the opposition
conceived of as simple differences whose resolution derives from
narrowly defined, factual expertise, rather than a redefinition of
the problem to be solved. In Corcoran, the public record includes
no inquiry about the state’s decision to expand prison capacity.
There was no nearby crime wave to give the program a locally
palpable explanatory context. When asked in passing what difficulties they envisioned, most people only remembered worrying
about whether prison would mitigate local and regional inequality; when they decided it might, the decision rolled forward. But as with the lack of critique concerning the need for
more prisons, there was no discussion, either, about what it
would mean for a small city dominated by a single-industry oligopoly to deal with inequality by bringing in an enormous new
employer outside the direct control of anybody; nor did people
ponder what might happen should the prison fail to do the economic job.
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 175
Indeed, insofar as prison siting, like all industrial siting, is a
question of land use, it is, further, a question about horizontal
and vertical social and economic planning. It is not surprising,
but at least a little ironic, that “planning” has such a bad name
these days; in everyday common sense, “planning” smacks of all
the negatives implied in an alienating and cumbersome state bureaucracy. But as every geographer knows, “planning” is what
makes “globalization” possible and powerful, and the loss of the
power to plan (to have some sense of how to secure the future) is
what makes small towns, small farmers, and small-income
households desperate for relief.
In a number of communities around the Central Valley and
elsewhere in the Golden State’s rural reaches, grassroots activists
have stopped prisons from coming to their communities. In general ways, these places bear strong similarities to those where prisons have been sited; and in some cases they are (old- and) new-era
prison towns. What’s compelling is how the communities have
over time, in part through networking and collaboration, begun
to make different assumptions about new prisons and therefore to
ask, and find answers to, questions other than those that would
come up in a narrowly conceived siting discussion.
The question everybody asks at first focuses on the “fear versus finances” calculation (Carlson 1988): if prisons are safe, then
do they also benefit towns by distributing dollars into hands that
spend locally? Corcoran’s experience is in key ways typical: when
measured by jobs for current residents, residential development,
locally sited related industries and services, or consumer retail,
prisons have not delivered even on the modest employment and
growth projections derived from the CDC’s categorical assurances. Indeed, the biggest single beneficiaries of retail dollars are
176 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
those major shapers of the valley’s development, utility companies. For other retail, prison towns’ economic well-being and
growth potential compare unfavorably over time with depressed
rural places that did not acquire prisons (Hooks et al. 2004).29
The second question, inseparable from the first, focuses on the
goods and harms that might come to a small town that suddenly
finds itself a dependent neighbor to a town of equal or greater
size (a prison) whose residents are involuntary and whose employees are mostly commuters; this is a question about place—
the one raised by the Corcoran prison opponent who wanted to
“save” her town. The answers to this question require more evaluation than calculation: for example, it might seem better than
nothing that a handful of new jobs go to old residents.
For towns with unemployment that has stayed above 25 percent during the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, a single new job is a benefit. Such was the official wisdom in Delano,
former headquarters of the United Farm Workers, where the
city was slated to get a hotly contested, activist-delayed (from
1999 to May 2005) second 5,160-bed prison. Delano’s 1999 tenyear planning document barely mentioned the extant prison—or
the community corrections facility the city manages on behalf of
the CDC—other than to note that some residents wish it were
not there, and made no reference to the new one, focusing instead on other economic activities that would presumably induce
growth. The mayor at the time of the battle over the prison did
not particularly support it, but found no grounds—no palpable
harms—for opposing seventy-two new jobs (out of a projected
total of 1,600 new hires). After all, in the decade after the first
prison opened, unemployment climbed from 26 to 29 percent
(U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census 1990, 2000). The struggle over
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 177
the prison became a statewide and national symbol against prison
expansion.30
In Farmersville, about an hour from Delano or Corcoran,
farmworkers and growers lined up in 1999 to talk a prison proposal to death—to banish it from the city council’s agenda.
Farmersville unemployment is worse than Delano’s; yet at the
council meeting, two venerable and classically contradictory
groupings—Tulare County family ranchers and farmworker
families united under the UFW flag—agreed from a number of
perspectives not only that a prison would fail to solve economic
problems, but also that it would create new problems. In the residents’ view, the proposed prison would likely endanger water
supply and quality. They also argued that a prison would certainly aggravate race and class inequalities by fixing into the city’s
landscape under night-polluting lights the heightened expectations of racialized, impoverished criminality that U.S. prisons
symbolize. And, finally, they expressed fears that their community would be transformed if augmented by households with
higher than average rates of domestic violence—as is the case in
military, police, and prison guard homes. In fact, people who organize against prisons invoke the same beneficiaries (“the kids”)
as those who organize for prisons.
In the landscape of home, the state’s capacities to make the
water flow, the soil yield, the workers work, and the employers
finally sometimes pay resonate in the eye and the memory as materials for renovation. Thus in Tulare County, a cost-benefit
analysis of incentives for young people to do well (such as graduate from high school) versus punishment for having done badly
produced by the Rand Corporation in the early 1990s (Greenwood et al. 1994) circulated among farmers as an example of
178 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
what could be done. In Imperial County, parents bristled at
adding more COs’ children to the public schools, noting an increase in their own kids’ use of fear to settle differences. But also,
women and men in California, along with many who selforganized to save their communities around rural America,
began to tire of using fear to fight fear. Instead, they widened
their scope of analysis, in large part by listening closely as various
kinds of struggles came to their attention through conferences,
documentaries, and chance encounters during testimony before
governmental bodies. In particular, environmental justice activism emphasized the inseparability of economic well-being,
physical safety, healthy workers, flourishing children, and vibrant places. This broadening view gradually replaced a onedimensional picture of public safety with a complicated agenda
based on identifying and undoing the deadly cumulative impacts
of organized abandonment. Throughout the valley, new formations came together composed of all kinds of members—community people, paid activists, and college graduates employed in
governmental agencies devoted to well-being. They started to
ask new questions about development and control of financial
and other resources and to begin to envision what grassroots
planning might look like.
CONCLUSION
When people talk about the kids, about “saving” a place, what
are they talking about? Far from freezing a landscape in time
and place, the desire seems to be quite the opposite—one of pursuing particular kinds of change in order to produce the conditions under which social and cultural reproduction might happen. In other words, they are engaging in the tarnished practice
CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM 179
of planning. In lieu of technocratic expertise that “shows” how a
prison might blend into a community, activists opposed to such a
solution to political and economic crisis propose alternate planning criteria that must precede any industrial location decision.
If industries do create places, then so does planning; and indeed,
one of the rarely unacknowledged bitter ironies of the past
twenty-five years is that, while planning—in California, at any
rate—fell from its constitutionally mandated place on governmental agendas, the corporate and banking forces’ determining
the movement of capital across the land feature central planning
as a fundamental activity of their institutions and organizations.
This line of argument leads away from thinking of prison location as a siting problem for development ends and toward
thinking of prison as fully a development problem—or perhaps,
more accurately, as an antidevelopment problem (cf. Ferguson
1990). Certainly, a rich literature critical of developmentalist assumptions in the planet’s poorer countries highlights the ways
that particular forms and relations of developmentalism serve
deliberately or unwittingly (it really makes little difference in the
end) to further the underdevelopment of regions. The poorer
places, or global South, are also here in the global North, in both
urban and rural areas “unfixed” by capital flight and state restructuring. The unfixing is not, however, an absolute erasure;
what’s left behind is not just industrial residue—devalued labor,
land made toxic, shuttered retail businesses, the neighborhood or
small city urban form—but, by extension, entire ways of life that,
having been made surplus, unfix people: women, men, “the
kids.” In the course of crisis, ordinary people do not abandon
themselves but rather renovate already existing activities. Renovation entails planning. Rural antiprison activists are increas-
180 CR I M E, CROPLAN DS, AN D CAPITALISM
ingly taking up planning as the only means by which they can
keep prisons permanently off the local agenda because the accumulating evidence shows that they are not good for the towns
where they go. Furthermore, such activists are joining forces
with their urban counterparts, to whose story we now turn.
181
FIVE
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
Now that you have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, and you will be crushed.
WOMEN’S POLITICAL CHANT, ANTI–PASS LAW MOVEMENT, SOUTH AFRICA, 1956,
QUOTED IN ANGELA Y. DAVIS, WOMEN, CULTURE & POLITICS (1989)
M
others Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) began
to organize in November 1992 in response to a growing
crisis: the intensity with which the state was locking
their children, of all ages, into the criminal justice system. At the outset, the ROC consisted of only a few
mothers and others, women and men, led by its founder and
president, Barbara Meredith, and the life-long activist Francie
Arbol. The initial project was to mobilize in defense of Meredith’s son, an ex-gangster, who had been instrumental in the historic 1992 Los Angeles gang truce. The ROC lost his case but
gained the makings of a movement. By the spring of 1993, when
the LA Four went to trial, Mothers ROC had developed a net-
182 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
work throughout greater Los Angeles and achieved recognition
as an organization devoted to action rather than to commentary.1
Mothers ROC’s mission was “to be seen, heard, and felt in the
interest of justice.” To achieve this goal, Mothers ROC convened
its activism on the dispersed stages of the criminal justice system.
The group extended an unconditional invitation to all mothers
and others struggling on behalf of their children, and it reached
its audience in various ways. The primary method was leafleting
public spaces around jails, prisons, police stations, and courthouses to announce the group’s existence and purpose. When distributing flyers and business cards, members engaged people in
conversation to explain the purpose of Mothers ROC (whose
members are known as ROCers). ROCers gave talks and workshops at elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, churches, clubs, and (at the outset, but with decreasing frequency) prisons and jails. They also appeared on regional and
local radio and television programs. Using these means, Mothers
ROC established a presence at many locations throughout the
political geography of the penal system.
ROCers attracted hundreds of mothers to fight on behalf of
their own children in the system. Many were already solitarily
performing the arduous labor of being on the outside for someone—trying adequately to switch among the many and sometimes conflicting roles required of caregivers, wageworkers, and
justice advocates. Some would attend one meeting and never return; others have persisted, whether their loved one’s case lost or
won. Often newcomers brought someone to the meeting for
moral support—a marriage or other partner, relative, child, or
friend from church or neighborhood, and that person also became active. Each weekly gathering averaged twenty-five
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 183
women and men. Most of them learned about the ROC from one
of the outreach practices noted above, or from an acquaintance
who had direct contact with a member. The rest, however, were
guided to the organization by their loved ones in custody.
Among the tens of thousands awaiting trial or doing time in the
juvenile detention camps and centers, and in the county adult
jails throughout the Southland, knowledge of Mothers ROC circulated by word of mouth, and a standard part of the message
was that the women were willing to help with even apparently
hopeless cases.
Every flyer proclaimed the ROC’s principle: “We say there’s
no justice. What are we going to do about it? . . . educate, organize, empower.” Mothers ROC made no judgment about the innocence of those whose families turned to the group for help. Not
a service organization, the group helped mothers learn how each
part of the system works, and, as we shall see, to grasp the ways
in which crisis can be viewed as an opportunity rather than a constraint. In the process of cooperative self-help, the mothers transformed their caregiving or reproductive labor into activism,
which then expanded into the greater project to reclaim all children, regardless of race, age, residence, or alleged crime. Experienced ROCers teamed up with newcomers to call on investigators and attorneys. They researched similar cases, and became
familiar with the policies and personalities of prosecutors and
judges. In addition, ROCers attended one another’s hearings or
trials. They also observed courtroom practices in general, monitoring individual officers of the court or state’s witnesses believed
to be promoting injustice.2 The group’s periodic demonstrations
outside courthouses and police stations brought public attention
to unfair practices. Finally, ROCers sponsored monthly legal
184 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
workshops with attorneys and requested research reports from
scholar-activist members to help mothers become familiar with
the bewildering details of the system in action.
Although never an exclusively Black organization, Mothers
ROC presumed at first that it would appeal most strongly to
African American women, because the state seemed to focus on
taking their children. However, the sweeping character of the
state’s new laws, coupled with the organization’s spatially extensive informational campaigns, brought Chicanas, other Latinas,
and white women to Mothers ROC for help. A few years into its
existence, the group had Black, Brown, Asian American, and
white women, and some men. Most participants had loved ones
in custody. People came to meetings from all over Los Angeles
County, western San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, and
northern Orange County, while their loved ones were locked up
throughout California.
Mothers ROC consciously identified with Third World activist mothers, the name deliberately invoking South African,
Palestinian, and Central and South American women’s struggles. As we shall see, the organization was neither spontaneous
and naive nor vanguard and dogmatic, but rather, mixing methods and concepts, it exemplified the type of grassroots organization that “renovates and makes critical already-existing activities” of both action and analysis to build a movement (Gramsci
1971: 330–31).
The material basis for their struggle was apparent: California’s deep political-economic restructuring reconfigured the social reproductive landscape, as well as the world of work. The
condition of surplus labor falls most heavily on modestly edu-
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 185
cated men in the prime of life from Black and other households
of color in Los Angeles; such men are also overrepresented
among CDC prisoners. Fully 40 percent of state prisoners come
from Los Angeles County, and 70 percent from the Southland.
What happens in the communities from which prisoners make
their involuntary migrations? While the expansion of industrialized punishment in California has a relentless intensity, it is
important not to misread the structural as also somehow inevitable. Industrialized punishment produces its own contradictions, as we saw in the conclusion to the account of the CDC’s
growth.
Mothers ROC’s work illuminates a contradiction from another cut—that of working women who refuse the state’s criminalization and sacrifice of their loved ones dispossessed by deindustrialization. Crucial here are both the state of emergency that
communities such as South Central Los Angeles have been living under for more than a generation and its broader historical
context. From the mothers’ vantage point, we can see how
prison expansion and opposition to it are part of the long history
of African Americans and others whose struggle for liberation
in the racial state has never achieved even a fully unfettered capacity to be free labor. The development of political responses to
legal dilemmas indicates how profoundly incapacitation deepens, rather than solves, social crisis. This chapter is a polemic in
the dramatic tradition of slave narratives; it both personalizes
and generalizes the morally intolerable (Kent 1972) to highlight
objective and subjective dimensions of the expansion of punishment and prisons, the demise of the weak welfare state, and the
capacity of everyday people to organize and lead themselves.
186 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
SITUATING MOTHERS ROC: SOME STRATEGIC
HISTORICAL COMPARISONS
We think organizations have to be the first step toward a social movement.
MYLES HORTON AND PAOLO FREIRE, WE MAKE THE ROAD BY WALKING (1990)
Mothers Reclaiming Our Children is part of a rich history of
twentieth-century movements whose systems, organizations,
and practices resonate with the Los Angeles grassroots women’s
critique of social conditions and their approach to social change.
The point of the following historical excursions is to show how
spatially, sectorally, and temporally far-flung struggles intersect
in Mothers ROC and similar grassroots organizations that rise
up everywhere. Beyond a formal analytical similarity, the convergence suggests real connections between underlying causes
that produce similar outcomes.
As with Mothers ROC, the organizations briefly examined in
this section mingle reformist and radical ideologies and strategies; in the vision and substance of their political projects, they
pose challenges to the system in question and to troubling hierarchies and unusefully narrow practices in organizations that are
the basis of antisystemic movement. I believe such complexity expresses an organic relation between these struggles and the specific context of the crises from which they emerge. Here, I wish
to differentiate specificity from a narrow conception of localism
or specialization. Thus, by “organic” I mean situated—the quality of being on the ground. It is a material, not mystical, quality;
and what one makes of it can be wonderful or terrible. The way
conflict emerges in a social structure is not inevitable, even
though it may be understood, in a general sense, to be an expression of a fundamental antagonism—such as class conflict. What
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 187
happens at the local level has everything to do with forces operating at other scales, and it is my interest here to reconcile the
micro with the macro by showing how the drama of crisis on the
ground is neither wholly determined by nor remotely autonomous from the larger crisis. I do not wish to ascribe intentions or dimensions to people’s actions where evidence indicates
otherwise; rather, I wish to draw out the ways in which practical
questions of method, argument, and/or structure powerfully engage crisis on the material and ideological stages where the conditions of crises unfold.
For Mothers ROC, then, the group’s specific response to crisis
was organized, with varying degrees of self-consciousness,
around three key factors. These are the embeddedness of African
American and other working-class mothers in a world only minimally shut out by home; the problem of organizing the unorganized in the United States according to categories other than singular, partial identities (e.g., occupation, race, parental status);
and the potential power of “motherhood” as a political foundation from which to confront an increasingly hostile state and the
polity legitimizing it.
Black Working-Class Mothers Women whose paid labor is
crucial to the household economy and who are judged in the
dominant discourse and the gross domestic product according to
their performance in the gender-segmented labor market embody
different roles with respect to production, reproduction, and
politics from women who can ignore such material and ideological
constraints (Boris 1989). Such difference in the United States is
further hierarchically organized by race (Fields 1990). During the
Progressive Era (roughly 1893–1920), African American “club”
188 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
women who organized around issues of gender and work could
not echo, on behalf of their sisters, the rhetoric of home and
dependency espoused by white women reformers (Linda Gordon
1994; Giddings 1984). While immigrant European working-class
women ordinarily had to work for wages, the standards by which
white feminist/gender politics—dominated by native elites—
strove to produce the “true” and then the “American” woman
rested on the expectation that all such women should at the earliest
economic opportunity become dependent, full-time homemakers
(Boris 1989; Carby 1987; Fraser and Gordon 1992). The gendered
economic power of anti-Black racism made such an expectation
for African American women impossible, since there was no
likelihood either that their own paid labor would soon become
unnecessary or that their mates could ever earn a reliable family
wage (Linda Gordon 1994; cf. Dalla Costa and James 1972; W. J.
Wilson 1987). In the period, while elite civic activists developed
new state agencies to guide the transformation of immigrant
women and their families into Americans, and juvenile justice
departments initiated a particular repertoire of control-as-reform,
the simultaneous proliferation of Jim Crow laws shut out most
Black people from political or economic engagement (Mink 1995;
Schlossman 1995; Woodward [1955] 2002).
African American club activists’ politics focused on ways to
ameliorate working-class women’s daily experiences within and
between home and work, with the church typically serving as a
semipublic arena where such women could gather in relative
safety to organize for social change (Giddings 1984; Gilkes 1979,
1989; Long 1986; Sterling 1984). Efforts centered on life’s everyday details and included lessons in such areas as grooming, liter-
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 189
acy, and better housekeeping either for wages or for family. Club
women used recognizable household relations to build women’s
political consciousness (G. E. Gilmore 1996). The self-help lessons
were strategies through which the most vulnerable members of
the workforce could make themselves stronger against everyday
assaults on their integrity—assaults typified by employer rape no
less than paltry wages (Angela Davis 1981). Activists insisted that
Black women must expect to act on a stage where no sturdy legal
or customary curtain shielded the private from the public realm.
The legacy of slavery (Angela Davis 1981; White 1985), the reality of Jim Crow laws (Sterling 1984; G. E. Gilmore 1996), and the
discipline of lynching (Ginzburg [1962] 1988) suspended any illusion that Black women might either withdraw from the labor
market—and the coercive social controls determining when and
where they entered it—or turn to the state for protection or relief.
In this historical context, motherhood functioned through,
and as an attribute of, the woman-as-laborer, enacted as collective, or social, rather than individualized practice (Collins 1990;
see also White 1985; Kaplan 1982). Club women included mothering lessons among their outreach projects, because they rightly
viewed the future of the race as depending on the children’s successful preparation to participate in severely restricted, highly
unstable job markets. In other words, the club women’s specific
conception of the politics of motherhood required good housekeeping to include, as a matter of course, deliberately raising
children to survive in racially defined, conflict-riven lives. These
lives would be shaped by a constantly “changing same” (Jones
1967) of negative contingencies—exemplified by the nation’s territorywide, multiscalar accumulation of both Jim Crow laws
190 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
and de facto segregation practices in the Progressive Era (Du
Bois [1935] 1992; Marks 1989; Woods 1998). Most children might
learn strictly to labor in whatever niches defined their generation’s market enclave (Willis 1977). At the same time, however,
the constant reorganization of labor markets—most notably
during wartime—meant that mothers were also educating their
daughters and sons in ways of thinking that might lead to more
radical consciousness of what change without progress meant,
given the material and ideological positioning of Black people in
the racial state (cf. Omi and Winant 1986).
While the type of organizing club women espoused seems to
have fallen squarely into Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee
model of cooperative apartheid, it also opened new possibilities
for women to enlarge their scope of activity through emphasizing rather than minimizing Black women’s visibility in the
world. Although dangerous, visibility also provided Black
women with peculiarly exploitable access to potentially political
audiences because of their regular passage through public space.
For example, women were often in the vanguard protesting state
and state-sanctioned terrorism—in part because men were the
ordinary (although not exclusive) victims of lynching and police
brutality (Carby 1987; Ware 1992). Similarly, in later years, the
Montgomery bus boycott—popularly viewed as a watershed of
the post–World War II civil rights movement—gained structure
and strength in large part from a church-based women’s organization. These women built the scaffolding from which to dismantle U.S. de jure apartheid around the issue of public transportation for African American domestic and other workers
(Powledge 1991; Kelley 1994). For both the immediate Montgomery audience and viewers of newsreels shown on televisions
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 191
and in movie theaters across the United States, the boycott produced an unfamiliar and compelling image of urban Black
women walking in groups to and from the job, their apparent
cheerfulness belying the fearful conditions in which they confronted the most readily perceivable ways in which U.S. racism
divides class and gender. In these women, foes recognized unanticipated adversaries; allies, by contrast, recognized, through the
women’s actions, how familiar practices of everyday life might be
rearranged in order to take on previously unimaginable tasks
(A. D. Morris 1984).
The Problem of Identification Organizing is always constrained
by recognition: How do people come actively to identify in and act
through a group such that its trajectory surpasses reinforcing
characteristics (e.g., identity politics), or protecting a fixed set of
interests (e.g., corporatist politics), and instead extends toward an
evolving, purposeful social movement (e.g., real class politics)?3
This question has particular importance when it comes to the ageold puzzle of organizing unorganized workers. U.S. labor history
is dominated by work site and occupational movement building,
with group boundaries established by employers or by skills (Wial
1993; Johnston 1994; Stone 1981). These boundaries, of course,
negatively organize—and even disorganize—people who are
excluded, because U.S. work sites and occupations are historically
segregated by both gender and race (Cobble 1991, 1994; Milkman
1987; Roediger 1991; Wial 1993).
In a few instances, U.S. labor movements have broadened their
practices by engaging in a class rather than a corporatist approach.
Whereas most such efforts resulted in failure—crushed by the
capitalist state’s policing and spin control, as well as by firms’
192 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
engineer-driven managerialism—some attempts along this way
produced surprising results (Dubofsky 1969; Phillip Foner 1970;
Wial 1993). When the Communist Party (CPUSA) attempted to
organize workers in the relatively new steel district of Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1930s, it ran into a sturdy wall of
racism that prevented it from forging a movement in which whites
could recognize themselves and Black people as equally exploited
workers rather than as properly unequal Americans. However,
the organizers who traveled to the urban mills and rural mines
seeking out industrial laborers discovered an unanticipated audience for their arguments among predominantly Black sharecroppers. The Share Croppers Union adapted the CPUSA analysis to
its own precarious conditions, and the group grew rapidly, forming a network of cells in urban and rural locations throughout the
region. One needed neither to be a sharecropper nor employed nor
Black to participate in the union. Upwards of 6,000 millworkers
and miners, in addition to dispossessed (busy or idled) farmers,
found common cause in a social movement through their understanding of their collective “equality”—which was at that time
their individual interchangeability and disposability on northern
Alabama’s agricultural and industrial production platforms (Kelley 1990; Painter 1979; B. M. Wilson 2000).4 State forces eventually
crushed the movement, yet the submerged remnants of the union,
according to its indigenous leadership, formed the already existing
regional foundation for wartime organizing and postwar antiracist activism (C. L. R. James 1980).
Today, Justice for Janitors (JfJ) is a innovative labor movement in which neither work site nor occupation has served as a
sufficient organizational structure in the low-wage service industry (Johnston 1994; Erickson et al. 2002). Learning from his-
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 193
tory, JfJ’s strategy has been to exploit the otherwise inhibiting
features of the labor market by pursuing a “geographical” approach to organization (Wial 1993; Johnston 1994). In the massive layoffs of the late 1970s and early 1980s, firms broke janitorial unions that African Americans and others had painstakingly
built under the aegis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) during and after World War II (C. L. R. James 1980). Industry subcontracted maintenance and thereby negated labor’s
hard-won work-site-by-work-site agreements.
The ensuing proliferation of small, easily reorganized janitorial service contractors made actual employers moving targets,
and traditional forms of wage bargaining thus became impossible to carry out or enforce.5 Furthermore, janitors working
under the new arrangements, often at less than minimum wage,
have not been the same people who by 1980 had fought for and
won hourly wages of $10 or more (in 1980 dollars). Thus, in addition to pressing employers for contracts, JfJ’s solution was to
organize both the actual market for janitorial services (hotels, for
example, rather than contractors) and the potential labor market
for janitors. This limits employers’ flexibility, because it is their
actual and potential clients who agree to do business only with
unionized contractors. The solution has also required that labor
organizing be community organizing as well, as was the case with
the CPUSA’s work in 1930s greater Birmingham. To appeal to
former janitors in target areas, and to potential janitors wherever
they may might be, the JfJ approach is a bottom-up strategy to
develop comprehensive regional plans that include, but are not
reducible to, setting minimal standards for wages that employed
individuals (janitors or not) might expect (Wial 1993; Parker and
Rodgers 1995; see also Faue 1990).6
194 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
Public Mothers The divisions between home and work,
private and public, on the stage of capitalist culture seem for
many the self-evident, natural limits to particular kinds of
conflict. When political conflicts show the holes in those limits,
new possibilities for organizing unfold. As we have seen, Black
working-class women politicized the material and ideological
distance between their paid and unwaged labor by traversing the
streets. More recently, janitors around the United States have
taken their clandestine exploitation public on a number of fronts,
combining community-based organizing with frontline publicsphere militancy led by immigrants who gained experience as
oppositional subjects of, for example, Salvadoran state terrorism
(Pulido 1996).
In Argentina, under the fascist military government
(1977–83), Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo defied the presumption that women should not meddle in affairs of the state—
which is to say the male, or public, sphere—by organizing on the
basis of a simple and culturally indisputable claim that mothers
ought to know where their children are (Fisher 1989; Bouvard
1994). The fascists’ nightly abductions of teenage and adult children—most of whom were never seen again—effectively coerced neighbors who had not yet been touched to avert their eyes
and keep their mouths closed. However, a cadre of mothers, who
first encountered one another in the interstices of the terrorist
state—waiting rooms, courtrooms, and the information desks of
jails and detention centers—eventually took their quest into the
Plaza de Mayo. There, with the eyes of the nation and eventually
the world on them, they demanded both the return of their disappeared and the names of those who had perpetrated the terror.
The mothers dressed for recognition, wearing head scarves
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 195
made of diapers, on which each had written or embroidered the
name(s) of her disappeared (M. E. Anderson 1993; Bouvard
1994; Femenía 1987; Fisher 1989; Mellibovsky 1997; Sepúlveda
1996).
The Madres’ fundamental position, echoing and echoed by
similar movements in such places as South Africa, Palestine, and
El Salvador was, and is, that children are not alienable (Harlow
1992; Tula 1994). In order to make this position politically material, in the face of continuous terror, the Madres permanently
drew back the curtain between private and public, making “maternal” activism on behalf of children a daily job conducted as
visibly and methodically as possible. The Madres’ persistence,
both before and after the official admission that the children
had died horribly, transformed the passion of individual grief
into the politics of collective opposition (Mellibovsky 1997). Betrayed in the early years by state and church officials alike, by
military, police, bureaucrats, and priests, the Madres learned to
challenge institutions as well as individuals, and, as their analysis became enriched by experience, they situated their disappeared in the context of political-economic crisis. Thus, when a
redemocratized Argentina emerged, they did not return to
hearth and home but rather expanded their political horizons,
shifting their focus to the effects of the country’s structural adjustment program, which widened and deepened poverty and
reduced opportunities for young people (Fisher 1989; Sims 1996).
As we shall see, Mothers ROC emerged in a politicaleconomic climate as hostile as that which formed each group we
have briefly examined. ROC’s solutions to the problems constituting the daily struggle to reclaim the children drew on the
structural features of radical self-help, on the strategies of orga-
196 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
nizing on every platform where conflict is enacted, and on the argument that mothers should extend their techniques as mothers
beyond the veil of traditional domestic spheres. In a word, they
realized the “consciencization” (Freire 1970) of motherhood,
such that one need not be a woman or a parent to participate in
an action-based critique of vulnerability grounded in, but not
bounded by, local conditions.
FREE GILBERT JONES: THE EARLY POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY
OF MOTHERS ROC
Mothers suffer a special pain when their children are incarcerated (lost to
them). It was from this pain and suffering that Mothers ROC was born! We are
an organization of Mothers (and others) whose children have been arrested &
incarcerated. We fight against the police abuse, the false arrests & convictions
and the unfair treatment throughout the Justice System. We educate ourselves
and our young about the workings of the Criminal Justice System.
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 1995 FLYER
Nobody disputes that on November 29, 1991, a Los Angeles Police Department officer shot George Noyes to death at the Imperial Courts public housing project, outside the homes of his
mother and grandmother. The still-raging controversy concerns
whether he was armed, whether he was kneeling, and whether
he was begging for his life. According to members of the George
Noyes Justice Committee, he was executed by a notoriously brutal policewoman. According to the LAPD, he was a gangster run
amok. No charges were ever filed in the case.
The killing provoked a grassroots rearrangement of power
throughout South Central Los Angeles, producing along the way
both the 1992 LA gang truce and Mothers Reclaiming Our Children. Formerly an active gang member, George had recently
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 197
moved to Sacramento to get out of the life. He died while home
for the Thanksgiving holidays. For his family members and
friends who began organizing, the nature of George’s violent end
epitomized their collective experience and dread of the LAPD.7
Two of the dead man’s cousins, Gilbert and Jocelyn Jones, and
their mother, Barbara Meredith, initiated the work of figuring
out how those most vulnerable to state violence could begin systematically to shield themselves from it. Family, neighbors, and
visitors at Imperial Courts, including George’s mother, grandmother, siblings, aunt, and cousins, began to testify among themselves about what they had seen, what they had heard, and how
the death could only be explained as murder. Such discussion is
typical wherever poor people are harassed, hurt, or killed by police (see, for examples, Piven and Cloward 1971; Hall et al. 1978).
The political problem centers on what to do with the energy that
fears and traumas produce. Does the state’s discipline work?
Does it terrorize everyone into silence, by dividing the “good”
from the “bad,” by intensifying anxieties that lead to premature
deaths due to alcoholism and drug addictions (including cigarettes), heart disease, suicide, crimes of passion, and other killers
that relentlessly stalk the urban working and workless poor (see
Greenberg and Schneider 1994; R. W. Gilmore 2002a, 2002b).
In order to persuade as many residents as possible that the
death concerned them all, the family formed the George Noyes
Justice Committee, which met in the all-purpose room at Imperial Courts to plan ways to fight the wrongful death. To mark the
moment further, Barbara, Gilbert, and Jocelyn decided to walk
the neighborhood, starting with the three South Central public
housing projects, and ask the gangs to declare a one-day truce so
that all of George’s family and friends—who lived scattered
198 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
about the area—could attend the funeral. The dangers of the pilgrimage were many: Gilbert was a well-known gang member
who could not pass through the streets freely. His sister Jocelyn
and mother, Barbara, could not identify themselves as George’s
or Gilbert’s relatives without simultaneously revealing their familial connections to—and therefore exposing themselves as—
potential enemies. And finally, since neither Jocelyn nor Barbara
lived in housing projects, residents might easily view them as
outsiders making trouble in locations intensely surveilled
through a number of means, including helicopters, on-site security, caseworkers from income assistance programs, and periodic
LAPD raids (Mike Davis 1990).
To reassure residents that she was not an “outside agitator”
but rather a grieving aunt, fearful mother, and good sister, Barbara started to hold meetings for women, especially mothers, at
Imperial Courts. She explains:
I believed we had to start taking care of our children. The police would not think they could get away with shooting our
children down in cold blood if we took better care of them. So I
started [what eventually became] Mothers ROC at Imperial
Courts. We would meet once or twice a week. We talked about
grooming, about how to brush and braid your daughter’s hair.
How your children should look when they leave your house.
How they should talk to the police, to strangers, to each other.
It seemed to me it was up to us to change things, by doing what
we already knew how to do. Our mothers had taught us everything. And our grandmothers, and our aunts, and the ladies
next door. They all taught us so we could have a better life. So
we have to teach our children for them to have a better life. I
think we let them down because we stopped teaching them and
talking to them. . . . My [late] husband and I both worked, all
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 199
day, every day, so our kids could have the things we never had.
We thought it was the right thing to do, to work hard and to
make our children’s lives easier than our lives. But we didn’t
make their lives easier, we made them harder. And now we
have to teach them, and let them teach us where we went
wrong.
Born on the eve of World War II, Barbara grew up in
Louisiana, enmeshed by formal and informal community networks of family and friends (see, for example, hooks 1990, chs.
5–6). She married a career military man, lived on bases around
the United States, including Alaska, and eventually settled in Los
Angeles, where she was widowed as her four children reached
adulthood. While many African Americans in Los Angeles
achieved modest prosperity during the defense boom of World
War II, their segregation from good jobs started at the war’s end,
and every subsequent recession has hit the community with lasting severity (Soja and Scott 1996). When the old heavy industries
(steel, tire, auto, and to some degree oil) cut workers or closed
plants and the waterfront mechanized, direct loss of those jobs,
in combination with the disappearance of jobs reliant on that industrial core, left the city’s Black working-class men without access to alternative high-wage local industries (Grant et al. 1996;
Oliver et al. 1993; Peery 1994; Soja 1989).
Many women from the “stranded communities” (Jacqueline
Jones 1992) concentrated in the projects enthusiastically welcomed Barbara’s meetings. They could talk about themselves,
their hopes and disappointments, their interrupted life plans. As
many as sixty mothers and daughters (and sometimes young
sons, but rarely any boys over four or five years old) might attend
one of the sessions, and they eagerly put themselves to the tasks
200 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
of doing each other’s hair, and staging fashion shows, while talking about their loved ones who had died violently, who were in
prison, or who had simply disappeared. According to Barbara,
most of the women were engaged in the informal economy, selling legal goods or providing lawful services for unreported income (see, e.g., Spalter-Roth et al. 1992; Hartmann 1996). At the
same time, concern about joblessness—their own, their children’s fathers’, their children’s, and especially their sons’—dominated the discussions that did not focus on grooming, nutrition,
or violent premature deaths. The women reported from experience what scholars prove again and again: in the United States,
certain types of people have access to certain types of jobs. For
Black people looking out from the jail-like complex of Imperial
Courts, the landscape of legitimate work was bleak: an expanse
of big, empty factories, minimum-wage service jobs in retail or
home health care, unreliable, slow, and expensive public transportation, and bad schools leading nowhere in terms of education and skills (see also Sklar 1995). Barbara forged an alliance
among women in the projects in spite of her own outsider status
by appealing to a capacity the group achieved through coordinated maternal practices; they made critical the activities of
mothering as necessary, social, and consequential by doing, collectively, what they already knew how to do as individuals
(Collins 1990).
At the same time, Barbara, Gilbert, and Jocelyn achieved the
one-day truce, by persuading the gangs—temporarily—to suture South Central’s divisions and shift their everyday capacity to
act as extralegal “shadow states” by realigning their practices
from small-scale “interstate” rivalries to an areawide alliance.8
They walked and talked with people in the three projects and
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 201
along the streets between them, emphasizing how everyone
could relate to a family who had lost a loved one and everyone
could tell a tale of police violence. Rodney King’s beating in
March of that year provided a ready and politically charged referent that even extremely hostile listeners could recognize, and it
transformed highly segmented groupings into a provisional “we”
who might mediate the gang-controlled divisions of Los Angeles’s streets. Little by little, the older male gang members began
to acknowledge their collective power and what it could mean
for Rodney King, for George Noyes, for many others, and for
themselves, should they decide to allow everyone one day’s free
passage through the streets of South Central.
The men also agreed to a truce in the name of the grieving
mothers. They extended their commonsense notion of the gangs
as “families” and thereby recognized a central familial figure’s
claim on their care. “Mother” became, in name, George’s mother,
for whom Barbara, her sister, was a stand-in. Barbara’s ability to
speak from her heart, to express a mother’s pain at losing a child,
and to acknowledge her own son’s gangster status without glorification or shame, touched men for whom George’s death was, at
least at first, of minimal importance. On behalf of Barbara, of
George’s mother, of “mothers,” the men agreed to redirect their
power and to instruct the gangs to police their streets and themselves in order for the dead man’s family to gather for a big,
peaceful funeral.
The two groups—mothers and gangs—quite rapidly developed a process of identification, focused, at the outset, on realizing a common interest—an ordinary funeral for a man many of
them did not know. But while they came together in the name of
children and of mothers, their goal became action in the context
202 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
of their more general interest to struggle against the conditions
that required so much organizing to precede such a homely affair as a burial. The everyday brutality that provoked Barbara
and her children to bring this particular funeral to the foreground of consciousness provided material and symbolic shape
for what was to follow. The interest embodied by those who attended, or who helped secure, George’s peaceful services gave
way to a sense of purpose not bounded by a gravesite or a day.
The developing identity of purpose cast the spatially unified
legal state as the legitimate object of resistance and opposition
against which to organize future actions.
The next stage of organizing followed shortly after George’s
December 9 funeral. During the services, mothers and others
who spoke in his memory called for a rally to protest the police
murder. At the same time, the imam of a nearby independent
mosque offered it as a sanctuary where the gangsters could work
to extend the truce across time and space. The gang reconciliation first embraced the rally: more than five hundred people
turned out at the 108th Street Station to accuse the police of murder and to announce the end of the community’s passivity, vulnerability, and complicity with respect to the brutal treatment too
often doled out by the hands of the law (Donner 1990).9
Throughout the winter of 1991–92, Gilbert and a number of
other gang members, inspired by the turn of events, continued
the peacemaking process, each day bringing in more people from
a wider and wider region of South Central. Word went out
through all sorts of networks, alerting Black gangsters everywhere to the possibilities of the historic moment. Barbara attended every meeting at the mosque and continued to hold the
self-help discussion groups at Imperial Courts, where women
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 203
from other projects would sometimes show up to see what was
going on. Gang members from the truce meetings would come
to report their progress, and women other than Barbara would
also attend meetings at the mosque to monitor the proceedings.
The George Noyes Justice Committee also continued to meet,
with the object of finding an opening in fortress LAPD through
which they could successfully lob their charges of wrongful
death.
Shortly after 10:30 p.m. on February 16, 1992, just as a Justice
Committee fund-raising dance at the Imperial Courts allpurpose room was about to end, the LAPD showed up at the
door to arrest Gilbert. They charged him with taking ten dollars
during an armed robbery that had allegedly occurred outside the
building moments earlier. The problem of justice for George
immediately widened to include his cousin Gilbert. Barbara,
convinced that the purpose of her son’s arrest was to stop the
work she and her children had started, began to organize on his
behalf as well.
While Gilbert was in custody, fighting for his freedom, the
Los Angeles uprising (April 29–May 2) changed the city’s political mood. Three days of “multicultural riots” (Mike Davis cited
in Katz and Smith 1993) produced both new unities and new divisions. The uprising began in the afternoon, after a Simi Valley
jury acquitted the four LAPD men who had beaten Rodney
King, a motorist who had apparently committed several misdemeanors.10 Millions had viewed the videotape of the beating by
an eyewitness, George Holiday, which had been extensively and
intensively broadcast for more than a year (R. W. Gilmore 1993;
Madhubuti 1993; Gooding-Williams 1993).
Friend and foe widely attributed the truce to the uprising.
204 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
However, according to participants and witnesses, a month earlier, on March 29, the peacemakers of the Los Angeles gang
worlds met at the independent South Central mosque to sign
their historic declaration. Indeed, the riots did not produce the
truce; rather, the truce, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, and
the uprising were all expressions of the same objective conditions
that characterized relations between the state and stranded
Black, Brown, and other poor communities throughout deindustrializing Los Angeles.
Like the trial of the four LAPD officers, Gilbert’s also
changed venue. But whereas the trial of the former was moved
to Simi Valley, where they were more likely to have a jury of their
peers (e.g., police or retired military), the state relocated Gilbert’s
case from Compton—where seating a Black jury is quite easy—
to the Long Beach courtroom of an “antigang” judge, Marvin
Doolittle. Despite the testimony of numerous witnesses who
were with him at the time of the robbery, the jury found Gilbert
guilty, and, despite further testimony at the sentencing hearing
by former Governor Jerry Brown, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and others concerning his peacemaking achievements, the
judge bound the young man over to the custody of the California Department of Corrections (CDC) to serve seven years for a
ten-dollar robbery.
For Barbara, the injustice in both cases made it clear that the
object of struggle was not only the South East station house of the
LAPD Southern Division. It was the state, at many levels, that
had taken her son away, just as it was the state, at many levels,
that had enabled the police to take her nephew’s life. The CDC
assigned her son to Susanville, a prison located more than 500
miles from Los Angeles, where the white supremacist Aryan
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 205
Brotherhood reputedly dominated the prisoner population. This
assignment terrorized the family on two accounts. First, they
feared that his notoriety as a Black gang peace activist would
bring him into conflict with the Aryans. Second, Barbara had
suffered a heart attack during the fall of 1992, and she was not
able to make the long journey to visit him. The ROC launched a
successful political campaign to have Gilbert moved closer to
home, and he spent about half his time in Tehachapi, about 150
miles north of home, and was released on parole after serving
three years and eleven months.11
The project to “Free Gilbert Jones” also marked the beginning of the formal organization of Mothers ROC. In alliance
with a number of other South Central mothers, many of whom
had children of all ages in custody as a result of the uprising, Barbara started to hold regular sidewalk protests downtown: at the
main Los Angeles County Courthouse, and at Parker Center, the
LAPD headquarters. During this phase, in November 1992,
Francie Arbol, a Los Angeles activist, met Barbara through the
intervention of an LA-based writer who had been impressed
both by Gilbert’s accomplishments and by Barbara’s eloquent
persistence. Together, Francie and Barbara founded Mothers
ROC.
FROM IMPERIAL COURTS TO THE STATE COURTS
The formation of Mothers ROC as a political group seeking justice coincided with the restructuring of the Communist Labor
Party, which had organized in several U.S. cities in the 1950s.
The African American revolutionary Nelson Peery founded the
small party. His consciousness of race and class oppression had
developed while he rode the rails as a teenage laborer during the
206 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
Great Depression and further evolved while he served in the Pacific theater during World War II (Peery 1994). The group was
renowned in radical Los Angeles circles for grassroots, issueoriented organizing with nonmembers.
Francie Arbol, daughter of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants,
had joined the party as a teenager in the 1960s. She had always
worked on both workplace and community-based issues arising
from exploitation and injustice, while raising her two daughters—mostly alone—on a bookkeeper’s wages. She brought to
Mothers ROC a systematic analysis of social structures and political economy, cast in colloquial terms, and a keen sense of how
to get things done. Unafraid to engage in spirited debate, she also
carried through on any group-chosen project, regardless of her
opinion of it.
When Francie and Barbara sat together to plan the contours
of an action-oriented group of mothers, it was in the garage office of the disbanded Communist Labor Party’s ongoing community organization, the Equal Rights Congress (ERC). The office was about a mile north of the infamous intersection where
Reginald Denny and the LA Four had their fateful encounter
and seventy-five blocks northwest from the site of George
Noyes’s murder. The garage sits on property belonging to the Society of Friends, and the livingroom of the small front house became Mothers ROC’s regular meeting place. The house has long
been a location for activists to meet, a surprisingly pacific oasis in
a neighborhood in constant flux. People who live in South Central, as well as those from outlying communities, are not afraid to
go there because the house is not “of” any particular group’s turf.
By linking Mothers ROC to the other projects of the ERC,
Barbara and Francie started out with amenities others struggle
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 207
long to acquire: an office, a telephone, one of the world’s oldest
copiers, and a convenient meeting place on neutral ground. They
announced a regular Wednesday evening meeting beginning in
November. African American mothers came—six, then ten,
then twenty, then twenty-five or more. They came to talk about
the injustice of the LAPD case compared with that of the LA
Four; they came to talk about their own children’s and other
loved ones’ cases; they came because there was someone, at last,
with whom they could talk about what concerned and frightened them most.
Most of the women who had so enthusiastically participated
in Barbara’s mothering sessions down at Imperial Courts did
not come, although Mothers ROC’s central premise had not
changed. Barbara remained consistent in her invocation of collective mothering as the practice from which political action
springs. However, the outright politics of the formal organization apparently deterred some, especially given its dedication to
confronting the state head- on. This aspect seemed dangerous
to people who live intensively policed lives. Francie’s role discouraged others who, perceiving her as white, would not trust
her as a matter of course. And finally some came and left because rumors that communists controlled the new group spread
rapidly thanks to the perhaps inadvertently strategic intervention of two Black policemen.
According to the story that circulated widely through the organization and beyond, the two policemen called on the parent
of an LA Four defendant to warn her that her son’s case would
go much better if she disassociated herself from “those communists” in Mothers ROC. Many disputed the visit’s purpose: some
said the police were trying to break up the group, and others
208 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
maintained they were trying to help a struggling Black woman,
known personally to one of them, who did not understand the
consequences of her activism.12 The news provoked a crisis in the
ROC. Some women wanted Francie expelled; others, including
the mother in question, quit. Barbara and Francie held special
meetings one weekend at several locations in the city and county,
where they fielded questions and engaged in fiery debates about
communists, racism, and justice.
Francie candidly discussed her reasons for having become a
communist, and also described how the party had, in her view,
outlived its usefulness. She also refused to quit the ROC and
made clear to those who planned to flee her influence that if she
was the biggest problem in their lives, they would not have
joined Mothers ROC in the first place. The brutality of the police, the menace of prosecutors, and the meanness of judges with
respect to their children was not a response to communism. But
could the specter of communism make things worse? Barbara reminded the group that the ROC’s purpose did not preclude any
kind of person from joining and being active—as long as they
worked toward the goal of justice.
The debates followed an intricate pattern, demonstrating the
rich complexities of common sense in this particular time and
place (cf. Gramsci 1971; Stuart Hall 1986). The systematic critique of state power with respect to criminalized children required the mothers also to question the authority of the state’s
representatives—police, judges, and prosecutors and other
lawyers. Setting communism aside for the moment, the mothers
would agree in one voice that their problem was, indeed, violence
and systemic injustice. Yet when confronted by the fact of a (former) communist in their midst—even as the Soviet Union was
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 209
collapsing—many of the women absolutely embraced the government’s definition of the collective enemy, for whom Francie,
a tiny activist, was a stand-in. Most of the women had attended
elementary school during the Cold War buildup in the 1950s,
and the lessons they had learned—whether lining up for civil defense drills or studying the geography of “the free world”—informed their current evaluation of possibility and danger. Furthermore, the connection of communism with atheism sat ill
with women for whom, as we shall see, God and prayer are vital
sources of guidance and strength.
What Barbara and Francie and their allies had to do was help
the women see and say that their own children—not the “communists”—were the new official enemy now (R. W. Gilmore
1993). Even if the policemen represented authentic African
American anticommunist fears, rather than the designs of the
county prosecutor, the outcome would not change. Others versed
in radical traditions spoke up during the agonizing debates, but
the heat stayed mainly on Francie, who stalwartly took it. She was
not the only apparent Anglo in the group at the time, but the combination of her ascribed race, radical roots, and refusal to yield—
plus her blunt confrontational style—kept Francie downstage
center during the crisis.
The crisis resolved into a truce among those who stayed, forcing the group to mature quickly into an organization foritself despite substantial internal differences. The process heightened
suspicions but also enhanced everybody’s sense of political identity. That is, while disagreeing with the “politics” figured by
Francie and others, the women enacted an alternative political
vision by remaining in the fight as the ROC. They made clear to
all who inquired that mothers, not some hidden cadre of white
210 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
or Black communists, openly and deliberately set the agendas for
action. Severance of the ROC from the Equal Rights Congress
gave symbolic emphasis to the organization’s insistence on autonomy, even though the meeting place, office, and telephone
number did not change.
In this period, the group’s actions, formerly centered on the
Gilbert Jones and LA Four cases, became generalized so that the
ROC could act quickly and consistently on new cases. Members
set up systems of court monitoring and legal workshops. Mothers
would attend court sessions, either for the cases of other mothers
or randomly to see what was happening to defendants. Over time,
this system became a palpable presence in the halls of Southland
county courthouses—especially in Los Angeles. Bailiffs, prosecutors, public defenders, and judges began to recognize that, in Bernice Hatfield’s words, “nice Negro ladies with big handbags”
were watching and noting. Indeed, some judges ordered the
women not to write while court was in session. They would scribble a clandestine note or two and then write up or dictate the proceedings afterward. Judges who issued such orders got more,
rather than fewer, observers in their courtrooms. Some mothers
who had difficulty with the written word would simply pretend
to take notes and rely on their substantial memories to reconstruct
events at the end of the legal day.
Mothers also monitored relations between defendants and their
attorneys—usually public defenders—and began to hold workshops with activist lawyers in order to learn about the best way to
work with legal representation. The workshops became primary
centers for people to learn about topics such as acting as one’s own
lawyer; sentence enhancement; and related issues. One recurring
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 211
issue was the belief that a private attorney is better than a public defender—the belief is rooted in the commonsense American notion
that “you get what you pay for.” The fact that working people including the ROCers “pay” for all the public defenders via taxation
is invisible in this schema. However, in the ROC, automatic distrust
of public defenders (known on the street as “public pretenders”)
gradually gave way to a view of how rapid growth in industrialized
punishment produced both overworked public defenders and a
concomitant expansion of unscrupulous private lawyers looking to
make a sure dollar.13 This critique further sharpened the ROC’s
perception of the crisis as a political question—what should the state
be like?—as well as a legal question—how do we correct wrongs
in the courtroom?
The shift in location and project—from the meetings at Imperial Courts to the full-fledged Mothers ROC poised to take on
the state courts—represented a change in the social position of
the women as a group. Nearly all the ROCers worked for wages
in the formal economy; and those who did not were disabled
(generally by ailments exacerbated by poverty and stress, such as
diabetes, heart disease, and cancer) or retired. Many noted the
bitter irony that in order to become full-time mothers for the first
time, they had to lose one or more children to the system. More
than half were homeowners living in modest stucco or frame
bungalows, or condominiums. They were all keenly conscious
that they had something to lose. The structure of Mothers ROC
gave them a framework for hope as well as for action, encouraging an expansion of political scope from immediate legal remedies to a wider exposition and assault on the criminal justice system as a whole.
212 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
A MOTHER’S PLEA FOR HELP: LAW, SPACE, AND SOLIDARITY
Early on a Thursday morning in 1992, just before that year’s long
Independence Day weekend, a dozen officers from the San
Bernardino and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Departments and
the West Covina Police kicked in Bernice Hatfield’s front door.
Hearing what sounded like an explosion, followed by footsteps,
falling furniture, and shouting, Bernice rushed to the top of the
stairs in her modest suburban condominium, and looked down
on a vision of terror. Guns drawn, the police stood in the kneesbent, two-hands-on-the pistol crouch that tells every television
viewer that bullets are sure to fly. The officers were calling for the
surrender of her seventeen year-old son, “Stick,” and they
hollered at her to put her hands where they could see them. Bernice raised her hands over her head and edged down the stairs,
trembling as she asked over and over again, “What are you doing
here? What do you want?” As it turned out, they wanted to
charge Stick with six counts of attempted murder. The officers
took the teenager away that morning; and for the next decade,
Bernice fought against what in her periodic newsletter, A
Mother’s Plea for Help, she called “the legal kidnapping of my
child.”
Never a naive woman, Bernice grew up Black and working
class in a postwar southern New England city, living inequality
and racism in generally unremarkable ways. Determined not to
be poor all her life, she studied hard in school, became a nurse, and
worked for twenty years to care for and reassure the sick and suffering. Bernice thought she knew about how the justice system
worked. While she did not expect it to be truly unbiased, she did
expect that when someone is charged with a crime, there is probably some evidence, whether genuine or bogus. The “people’s”
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 213
case against her son consisted of contradictory testimony and
there were no injuries, no gun, no motive, and no clear reason for
him to have been brought up on charges in the first place. Yet he
was charged, and as a gang member.
The powers of and pressures on the principal players in the
criminal justice system were augmented by the California Street
Terrorism Enhancement and Prevention Act (STEP Act) of
1988, and a host of related laws. California declared war on gangs
during the first phase of the prison expansion program in the mid
1980s, and specifically targeted Los Angeles County, where Bernice and her family lived, as the region where new programs
would be developed. Sacramento directed local law enforcement
agencies to identify all gang members in their jurisdictions so
that the state could develop a comprehensive, centralized gang
database.
Stick had never before been in custody, but about a year earlier, after he was pulled over for a motor vehicle infraction, his
name had been entered into the state’s gang database. In early
1993, after he and his mother rejected a plea bargain offering him
six years in the Youth Authority, the prosecutors decided to try
him on the six counts. With sentence enhancements, or extra
time per charge, due to his gangster status, the state assured him
that he faced ninety-one years in prison. Stick, who by then had
turned eighteen, decided to accept the bargain, which required
him to confess guilt and to waive any rights to an appeal; in the
interim, the prosecutor increased the minimum term from six to
nineteen years, even though nothing in the case had changed except Stick’s age. Bernice could not legally intervene, because the
child had reached majority. In her view, he had been coerced into
the confession by those who promised him a lifetime behind bars
214 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
if he went to trial and lost. Young and scared, he tried to act hard
and worldly. Although Stick was a minor at the time of his arrest,
the sentencing judge bound him over to the custody of the California Department of Corrections (CDC) Adult Authority.
The morning the police first took her younger son away, Bernice stepped into a role she could never have imagined herself
playing: that of a mother who would reach out to strangers and
ask anyone who might listen to help her get her child back. At
first she did everything herself, driving fifty miles round-trip to
her nursing job each day in addition to traveling forty miles
round-trip in the opposite direction for Stick. She visited with
her son, met with the public defender, checked up on the private
investigator, confronted the prosecutor, interrogated the psychiatric evaluators, and sat stony-faced at the hearings.
Bernice found that while she was struggling to free her child,
because his arrest was simply a mistake, the state was working
systematically to hold onto him, because his arrest was part of a
program to take people “like him” off the streets. For Bernice,
the crucial given was that her son had never been in trouble with
the law before; for the state, the crucial given was his prior identification as a gang member. For a long time, she refused to engage the state on its own terms, because she thought things
should work out fairly: “I believed I had constitutional rights. I
mean, I really thought I had constitutional rights. But I found
out . . . in the courtroom . . . that I am a second-class citizen. The
Constitution does not apply to me.”
For African Americans there is nothing new in realizing, once
again, second-class citizen status (Du Bois [1935] 1992; Sykes
1988; Fields 1990). But while repetition is part of the deadly
drama of living in a racial state, the particular challenge is to
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 215
work out the specific realignments of the social structure in a period of rapid change.
Toward the end of one of her long, lonely days, before the confession and plea-bargain deal was struck, Bernice drove toward
home from a visit with Stick, frightened that they were losing
and unable to understand why. She happened to tune in a radio
program about the trial of the LA Four and heard a defendant’s
mother talking about ROC. While Bernice had thrown herself
into her child’s case because she was his mother, she had never
thought about forming alliances with parents in similar circumstances. Keenly aware that being able to claim her maternal relation to Stick made some difference—court officers and bureaucrats might return a mother’s call or respond to one who
spends hours waiting on molded plastic seats in anterooms or
standing in corridors—Bernice decided to attend a Mothers
ROC meeting to see if they could help her.
The ROCers encouraged her to get her story out, to start a
chapter over in her part of the county, and to reach out to other
mothers like herself in the places where she spent so much time
on Stick’s behalf. Bernice promptly wrote the first edition of A
Mother’s Plea for Help. She visited a number of copy shops looking for affordable rates and found an establishment run by a man
who became sympathetic with her cause after she explained her
plight. He agreed to let her use his machines at a discounted rate;
and she began to produce her news on brightly colored paper
(usually orange, sometimes startling blue) to catch the prospective reader’s eye. Combining narrative, scripture, and cartoons,
Bernice’s two-to-six-page broadsides attracted the attention of
mothers and others engaged in the unwaged reproductive labor
of reclaiming the future by saving their children.
216 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
Eventually, Bernice established a regional meeting in the Inland Empire (the area straddling the nexus of Los Angeles, San
Bernardino, and Riverside Counties). Every Saturday, new
mothers and others arrived at a Pomona coffeehouse with a
broad range of problems; some were trying to stop drug dealers
on their streets; others had lost their children to the Department
of Youth and Family Services and wanted them back. Men from
churches, the Nation of Islam, and several local Black fraternal
organizations came to observe and offer help. They also came to
let the ROCers know that city and street politics were already
under the informal jurisdiction of the old urban coalition organizations such as the NAACP and the churches; thus any new
organizing required the blessing of particular power brokers. It
quickly became clear that the stages and stakes of the old struggles—churches, city hall, the schools, the civil service—would be
helpful but hardly adequate to the new struggle. The implicit
caution and challenge from the old civil rights elites, then, came
to nothing for two reasons. First, their highly developed localism
availed little against a state-organized criminalization project
consisting of combined and overlapping jurisdictions. Second,
under the weight of the region’s ongoing political-economic crisis, the golden-age Black-white coalitions were crumbling, while
at the same time Chicana/os’ achievement of elected and appointed positions signaled certain, if unpredictable, changes to
come (cf. Sonenshein 1993).
The ROCers determined to find out about the STEP Act under
which Stick had been charged and sentenced. One Saturday afternoon, a group gathered in a California lawyer’s library to read
up on the law. None of the participants was an attorney, but they
had extensive experience in research and writing, and they as-
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 217
sumed it would take them an hour or two at most to find the
statute and write a statement about it for a flyer. Several hours into
their quest, they all realized that the arcana of legal letters starts at
the most fundamental level of organization; an outsider could not
simply slide her finger down a table of contents or index to find a
law. A subcommittee of the group found the law’s text the following week by talking their way into a library with an electronic legal
database service, and doing electronic subject searches.14
The STEP Act, and the events leading up to its implementation, made abundantly clear what the mothers feared: the “system” had for years been designating a profile of young persons
whose rights and prospects were statutorily different from those
of others in their cohort. The Task Force on Youth Gang Violence
had stipulated that the region most in need of surveillance and
control was in the Southland, and that Black and Brown youths
were most likely to be gang members (California State Task
Force 1986). While it had stretched the analysis of gang violence
to encompass suicidal propensities among white middle-class
“Heavy Metal” and “Satanic” gangs, the task force absolutely ignored, for instance, the growing skinhead and neo-Nazi gangs
concentrated in the Southland (R. W. Gilmore 1993b).
The act’s directive compelling local enforcement to identify all
gang members in their jurisdictions seemed to the mothers likely
to produce indiscriminate listings that would include people based
on race and space, and that this, in turn, would transform any
kind of youthful stepping out of line into major confrontations
with the system. Acting on their new knowledge about the STEP
Act, the ROCers decided to expand their stage of activism in order
to prepare audiences and future actors for what the drama was really all about. They produced a flyer titled MOTHERS WARN
218 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
YOUR CHILDREN, alerting principal caregivers to forbid their
dependents to sign papers or allow their pictures to be taken by
police on the street. Minors should insist that their parents be
called. Adults should politely but firmly demur. The flyers were
extremely effective ways to start conversations at bus stops, in the
blistering sun at the county jail parking lot, and outside schools,
courthouses, and police stations. Both men and women took the
flyers—often promising to duplicate and distribute them at
church or work. New people arrived at the Inland Empire meeting, flyer in hand, to learn more about the act.
Bernice had to expand her daily activities. The combined
events of Stick’s confession and the discovery of the STEP Act increased her labor; in addition to duties of home, job, and the
court/jail complex, she now had to learn more about how the act
and related laws worked, politically and juridically, and whether
anyone had successfully opposed the statutes. Chastened by the
afternoon in the lawyer’s library, she started spending her free
days in the library at the UCLA Law School. By browsing and
asking the reference librarian strategic questions, Bernice discovered how to find summaries of recent cases and judgments,
how to find the full arguments of those cases, and how to compare the growing stacks of paper to Stick’s case.
In the short run, neither new knowledge nor new comrades
made Bernice’s struggle easier; on the contrary, she realized that
she would have to work longer and harder hours as the mother of
a kidnapped child. Since Stick’s accomplices were never charged
with anything, since people not enrolled in gang databases charged
with similar offenses receive far lighter sentences, and since young
people from different racial, class, or regional positions are often
diverted to rehabilitation programs, Bernice set out to make the
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 219
case of discriminatory prosecution, augmented by other claims,
such as ineffective counsel. Indeed, Bernice perceived what had
once been a state-identified chink in its own armor a generation
earlier, when the first set of postwar federal antigang street crime
acts was enacted between 1968 and 1970.15 At that time, law enforcement hesitated to exercise the statutes because of civil rights
concerns—especially in the area of discriminatory prosecution.
However, more than two decades of political-economic crisis, coupled with intensive and extensive crime sensationalism in the
media (political campaigns, news programming, reality-based
shows, movies, and television series), had produced the notion that
some people’s rights should be restricted based on prior patterns of
behavior, which was now perceived as common sense.16
The intensification of Bernice’s anxieties and labors on behalf
of her son, coupled with her new occupation helping out and reassuring other mothers in similar predicaments, impeded her
nursing. She had always derived great satisfaction from caring for
sick people. However, not long before Stick’s troubles began, a
racist patient in the regional hospital where she had worked for
several years had informed a floor supervisor that he did not want
the Black nurse to touch him. Bernice decided to find a new job
serving a predominantly African American clientele, and she
loved looking after “my Black patients,” most of whom suffered
from chronic, and often terminal, ailments. As is the case with so
much “women’s” work, nursing requires physical, intellectual,
and emotional labor (Cobble 1991; Duffy 2005). This, on top of
Stick’s plight, wore Bernice out—especially emotionally. Ironically, she gave up “women’s” paid work in order to do “women’s”
unpaid work, her inability to nurse enabling her to become a fulltime mother. But full-time mothering meant being a “co-mother”
220 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
(Tula 1994) with the ROCers, an advocate for her son and all the
others—adults and children—caught up in the system.
The web of laws and mandates the ROCers found themselves
tangled in was so complex that it seemed to many mothers as
though the public defenders who could take the time to explain
things were spinning tales. Eventually, however, the stories revealed patterns to investigate. Gilda Garcia’s testimony exemplified many sociospatial constraints of everyday life for ROCers
and their families:
And then she [the public defender] said, “The reason the prosecutor can add the extra time is because your son was within 500
feet of a school when he was picked up.” My son went to bring
his little brother home from school! That’s why he was at the
school. La migra waits by schools to catch people without green
cards, and they detain anybody who looks like us. Anybody. We
sent our son because he doesn’t have a job, so if they stop him we
don’t lose any money. We’re just making it. We can’t afford to
miss work just because INS needs to look good to . . . I don’t
mean any offense, but . . . they need to look good for the white
people. They don’t care about us, that we have jobs. It’s all a
show. But in the morning, as soon as my husband and I drive
away to work, the [city] police are on our street, starting stuff,
making our kids mad, telling them they are going to get them.
One day I went back because I forgot something, and the police
were there, outside of their cars. I asked them, “What is wrong?
What do you want here?” And this one cop, his name is ———
[knowing laughter in the room], told me, “We’re going to get
your son,” and he called my son names. He told me my son was
in a gang. But see, I know he isn’t in a gang, because the gang
they said he was in is in another neighborhood. My son could not
live with us and be in that gang. I have relatives in that gang,
who have an auto body shop, and sometimes my son does some
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 221
work for them to make a few dollars. But he could never join
that gang, because of where we live. Everyone knows that.
As the newcomers like Gilda shared their stories, and began
to help each other on cases, Bernice began to understand why she
had been so perplexed. While there had been no doubt in her
mind that she and Stick were up against a system, it became
clearer and clearer how the system specifically targeted children
like hers, and Gilda’s, and Barbara’s. She had imagined the criminal justice system was on the other side of a fixed line of law,
rather than that the law had moved to include her and her family in its legal and social space.
California’s expanding criminal justice system overlaid the
state’s restructuring landscape with new prisons, new laws targeting people in specific areas, new mandates for law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges; these territorial and discursive regions constituted the system’s political geography that the
mothers were trying to find their way through. Their techniques
of mothering, in and as Mothers ROC, extended past the limits
of household, kinship, and neighborhood, to embrace the political project to reclaim children of all ages whose mothers were
losing them, at a net rate of fifty-five statewide per business day,
into the prison system.
ONE STATE TWO LAWS  THREE STRIKES
[W]hen the woes of the poor press most dangerously upon the rich, then an age
searches most energetically to pierce the future for hope.
PETER LINEBAUGH, THE LONDON HANGED (1992)
Prayer framed every Mothers ROC meeting. At the beginning
and end of each session, the group held hands in a circle to ask for
222 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
protection and guidance. The women who led the prayers had a
gift for preaching. Their invocations set and summarized the
seemingly endless agenda of reclaiming the children within a
material context of spiritual hope realized through human action. Prayer helped span the visible and invisible social distances
among people for whom, in most cases, organized religion was a
vital aspect of life. Prayer also figured the power of attentive listening for group-building. During prayer, anyone in the group
might comment affirmatively on the leader’s devotional trajectory, and such encouragement of the speaker encouraged the collectivity, as one and then several voices would rise, lifting the
speaker’s higher. And finally, by emphasizing the difficulty and
urgency of the situation that had brought them together, prayer
renewed and strengthened the mothers’ provisional unity. Individual differences, which occasionally produce incidents, did not
need to become persistent organizational impediments—in a
house of worship or in the ROC.
The group meditation on power and powerlessness established the scene in which mothers are able to identify with one
another in a fast-changing world. In 1994, the FBI recorded
11,500,000 arrests by federal, state, and local law enforcement. In
1995, the number increased to 14,500,000 (U.S. Bureau of the
Census, Statistical Abstract, 1995, 1996). Arrest and incarceration
are common in the United States, yet those who are touched by
law enforcement are so segregated, in many different ways, that
the experience of confrontation with the legal system does not of
itself produce any kind of strong social identification. In the
ROC and elsewhere, the similarity of mothers’ stories could produce a sense of commonality, but without guarantees that such a
sensibility might serve as the basis for collective action. Within a
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 223
social order of wide and deep inequality—most forcefully expressed as racial inequality—the mothers were cautious, because not all children are equally vulnerable to the law’s harsh
punishments.
When Pearl Daye’s thirty-one-year-old son called from the
police station to say he had been arrested for allegedly shoplifting a package of razor blades from a discount drugstore, she
was confused—he had a steady job—and distressed—he had
not been in any kind of trouble for more than eight years.
Going to the station to post bail, Pearl found it set at an absolutely unattainable $650,000, because the Los Angeles County
District Attorney’s office had charged Harry Daye with a thirdstrike felony rather than a petty theft misdemeanor. Suddenly,
the African American man faced a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty-five years to life without possibility of parole.
As Pearl related the compounding events of Harry’s arrest
and accusation at her first Mothers ROC meeting, she often had
to pause because of the breathtaking anxiety of revealing seemingly unbelievable adverse family circumstances to strangers.
However, the roomful of women recognized the Dayes’ drama
as neither bureaucratic error nor bad dream, but rather as an increasingly ordinary conflict between families like theirs and the
law. The plot had already become so familiar, one year into implementation of California’s three strikes act, that at certain moments, a number of women, as though they were a chorus, recited with Pearl what the public defender and others had told
her—especially the guaranteed sentence of twenty-five years to
life without the possibility of parole, known on the street more
briefly as “twenty-five to . . . without.”
Harry Daye faced the death of freedom because at that time
224 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
the Los Angeles County district attorney’s written policy was to
enforce the three strikes law vigorously. Such vigor included
charging defendants to ensure the longest possible prison sentences, regardless of the current character of the defendant’s life.
Harry’s alleged petty theft constituted what California law designates a “wobbler”—a charge that can be treated as either a
misdemeanor or a felony. Three strikes and other minimummandatory-sentence laws, conventionally portrayed to work
with a machinelike disregard for individual circumstance, actually explicitly allow prosecutors and judges to use discretion “in
the furtherance of justice.” However, throughout California—
especially in the southern counties that produce most prisoners—the practice of prosecutorial or judicial discretion in favor
of second- or third-strike defendants was throughout the 1990s
so rare as to be newsworthy (see, e.g., Gorman 1996).
Pearl ended her introductory testimony to Mothers ROC with
an observation about the entire system: “The way I see it there
are two laws, one for the Black, and one for the white.” Leticia
Gonzales, a Chicana whose husband had started a “twenty-five
to . . . without” sentence some months earlier, disagreed. “No. I
think there is one law for the people of color, and another law for
the white.” By this time, everyone was talking. Francie Arbol
proposed another structure: “Poor people and rich people.” But
poor versus rich failed to explain the state versus O. J. Simpson.
Why was the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office
spending so much time and money to convict one Black defendant?17 Therefore, the distinction could not be rich versus poor.
At the same time, because virtually all the prisoners anyone in the
room knew or could imagine were people of modest means from
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 225
working-class families, the money question could not simply be
dropped. Anti-Black racism seemed to explain a great deal, but
could not account for all poverty, powerlessness, and vulnerability before the law.
In the year or so before Pearl Daye brought her case to ROC,
Latino (mostly Chicano and Mexicano) prisoners surpassed
African Americans as the largest group in absolute numbers in
CDC custody.18 The unevenness in outcome for people of color
lies in both patterns of policing and the offense with which defendants are charged. For example, in Los Angeles County,
white defendants would be far more likely to have charges reduced from felonies to misdemeanors or dropped completely,
while people of color are more likely to have the harshest possible charge leveled against them (Schiraldi and Godfrey 1994; see
also Nasar 1994). Both federal and California laws allow radically different treatment of people who have done essentially the
same thing. Such police, prosecutorial, and judicial capacity—
which, since its introduction in the early 1980s, has remained
fundamentally impervious to challenges based on “equal protection” and other constitutional principles—provides both the
means and the encouragement for application of substantively
different rules and punishments to various kinds of defendants
(see, e.g., Butler 1995).
It is not surprising, then, that the ROCers had a hard time developing a summary of how the law discriminates against and
among those who are most vulnerable to the system. The law’s
ability to wobble made routinely unequal punishments possible.
At the same time, the wobble made developing a commonsense
definition of how such inequality is achieved and reproduced on
226 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
a case-by-case basis very difficult indeed. Everyone who spoke—
nearly everyone in the room—had no doubt that the system operated on a dual track. But how is each defendant routed?
Leticia Gonzales could match Pearl’s story horror for horror.
Her husband had been tried and convicted for shoplifting a pair
of pants during the Christmas shopping rush. She was convinced
that either nobody took anything, or that somebody else, who
looks like her husband, took the items. “Why would he take
some pants? He could buy them. And at Christmas, there are
guards everywhere around at the stores. He’s not stupid.” However, since in his deep past he had been convicted on two counts
of robbery, the petty theft of a pair of inexpensive trousers became, in his case, robbery, sending him away for “twenty-five
to . . . without.”
Leticia heard about the ROC from her husband, who had
learned about it in the county jail. She was afraid to come to the
meeting at first, because she did not know anybody, lived down
in San Pedro, and was afraid she might not be welcome. Much to
her surprise, the group, still composed predominantly of African
Americans, did welcome her, and as the months went by, more
and more Latinas showed up at the door. Mothers of sixteenyear-olds charged with murder. Wives of second- and thirdstrike defendants. Grandmothers of kids charged under the
STEP Act. Indeed, the Black and Brown cadres of abuelas began
to hold occasional caucuses—after the manner of the grandmothers of Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo—to discuss their unique
problems, which often centered on their status as undocumented
primary caregivers to their children’s children.
The number of Latinas attending meetings increased, as the
Los Angeles County prosecutor extended vigorous enforcement
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 227
of California’s 1,200 new pieces of criminal legislation to Brown
as well as Black defendants. The night of Pearl Daye’s first visit,
the ROC’s debate about the law’s unequal application continued
well into the evening and spilled out onto the sidewalk after the
regular meeting came to a close. The crucial issue in resolving the
question had to do with maintaining organizational solidarity,
which the closing prayer emphasized as the session’s unfinished
business. Finally, one of the women proposed a solution. There
are, as Pearl had said, two laws—one for Black people and one
for white people. Given how the prosecutors had started charging more and more Brown and other poor defendants under the
new laws, especially the three strikes act, then perhaps the explanation could be put this way: You have to be white to be prosecuted under white law, but you do not have to be Black to be
prosecuted under Black law. The resolution satisfied that
evening’s debaters, because it provided a way for the women to
recognize one another through the extension of prosecutorial
practices without ignoring African Americans’ indisputable experience of the new laws’ most intensive application.
Not long after discovery of the Black/white law solution, a
local power broker came calling on the ROC. The African
American man, who had made a small fortune running secured
(locked-down) drug rehabilitation units for the state, wanted the
ROC’s blessing to build a private prison (owned by him) in the
neighborhood where the CDC would send selected prisoners to
serve the final year of their sentences. He assured the women that
the prison would be run in accordance with community wishes,
since the city would not grant a conditional use permit for the location without community approval. For many ROCers, this visit
crystallized the dynamic contradiction in the system they had
228 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
taken on. If the ROC was right, then the prison was unnecessary.
If the prison came in, accompanied by “jobs,” then part of the
ROC’s critique—poverty—would seem to have been addressed
by expanding the specific object of the ROC’s opposition—cages.
As the carceral entrepreneur—himself an ex-prisoner—
explained how much good the prison would bring to South Central, the ROCers listened closely. Then, in an orderly show of political passion, each one told him why, from her perspective, the
ROC would never endorse the facility. His claim that somehow
the community could control the inner workings of a prison because of its location struck them as ludicrous; they had learned
that distance is not simply measured in miles, and that the prison
would not be a neighborhood or community facility, but rather a
state incapacitation facility run according to state rules. His
promise that perhaps their own children might be in the prison
elicited, at first, an emotional moment of hope on the part of
some women, who drove fifteen-year-old cars four hundred
miles round-trip on Saturdays to see their sons. But the record of
failures in many of the campaigns to have children moved closer
to their families indicated that the people in the proposed South
Central prison would not likely come from the area. The ROC
told the entrepreneur, over and over, that they would not remedy
the disappearance of jobs at GM, Firestone, and Kaiser by
putting half the population into prisons so the other half could
make money watching them. They sent him on his way, somewhat bruised by their blunt words.
The visit provoked the members to ask themselves what else
they should be doing to stop the prison from going up in South
Central. They knew that the prison would go up somewhere—
the power broker had assured them of that—and so protesting at
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 229
the local level would not solve the problem. Clearly, the ROC had
to expand its activities to an adequate scale. At the next meeting,
they decided to take on the brutal three strikes law in order to
build a statewide coalition of people who would be likely to help
fight the expansion of prisons as California’s all-purpose solution
to social problems involving the poor. That project, inaugurated
in January 1996, built slowly over a year, eventually culminating
in a “Three Strikes Awareness Month” during which teach-ins,
radio and television appearances, and leafleting outside courthouses raised consciousness of the legislation’s effect. Although
the scale of activity grew, so did uneasinesses and antagonisms as
the ROC entered a new organizational phase, in which the place
where it had begun life in the ERC’s office might remain the symbolic, but not necessarily the political, center of the group.
YOU CAN’T MAKE ANY MONEY HOLDING BAKE SALES:
NEW SITUATIONS, NEW STRATEGIES
While Mothers Reclaiming our Children started off with the
kinds of amenities—office, telephone, fax, copier—that most
fledgling grassroots groups lack, the meager initial advantage
created the basis for future needs. In particular, the organization’s capacity to plan outreach and strategy around the three
strikes law rested on the fact that it had a place, could make and
receive telephone calls, produce flyers, and get communiqués to
and from other concerned activists—including a few inside key
state offices—printed reasonably rapidly. To some ROCers,
however, this flurry of activity—while important—threatened
the Mothers’ core purpose and constituency both by diverting
material resources and by turning so much attention toward one
category of defendant/prisoner.
230 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
In order to achieve stability in the newest crisis, ROCers from
both tendencies agreed to formalize as a not-for-profit organization. Across the divide, the activists agreed that a mission statement would be an objective standard against which all collective
undertakings could be measured, and they also agreed that current
and future projects would require substantial income. The agreements produced sustained disagreement as factions tried to fashion mission statements commensurate with what they thought the
group should become. The debate shifted a good deal of everyday
work from the politics of organizing to the politics of organization.
In other words, reworking themselves into an institution—with
written rules, a governing board, and detailed expenditures—became, for a while, the ROC activity.
The astonishing suppleness of the ROC’s earlier days gave way
in this period to slower and more deliberate methods; it was as if
the structural imperative everyone wished to satisfy ruled out a
future in which the women and men could depend on ad hoc
summonings of sense, experience, and spirit to work through
problems and differences. What they hoped to gain in return for
the sacrifice of spontaneity was the sturdiness of reproducibility:
not an ad hoc future, but a predictable one. Of course, to guarantee a future meant to become legitimate, to seek shelter in one corner of the state while doing battle in many others. But being so
sheltered also meant getting “legal”—following rules, no less
than laws, with the specter of noncompliance standing in as a
shadow policeman. Poverty and underdevelopment persist because the way out is across the very infrastructured barriers that
make it possible to identify poor regions, or neighborhoods, or
races, or genders, in the first place; being locked in and locked out
are two sides of the same coin. A good deal of the early excitement
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 231
at the prospect of becoming a registered not-for-profit organization centered on the hopeful misunderstanding that achieving
tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue
Code was in itself a development plan—as though eligibility for
certain kinds of money were a fiscally magnetic force. Those with
different understandings—from prior experience or present
study—began to think quite practically about fund sources, given
the ROC’s potential range of not-for-profit practices. Grants?
Speaker fees? Services? T-shirts?
A consultant who specialized in helping grassroots groups incorporate encouraged the group to think creatively, while cautioning that they could not make any significant money from
holding bake sales. The reminder that neighborly voluntarism
could not guarantee the ROC’s future forced everyone to think
about the array of funding options that might realistically be
forthcoming. In other words, whenever the work focused on
budget building—the “business” of legally legitimate activism—
discussions gravitated toward the cooperative self-help mode
that gave the ROC its early local appeal and strength, setting
aside more expansive political strategies the three strikes faction
struggled to realize.
Polled separately and informally, every ROCer wanted to save
everybody caught up in the criminal justice system, but polled collectively and formally, most said their organizational attention
ought to concentrate on youth. By the mid 1990s, organizing on
behalf of young people “at risk” had gained cachet among the
kinds of small regional foundations from which the ROC might
get seed money. At the same time, governmental agencies, such as
the U.S. Department of Justice, dangled money for communitybased organizations in cities that agreed to trade “weeds” (crimi-
232 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
nalizable adults or juveniles) to law enforcement for “seeds”
(grants).19 Deindustrialization and crumbling welfare state institutions combined to create emergencies that were addressed by
the official sector—if at all—either through the expanding system of criminalization or, in a smaller way (at least when measured by expenditure per youth, if not in absolute numbers),
through the interventions of not-for-profit organizations fueled
by pre- or posttax dollars. The ROC did not predicate its future
on what was fundable. However, it incorporated at a time when
the public abandonment of young people applied increased pressures throughout the quasi-private caring community. Therefore,
to join that community “officially” meant taking on that pressure
and, as a result, “naturally” taking up that work.
Although popular, the campaign to overturn the three strikes
law had less natural appeal than saving kids among those most intent on establishing the ROC’s formal structure. The arduous
work of coalition building—any campaign’s first step—requires
constant deal making and compromise, even as the character of
the struggle is redefined in the practice of producing consent. Or,
as the singer-activist Bernice Johnson Reagon liked to put it: “If
you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you’re not in …a
coalition” (Reagon 1983). Since the ROC was in process of defining itself, negotiating externally seemed precisely to threaten the
stability and autonomy that members sought to solidify internally.
The strain of give-and-take should have strengthened the
core, as it had in the past, particularly because the ROC was the
undisputed force behind the new, slowly coalescing, anti–three
strikes movement. In a way, the challenge did prove to be
strengthening, but not in anticipated or previously experienced
ways. At the end of the day, the Mothers rolled down as two
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 233
boulders: the new, incorporated, youth-oriented ROC; and the
heart of an emerging statewide organization (which itself incorporated after two years of struggle) called Families to Amend
California’s Three Strikes (FACTS).
In the scramble to institutionalize an identity—to secure a reliable, reproducible, public face—the stresses and strains sometimes degenerated into personality conflicts. Accusations of disrespect flew furiously, and it was fairly common during meetings
for people to step outside, caucus in the driveway, and return
with hardened faces and steely glares. As happened in the early
days around the communist scare, some police made informal,
friendly suggestions to ROCers about how they could enhance
their legitimacy by distancing themselves from extremists.
What constituted extremism? For the police, extremism meant
any willingness to face off with (and mouth off at) authority, particularly uniformed authority. But within the group’s logic, extremism
seemed also to mean any combination of ambition and compromise.
Thus, each side saw the other as extreme. The anti–three strikes
contingent denounced as “unwilling to do anything” those who emphasized conserving identity through the articles of incorporation
and the local, reproducible, repetitive work that would come from
success in the endeavor. The latter group, in turn, shook their heads
and wagged their tongues at the anti–three strikes faction’s seemingly impossible scheme to implant family-based opposition to draconian laws and the media-enhanced fears that produced them into
the vastness of California.
While those working on the anti–three strikes campaign initially strove to form a coalition of already existing organizations,
the outreach that generated the most stable chapters around California used the ROC methods. It should not be surprising to re-
234 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
alize that people who drive long distances to see loved ones will
make small talk in parking lots and discover an identity in their
immediate purpose, which then might be amplified in openended organizing and advocacy. What is surprising, perhaps, is
that the temporary camaraderie of those emotional encounters
became the basis for trust enabling the newly formed collectives
of people with modest resources, mostly women, to do things on
a less-than-modest scale. They learned to make plans long distance, use library email capacities, devise agendas, collect signatures on petitions, and eventually come together, lobby elected
officials, hold rallies in Sacramento, and, within two years, form
a new entity—this time a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization with
an expressly, if narrowly, political purpose.
While FACTS was amassing membership around the state—
including many among the (by 1998) more than 50,000 prisoners
in the CDC’s custody on second or third strikes—the ROC moved
office twice. The first time was uptown, across the freeway, out of
South Central, to Wilshire Boulevard. Fancy as the address
sounds, the location is one where a number of low-budget not-forprofits have concentrated in buildings once the exclusive domain
of high-wage service providers such as law and accounting firms.
Mid Wilshire, for the moment, was a remnant of the old space
economy, with beautiful art deco buildings decaying in capital
limbo before their rediscovery by the next round of investment.
Although the ROC meetings continued every Wednesday at
the original place, the relocation of the office, while only a short
distance away, severely disrupted the group’s cohesiveness. In retrospect, it seems that the layers of formalities—becoming a
501(c)(3) organization and settling into a businesslike office—invigorated a few while alienating many. People just didn’t go there.
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 235
Barbara Meredith, who continued as president throughout the
transition, found the new setup discouraging after a while. The
last thing she ever wanted to do was sit alone in a big office waiting for something to happen. What happened was that energy
drained from the ROC; some people drifted away, while others,
including Francie Arbol, transferred most of their activism to
building FACTS.
With her son Gilbert finally released from prison, Barbara
Meredith decided that her daily work ought to reach back to
those among whom she had done her earliest organizing—the
young people (parents as well as kids) at Imperial Courts, whom
she saw as tomorrow’s strikers, especially given the increased use
of zero tolerance and police in public schools and the increasingly
common resort to lawmaking and enforcement, rather than informal sanctions, when young people acted out. After she and
Gilbert persuaded the Housing Authority to grant them an
apartment for on-site activism, Barbara Meredith closed down
the Wilshire office and opened the new one a hundred blocks
south, where they had walked the streets nearly ten years earlier
to accomplish the one-day truce. And while, by day, Gilbert
worked for a state senator, he worked around the clock to maintain the gang truce in honor of his dead cousin and the many men
and women serving long sentences, as he had done.
FROM THE CRISIS OF PLACE TO THE POLITICS OF SPACE
Arrest is the political art of individualizing disorder.
ALLEN FELDMAN, FORMATIONS OF VIOLENCE (1991)
For millions of people in the United States each year, the individual nature of arrest produces fragmentation rather than con-
236 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
nection, because each person and household, dealing with each
arrest, must figure out how to undo the detention—which appears to be nothing more than a highly specific confrontation between the individual and law enforcement. The larger disorder
is then distorted to reflect only a portion of social fragilities, and
measured, like unemployment, as though its changing rate in a
society were a force of nature (see, e.g., Greenwood et al. 1994;
Wilson and Herrnstein 1985). ROCers gradually but decisively
refused to be isolated and began to develop oppositional political
arts centered on creating an order different from the one built by
the state out of more and bigger prisons. They arrived at their art
through critical action. Action, crucially, includes the difficult
work of identification—which entails production, not discovery,
of a “suture or positioning” (Stuart Hall 1990).
By enlivening African American practices of social mothering, the ROCers engaged a broadening community in their concern for the circumstances and fate of prisoners. That social
opening provided avenues for all kinds of mothers (and others)
to join in the work, because the enormous labor confronting each
mother tended to encourage all of them both to accept and extend help. I make no claim for “social mothering” as an exclusively or universally African American cultural practice; it is neither. However, Barbara Meredith’s commonsense invocation of
mothering as collective action made possible the group’s integration of mothers with similar or quite different maternalist assumptions (Kaplan 1982; Collins 1990; see also Traugott 1995). In
other words, techniques developed over generations on behalf of
Black children and families within terror-demarcated, racially
defined enclaves provided contemporary means to choreograph
interracial political solidarity among all kinds of caregivers los-
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 237
ing their loved ones into the prison system. These mothers and
others identified one another in the tight public spaces between
their socially segregated residential living places and the unitized
carceral quarters in which their loved ones are caged. Some were
shy about jumping into the process, while others came to the
ROC for help on their individual cases only; but all who persisted
practiced the “each one teach one” approach.20
The process of integrating different kinds of mothers and
others into the ROC involved extensive outreach designed to
permeate the social organization of space. These projects also
caught people in the “betweens” of segregated lives: at work, for
example, or on the bus. Like the Justice for Janitors Los Angeles
crusade, however, this approach raised a more general problem
of identification. The ROCers easily recognized one another in
the spaces of the criminal justice system. Outside those areas,
how do people resemble each other? If we are not all Black, and
if all activists are not mothers, and if all prisoners are not (minor)
children, then who are we? Poor people who work. As a community of purpose, Mothers ROC acted on the basis of a simple
inversion: we are not poor because our loved ones are in prison;
rather, our loved ones are in prison because we are poor. It followed that outreach should target working poor people and
their youth. Class, then, while the context for this analysis and action, cannot displace or subsume the changing role and definitions of race: poor people of color have the most loved ones in
prison.
As a matter of fact, the primacy of class is thoroughly gendered: women who work to support their families and to free
their loved ones encounter one another as laborers with similar
triple workdays—job, home, justice. Moreover, mothers who re-
238 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
ject the disposal of their children and ask why they themselves
should not be compensated for struggling against the state raise
a challenge to both their children’s and their own devaluations
from the vantage of the declining welfare state and the perils of
reproductive labor (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Fortunati 1995;
Quick 1992).21 The communist organizational and analytical influences in the ROC kept these complicated interrelated issues in
the foreground of activism. In the context of shared opposition,
the activists “discovered” (Kaplan 1982)—which is to say, created—shared values; in turn, that collective work produced
community solidarity, or political integration, enabling further
action. Solidarity increased with increased knowledge about the
complexity of how power blocs have built the new state by building prisons. Thus an individual police precinct house no longer
loomed as the total presence of the state, shrinking back toward
its real position—the neighborhood outpost of what both the
ROCers and FACTS characterized as a military occupation.22 If
it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes a movement to
undo an occupation. As Mothers ROC went deep and FACTS
went broad, both sought to immerse themselves in other communities of activism, reaching out nationally and internationally
to similar organizations.23 Such motion then and now heightens
the potential for connections between women struggling against
prison expansion and women throughout the global workforce
who struggle daily against the actual processes and effects of
worldwide structural adjustments.24
Mothers ROC critically used the ideological power of motherhood to challenge the legitimacy of the changing state. All
prisoners are somebody’s children, and children are not alienable
(see Cornell 1995). The racial and gendered social division of
MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN 239
labor required mothers of prisoners to live lives of high visibility;
ROCers turned that visibility to a politically charged presence,
voice, and movement against injustice, such that their activism
became the centerpiece of their reproductive—and socially productive—labor (see Fisher 1989). As with mothers’ movements
in Latin America, South Africa, and Palestine, Mothers ROC’s
frontline relation to the state was not as a petitioner for a share in
the social wage but rather as an opponent of the state’s changing
form and purpose with respect to the life chances of their family
members and those like them. The insistence on the rights of
mothers to children and children to mothers was not a defense of
traditional domesticity as a separate sphere; rather, it represented
political activation around rising awareness of the specific ways
that the contemporary working-class household is a site saturated by the neoliberal racial state.
Mothers Reclaiming Our Children evolved from a self-help
group that formed in response to a crisis of place—a police murder in South Central Los Angeles—into a pair of political organizations trying to build a powerful movement across the spaces
of domestic militarism.
A small, poor, multiracial group of working-class people,
mostly prisoners’ mothers, mobilized in the interstices of the officially abandoned, heavily policed, declining welfare state. They
came forward in the first instance because they could not let their
children go. They remained at the fore, in the spaces created by
intensified imprisonment of their loved ones, because they encountered many mothers and others in the same locations eager
to join in the reclamation project. And they pushed further, because from those breaches they saw and tried to occupy positions
from which collectively to challenge their political, economic,
240 MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
and cultural de-development brought about by the individualized involuntary migration of urban “surplus population,” and
the potential values that go with that population, into rural prisons. For the ROC and FACTS successfully to oppose the disposal
of their loved ones, they organized to challenge the fullest possible reach of state (and civilian) powers arrayed against them.
Working through cases, they built alliances of and as multiracial
groups that create and sustain solid centers of activism throughout and across the “nested scales” (Smith 1992) of the rising
prison state. Thus both groups demonstrate the possibilities and
the urgent difficulties of organizing across the many boundaries
that rationalize and reinforce apartheid America. Indeed, their
work might well exemplify what utopia is these days—social
perfectibility recognizable in something as modest as people getting on a bus.
241
SIX
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
T
he patient reader has traveled a long way in a short book.
The journey, like the one undertaken by the bus riders in
the Prologue, is an adventure of possibility rather than certainty. While the outcomes to cooperative human efforts
are never ever guaranteed, I certainly believe this: the
lessons I’ve drawn from researching and writing these pages
while simultaneously engaging in political work advise us to quit
the divisions, old and new, that trap us in doomed methods of
analysis and action. There are obvious divisions that, as we have
seen throughout the Central Valley Mother’s ROC chapters, can
and should be overcome. Most urgently, we must lift our ability
to recognize how to craft campaigns that both create solid organizations and foster robust coalitions among already existing organizations. The following theses—which suggest themes for
amplifying the work—are a modest attempt to propel us to a different scale by showing both myriad locations where activism
can take root and flourish and the potential for connecting those
242 WHAT IS TO B E DON E?
sites into something bigger. The outcome of this adventure
might be simply a more general, and therefore more comprehensive, way of acting on problems in the political-economic geography that currently prevails. Or a different scale might signal
the development of innovative social and spatial relationships
and capacities for action—just as the “Third World” and “PanAfricanism” did for earlier generations.
The proliferation of antiprison groups during the decade
when this book was in progress indicates how many kinds of
people understand that prison is not a building “over there” but
a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere. Unfortunately, many remedies proposed
for the all-purpose use of prisons to solve social, political, and
economic problems get caught in the logic of the system itself,
such that a reform strengthens, rather than loosens, prison’s hold.
In a sense, the professionalization of activism has made many
committed people so specialized and entrapped by funding
streams that they have become effectively deskilled when it
comes to thinking and doing what matters most. What are the
possibilities of nonreformist reform—of changes that, at the end
of the day, unravel rather than widen the net of social control
through criminalization?
If we take to heart the fact that we make places, things, and
selves, but not under conditions of our own choosing, then it is
easier to take the risk of conceiving change as something both
short of and longer than a single cataclysmic event. Indeed, the
chronicles of revolutions all show how persistent small changes,
and altogether unexpected consolidations, added up to enough
weight, over time and space, to cause a break with the old order.
Certainly, the political forces that hold governmental power in
WHAT IS TO B E DON E? 243
the United States of the early twenty-first century figured this
out and persisted for decades until they won. With persistence,
practices and theories circulate, enabling people to see problems
and their solutions differently—which then creates the possibility of further, sometimes innovative, action.
Such change is not just a shift in ideas or vocabulary or frameworks, but rather in the entire structure of meanings and feelings
(the lived ideology, or “taking to heart”) through which we actively understand the world and place our actions in it (Williams
1961). Ideology matters along its entire continuum, from common sense (“where people are at”) to philosophies (where people
imagine the coherence of their understanding comes from: Jesus,
Mohammed, the Buddha, Marx, Malcolm X, the market).
The bottom line is this: if the twentieth century was the age of
genocide on a planetary scale, then in order to avoid repeating
history, we ought to prioritize coming to grips with dehumanization. Dehumanization names the deliberate, as well as the
mob-frenzied, ideological displacements central to any group’s
ability to annihilate another in the name of territory, wealth, ethnicity, religion. Dehumanization is also a necessary factor in the
acceptance that millions of people (sometimes including oneself)
should spend part or all of their lives in cages.
In the contemporary world, racism is the ordinary means
through which dehumanization achieves ideological normality,
while, at the same time, the practice of dehumanizing people
produces racial categories. Old races die, through extermination
or assimilation, and new races come into being. The process is not
biological, however, but rather the outcome of fatal encounters
that ground contemporary political culture. This culture, in turn,
is based in the modern secular state’s dependence on classifica-
244 WHAT IS TO B E DON E?
tion, combined with militarism as a means through which classification maintains coherence. A sign of militarism’s ideological
embrace is the fact that all kinds of U.S.-based people believe
without pause that, in a general way, “the key to safety is aggression” (Bartov 1996; R. W. Gilmore 2002a). Where classification
and militarism collide is in the area of identifying an enemy.
“The Japanese are an enemy race” wrote a State Department
wonk in 1941, at the height of both Jim Crow and universal military conscription, as prelude to the internment of 120,000 people
in concentration camps in the South and the West.
Sadly, even activists committed to antiracist organizing renovate commonsense divisions by objectifying certain kinds of
people into a pre-given category that then automatically gets oppressed. What’s the alternative? To see how the very capacities we
struggle to turn to other purposes make races by making some
people, and their biological and fictive kin, vulnerable to forces
that make premature death likely and in some ways distinctive.
The racialization of Muslims in the current era does double duty
in both establishing an enemy whose being can be projected
through the allegation of unshakable heritage (fundamentally,
what the fiction of race is at best) and renewing the racial order of
the U.S. polity as normal, even as it changes. Given these practices, it should not be all that surprising that hundreds of thousands of white men are also in prison; while they might be, as Pem
Buck poignantly describes such people, a “reserve army of whiteness” (Buck 2001; see also Roediger 2002), I wouldn’t count on
it—not when the twenty-first century hasn’t quite wrapped up
what I call the age of human sacrifice. Such men, and their diverse
caged brethren, might alternatively be, as Staughton Lynd’s Lucasville prisoner activists novelly named themselves, the “convict
WHAT IS TO B E DON E? 245
race” (Lynd 2004). As ever, solidarity in the present is a precondition for any future less bleak than the past quarter century.
TEN THESES
1. A new kind of state—an antistate state—is being built on
prison foundations. The antistate state depends on ideological
and rhetorical dismissal of any agency or capacity that “government” might use to guarantee social well-being. Beginning with
the premise that social wages in the shape of tax dollars belong to
all of us, inasmuch as we produced them, people can organize at
some political-geographic levels to take charge of resources and
turn them to life-enhancing use.
2. Capitalists are not equally footloose, and the employment
of working people’s future surplus (what repayment of public
debt is) is a political decision. Public sector financiers had a crisis
in the 1980s—growing pools of investable cash but shrinking
outlets that could only be resolved in the political arena. The
problem is not, then, debt, but rather the uses to which public
borrowing is put.
3. Starting in the 1980s, the federal government reduced its
participation in state and local government funding of social programs, thereby passing along to lower-level administrative units
the task of making up for federal tax cuts granted to big firms
and rich individuals. This practice endures into the early twentyfirst century, and scaling back—“devolution”—characterizes
economic relations between states and their constituent cities and
counties. These rollbacks demand attention to the dynamics of
abandonment and the possibility of activism, and demand action
to foster greater alliances between currently geographically and
politically nonaligned impoverished places.
246 WHAT IS TO B E DON E?
4. The compensatory implementation of regressive taxes
such as sales tax and user fees has helped ensure that as local governments drew down their reserves and then tightened their
belts, the poor would have higher relative costs and fewer services than their richer neighbors. As this complicated jumble of
fiscal apartheid failed adequately to produce the desired goals,
certain kinds of dead-end redevelopment schemes based in fiscalization of land plus tax breaks suggest a new regionalization
of production and services, inviting activists to consider ways and
means to intervene in decision making.
5. Voters and legislators decided to lock immigrants out of
social services, to lock more people into prison for part or all of
their lives, and to put a personal lock on opportunities in public
sector education, employment, and contracts. This triplepronged attack on working people demonstrates the potential for
identifying linkages between immigrant, labor, and antiprison
activism. In particular, if public sector and low-wage unions
have made the greatest strides in the past twenty years, then their
members are constrained by the growth of prisons. Prison jobs
are few next to the plethora of non-cage-based employment possible when public sector investment is maximized for social
goods such as schools, parks, museums, and mass transport.
6. In a place where research indicates that other outcomes
might have occurred, Mothers ROC built an organization that
spurred the founding and growth of even larger organizations.
The ability to reach across social and spatial divides came from
the Mothers’ use of the ideological power of motherhood to challenge the legitimacy of the changing state. This activism, rooted
in earlier rounds of antiracist work by both these women and
their prior generations, shows how using the familiar opens the
WHAT IS TO B E DON E? 247
possibility of identification through the crafting of purposeful action by continual revision.
7. Mothers ROC’s frontline relation to the state was not that
of petitioners for a share of the available social wages, but rather
in opposition to the state’s form and purpose with respect to the
life chances of the mothers’ family members and those like them.
By thinking through the general details of this antagonism, we
can see how other kinds of oppositions become possible. Such
imaginative responses then open the way to new solidarities
based in recognition of the life-threatening harms that new and
old racist structures produce in all kinds of households of all races
and ethnicities.
8. The places where prisons are built share many similarities
with the places prisoners come from. Rural communities stuck in
economies that have languished for more than twenty years have
not profited from prisons as expected; rather, they continue to
struggle for the same kinds of opportunities and protections that
the urban mothers want for their biological and fictive kin. These
forgotten places, and their urban counterparts, can be understood
to form one political world, abandoned but hardly defeated.
9. Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to
premature death. Prison expansion is a new iteration of this
theme. Prisons and other locally unwanted land uses accelerate
the mortality of modestly educated working people of all kinds
in urban and rural settings and show how economic and environmental justice are central to antiracism.
10. Power is not a thing but rather a capacity composed of
active and changing relationships enabling a person, group, or
institution to compel others to do things they would not do on
248 WHAT IS TO B E DON E?
their own (such as be happy, or pay taxes, or go to war). Ordinarily, activists focus on taking power, as though the entire political setup were really a matter of “it” (structure) versus “us”
(agency). But if the structure-agency opposition isn’t how things
really work, then perhaps politics is more complicated, and
therefore open to more hopeful action. People can and do make
power through, for example, developing capacities in organizations. But that’s not enough, because all an individual organization can do on its own is tweak Armageddon. When the capacities resulting from purposeful action are combined toward ends
greater than mission statements or other provisional limits, powerful alignments begin to shake the ground. In other words,
movement happens.
249
EPILOGUE
ANOTHER BUS
I
n 2001, a group of people boarded another bus in South Central Los Angeles, this time bound for Fresno and a conference
called Joining Forces: The Fight for Environmental Justice
and against Prisons. Fewer rode this time, but their determination was no less fierce. They were headed to the second
small conference in California bringing together rural people
trying to stop the building of prisons and urban activists trying to
stop the production of prisoners. Meeting was not easy, because
for quite some time each group imagined that the other, in a general way, was the reason for its struggles. City people presumed
everyone in rural towns wanted prisons, and rural activists
feared that nobody in urban centers was trying to get at the root
causes sending so many people into cages.
The recognition that forged solidarity between unlikely allies
from Farmersville and Los Angeles was not spontaneous. However, something like magic seemed to happen. At the conference,
activists talked about how their organizations identified prob-
250 EPILOGUE
lems, shaped good questions, searched for causes, and embarked—often in fits and starts—on courses of action. Juana
Gutierrez, the founder of Mothers of East Los Angeles, a group
that stopped Sacramento from building a prison in their neighborhood, described how she and the other “crazy women” she
worked with started to raise questions about why so many people
presumed their kids would wind up in prison.
Guitierrez laid out the scenario—identifying what technocrats would call “risk factors”—and paused at each one to
raise a question about the problem. School, for example. Kids
who miss a lot of school generally do not graduate, and young
people without high school diplomas are more likely than those
with credentials to wind up in cages. She and her friends asked
why their kids were more likely to miss school, and through observation, arrived at a cause: They were sick a lot. What kind of
illnesses? Asthma. Why would kids in East Los Angeles have
higher than normal rates of asthma; in other words, why is
asthma a disease of the poor? Their reasoning took them further,
and in studying about the breathing disorder, they discovered
that restricted airway disease is caused by certain environmental
contaminants—toxic substances that are common in their area,
which abuts on LA’s mini-steel-mill district.
Farmworkers, prisoners’ families, immigrant rights activists,
environmental justice organizers, and prison abolitionists all recognized in Gutierrez’s argument some fundamental practices
and welcome truths. As Guitierrez showed, urban and rural
households struggle from objectively similar but subjectively
different positions across the prison landscape. They can and will
join forces when the purpose is a common one, and the issue is
not just local. Most of those fighting in the trenches have little
ANOTHER BUS 251
time for activism motivated solely by abstract political or ethical
rhetoric. Rather, they are fighting for their lives, their families,
and their communities. The remedy for cumulative negative impacts must be bigger and more compelling than a simple technocratic fix. A principled sense of mortal urgency gets grassroots activists to go to meetings, makes them board buses, and inspires
hope. Perhaps this is what class politics should be, in contradiction
to the Golden Gulag’s prison-lit but starless night.
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ONE. INTRODUCTION
1 The total number of adult lockups has fluctuated over the past five years
or so. The CDC built twenty-four new prisons, but it closed an 800-bed
women’s prison in Stockton in 2003. The agency wanted to reopen the
building as a men’s prison, but this has met with strong local opposition. A
total of sixteen community corrections facilities opened over the past fifteen
years, but in the face of strong opposition to privatization by the California
Correctional Peace Officers’ Association, the number has shrunk. The total
number of adults in prison did not shrink with the closures, however, and
advocates within the CDC and in the private sector lobby have worked
hard to reopen the facilities. The trend is toward putting as many people
as possible in the most massive prisons. And finally, on January 5, 2006,
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed two new prisons in his State
of the State Address (www.governor.ca.gov/state/govsite/gov_html
display.jsp?sCatTitle = Speeches&sFilePath = /govsite/selected_speeches/
20060105_StateoftheState.html [accessed January 2006]).
TWO. THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY
1 The distinction made here represents tendencies rather than absolute differences.
253
NOTES
2 In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck the law down. So much for the efficiency of the market.
3 In addition to free tuition in the public colleges and universities, the state
also guaranteed tuition scholarships for financially needy students attending the state’s private colleges and universities in California. In the
first fifteen years after the establishment of California state scholarships—
until the early 1970s—the grants were generally sufficient to pay the average tuition at any independent school; and the income cutoff for means
testing was set at a then-generous $30,000 per year. The master plan “articulated” (a key word in California postsecondary education) community
college (2-year), state college (4-year and graduate nonresearch), and university (4-year and graduate research) curricula with the explicit intention
that students could pass from one level to another until they achieved their
ultimate educational goals. This plan lifted traditional class, gender, and,
to a lesser degree, racial barriers by transforming community colleges
from dead ends into gateways. And the financial incentive encouraged the
independent sector to seek out students in the wide, deep pool of potential
applicants (R. W. Gilmore 1991).
4 Chief Parker’s warnings about the “Negro” threat to Los Angeles issued
throughout his career (see, e.g., Sonenshein 1993; Herbert 1997) are instructive of the hegemonic formation of the LAPD as a force of the racial
state, regardless of the race or intentions of individual officers. Daryl
Gates, Parker’s successor-but-one, who was notorious for his overt antiBlack racism, actually betrayed no unique virulence, given his training
and the ambient apartheid of Los Angeles and the police who maintained
the city’s social and spatial divisions (cf. Fanon 1961).
5 The mystification had much to do with a dominant theme of neoclassical
economics and Chicago school sociology, which was that urbanization
would break down racism—seen as a relic of slavery, alleged rural backwardness among southern whites, and the theoretically suspect concept of
hard-wired fear of darkness among Europeans (Jordan 1968). Economists
asserted that racism’s marginal utility would prove to be trivial, and that
therefore everyone willing to work hard and acquire the appropriate skills
would progress—a position that even Nathan Glazer (1997) has finally re254 NOTES TO PAGES 36–39
treated from. The sociologist Robert Park wrote in 1950: “America and,
perhaps, the rest of the world, can be divided between two classes: those
who reached the city, and those who have not yet arrived” (cited in Cell
1982: 5).
6 In 1967, the objective of California gun control was to disarm the Black
Panther Party for Self Defense. When the Panthers took to the streets toting shotguns and lawbooks, they were legally armed (Bean 1973). It is
somewhat difficult to understand the recent gun control movement as
being structurally tied to this law. The irony underlying the ethos of nonviolence that dominated much of the postwar antiapartheid struggle in the
South was that everybody in the region—Black and white—was always
already armed. The question—a matter of power—was not whether to
have guns, but rather if, how, and when to use them (Powledge 1991;
Dittmer 1994).
7 In his popular textbook on urban planning history, Cities of Tomorrow
(1988), Peter Hall sneers at the notion of “institutional racism” and drags
out a convenient colored commentator—complete with photograph—to
say that racism is not the real problem. Hall goes on to aver that the challenge for tomorrow’s planners is the challenge of how to plan for (or
around) Black teenagers on drugs—complete with photograph of looters.
8 Strikes in 1974 included rail; communications (May); Northern California
construction; West Coast dock; telephone; second rail (July); steel (averted,
July); Teamsters’ walkout in Northern California against building contractors (in response to federal undermining of the Davis-Bacon Act; August); East and Gulf Coast longshoremen (October) (CDF-CEI October
1977: 16ff.).
9 The point here is not to wax nostalgic for Keynesianism, much less for
Keynes. As Lynn Turgeon (1996) explicates in his recent book, the title
quoting Joan Robinson, all Keynesianism is Bastard Keynesianism. But
with disappearance of the congeries of policies that to some degree guaranteed effective demand and provided—however haphazardly and
stingily—incomes and services for the most vulnerable workers in the
racial state, some other form of social control will, indeed must, step into
the breach, as we shall see (cf. Piven and Cloward 1971).
NOTES TO PAGES 39–45 255
10 There were six major strikes that capital took note of: the air traffic controllers, whom Reagan fired (1981); the United Airlines Pilots’ Association
(1985); two steel strikes—the first in a quarter of a century—followed on
democratization of the union (1985, 1986); and in 1989, the machinists
struck Eastern Airlines and Boeing in Seattle (CDF-CEI 1989).
11 California’s promotional web site www.commerce.ca.gov, which was advertised on airlines’ inflight news programs, exemplified this in 1997.
12 For readers who wish it, here’s the longer version: Insofar as capitalist accumulation is based in the private appropriation of socially produced
value, the system is necessarily prone to crisis. The potential for crisis derives from the fact that the portion of socially produced value privately retained by capital—profit—is necessary for further accumulation; and yet
the means available to secure profit also contain the conditions for undermining its growth. The summary effect of this contradiction, according to
Marx, is that inbuilt in capitalism is the tendency for the rate of profit to
fall.
What is profit, and why does its rate tend to fall? Not uniquely among
political economists of his era, Marx believed that all value is produced by
labor. However, he put this insight at the center of his analysis and argued
that the changing proportion of labor power to all other inputs in commodity production affects the structure of profit and therefore the structure of capitalism. All value that workers produce but do not retain as
wages is retained by capital as “surplus”; the difference between capital’s
fixed costs and the gross surplus retained equals gross profit.
To increase profit, capital requires that labor produce more value; but
the challenge is to retain the additional value as surplus, rather than to pay
it out in more wages. One way to resolve this difficulty is for capital to require workers to put in longer days; another is for capital to put more investment into fixed means of production—such as machinery—in order
to increase labor’s productivity (Braverman 1974; Bowles 1986). In the latter scenario, while capital does not pay out significantly greater wages, it
does incur greater fixed costs that, while amortizing over time, negatively
affect the rate of profit. The rate of profit is calculated as the return on capital investment; thus, the rate declines even if the mass of profit increases
256 NOTES TO PAGES 46–56
due to greater output (Shaikh 1983). In Marx’s logic, this proportional shift
is due to the fact that while more commodities might be produced given
greater technological capacity, each one congeals less labor, thus less value.
And since profit is derived from value, its rate can go nowhere but down
if value diminishes (Marx [1867] 1967).
Systemic imbalances result from the dynamics that determine the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. In the first instance, capitalists may retain greater and greater masses of surplus value, thus bringing about
greater concentration of capital in their collective hands. However, in
order to do so, they must individually make sectorally determined investments (Shaikh 1983). Firms that become overextended by such investment
get swallowed up by other firms capable of buying machinery; or they are
driven out of business because of an inability to compete on unit price in
the market. As a result, concentration also creates the conditions for centralization, in which there are fewer firms in any given sector over time,
leading to oligopoly if not monopoly (Smith 1984; Markusen 1985).
At the same time, if the total output for a given political economy
equals the value of all the commodities produced, then they all must be
sold for capital to reproduce itself, which is to say to complete the circuit
M-C-M’—transforming money (M) through commodities (C) into more
money (M’). However, if capital is making more with a static or shrinking
wage bill, then overaccumulation can result because, in part, the mass buying capacity of all those workers is less than the mass value of goods for
sale. Unlike labor in the aggregate, businesses do not spend all they take
in (Baran and Sweezy 1966). Firms and rich people save, and the savings
constitute, in the aggregate, unrealized sales. The overaccumulation of
commodities leads to a cutback in production, leaving the system with unused, or surplus, productive capacity (David Gordon 1996). Productive capacity spans the entire range of the forces of production, and includes both
capital’s inputs—such as machinery and money, and workers’ inputs—
which is to say labor power (Marx [1867] 1967).
Radical theorists of crisis have tried to isolate the precise causes for the
rate of profit to fall. There are two general kinds of explanation. One focuses on underconsumption, which can be understood as overproducNOTE TO PAGE 56 257
tion—the scenario in which incomes are insufficient to buy all products,
unemployment rises, and economies stagnate (Baran and Sweezy 1966;
Brenner 2002). This theory has been characterized as the “declining
strength of labor” argument (Sherman 1997). Another class of explanation
emphasizes the effect that rising wages (or low unemployment) have on
the total costs of production, arguing that wages squeeze profit (Bowles
1986); this theory constitutes the “rising strength of labor” perspective
(Sherman 1997). For Sherman (1997; see also Hunt and Sherman 1972),
Shaikh (1983), and others the two strands of argument do not cancel each
other out but rather reveal the contradictory nature of crises at different
moments along the cycle, just as Marx argued ([1867] 1967).
13 Unless otherwise noted, the data in this paragraph are culled from Edward M. Gramlich’s (1994) review essay on public infrastructure in the
United States.
14 The exception to the rule is that debt can be created pledging the state’s
full faith and credit in time of war or to suppress insurrection (California
State Public Works Board 1985: C-2).
15 In technical terms, such profit is called “the underwriter’s spread.”
16 The Peripheral Canal was defeated by a strange alliance of growers, environmentalists, and tax rebels. The growers, dominated by cotton powers J. G. Boswell and Salyer American—who figure prominently in chapter 4—fought the canal because the law to enact it stipulated that all other
Northern California rivers would be forever protected from damming
and diversion (Gottlieb 1988; Reisner 1986).
17 The California Land Conversion (or Williamson) Act of 1965 protects
farmers from enforced disinvestment due to tax effects of encroaching
suburbanization via voluntary, ten-year, renewable contracts stipulating
that the county and city will assess and tax farmland at rates tied to farm
income, rather than real property assessment, as long as the land is used
for agriculture. Sacramento subvents a portion of local income forgone,
but poor counties and towns are not able to make up the difference, while
the state has not increased its share (Sokolow and Spezia 1992; Landis
1992).
18 Marx’s concept of “immiseration” is not tied to a singular vision of ab258 NOTES TO PAGES 61–71
solute poverty and mass starvation. That is a piece of the vision, amply illustrated by events around the world. Another key aspect of “immiseration” is what Marx described as an “accumulation of misery, agony of toil,
slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation” for workers whether
their “payment [be] high or low.” The present project is trying to account
for this immiseration (Marx [1867] 1967: 645).
19 People in jail are likely to be included in another category, because few are
in jail for a full twelve months and those who get out on probation who
do not have jobs waiting are required to register with the Employment
Development Department and therefore are included in the unemployment count.
20 A concept dating from the early 1970s, “underclass” was taken up by
William Julius Wilson (1987) in the 1980s to describe poor people who are
socially and spatially isolated from legitimate employment opportunities
and from people who work in the formal economy (cf. Massey and Denton 1993). The term gained popularity—without the analytical complexity that Wilson attached to it—because it gave observers a word to describe the increasingly visible social phenomenon of people carrying on
lives apart in deindustrialized inner cities. Wilson’s error, in my view, was
to reinforce U.S. racial hierarchy by proposing a novel, racially demarcated stratum (“underclass”) and then arguing that those consigned to it
should be reintegrated into the stratum (working poor) from which they
have been expelled. It was an easy move for Charles Murray (1984) and
Murray and Richard Herrnstein (1994) to take up the stratum as an object
of analysis, but with the crucial twist that in their view the underclass consisted of the stupid, the dependent, and the lazy, whose rightful (and highest) place is among the working poor. Wilson did not even intend for “underclass” to refer only to Black people; however, his particular research
and policy interest gave others the opening—even as he was roundly criticized for underplaying the power of race in the order of U.S. society.
Caveat theorist.
21 Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and Ventura Counties.
22 Chicanos and Chicanas are native-born Mexican Americans.
23 As MacKinnon (1989: 163) puts it, “Law, as words in power, writes sociNOTES TO PAGES 72–78 259
ety in state form and writes the state onto society. The rule form, which
unites scientific knowledge with state control in its conception of what
law is, institutionalizes the objective stance as jurisprudence” (cf. Bartov
1996).
24 Of course, anarchism rejects the state form categorically. But short of anarchism, other quasi-antistate movements, such as libertarianism and the
posse comitatus, actually do recognize legitimate scales of, and uses for, socialized wealth and power.
25 Everyone’s hair stands on end when I claim that Proposition 13 was
“labor’s” round of disinvestment in the state. It is true that landlords, led
by wealthy apartment building owners, bankrolled the proposition. However, it would be naive to ignore the fact that for most of the people who
voted for Proposition 13, their homes were their chief asset; they were
wage and salary workers with nothing else to fall back on and much to
lose. They decided that protecting their wealth was eminently sensible in
a period when double-digit inflation and unemployment made every
worker wonder how else she might envision retirement security. The legal
gutting of pension plans since 2001 under bankruptcy laws underscores
how widespread organized abandonment of a broad range of workers has
become since the early 1980s.
THREE. THE PRISON FIX
1 The federal Counter Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of
1996 has drastically narrowed the ability of state prisoners to use the
federal courts to review the circumstances of their arrest, charge, conviction, sentence, or confinement; the new law amounts to a de facto repeal of the right to file a writ of habeas corpus (the U.S. Constitution
forbids de jure dismantling of the right). The new rules, which require
petitioners to meet stringent time, evidence, and other criteria to qualify for review, make nearly impossible the kinds of cases that resulted
in success for prisoners around the United States who filed writs of
habeas corpus before 1996 (Counter Terrorism and Effective Death
Penalty Act of 1996).
2 Indeed, California’s oldest prison, San Quentin, was designed to hold
260 NOTES TO PAGES 80–89
48–50 prisoners. Before it opened, the state’s temporary prison, sited in a
ship in the Sacramento River, held 150 people rounded up from five counties around the state (Bookspan 1991: ch. 1).
3 As should be evident from the first epigraph to this section, mainstream
historians of prison use the word “cage” to describe the particular quality
of this institution of social control; in other words, “cage” is a technical
term.
4 Prison capacity is measured in beds. The number of beds is not equal to
the number of cells, because there are different numbers of beds in cells
depending on the security level of the cell in question. We return to this
topic below in notes 27 and 31.
5 See “Gang Truce Leader: From Peacemaker to Prisoner,” Los Angeles
Times, December 20, 1992, B-1.
6 I learned a great deal about the JLCPCO from conversations with chief
staffers R. Bernard Orozco (July 1995 and July 1996), Gwynnae Bird (various dates, 1999–2003), and John Lum (2003).
7 There were already precedents for assigning work to specialists; for example, the California Student Aid Commission could hired financial aid
experts to analyze students’ applications for state funding without advertising or bidding out the work.
8 The LAPD is a highly capitalized police force. Cost control centered on
equipment, not salaries and benefits. As Bradley told one scholar, LAPD
“asked for everything from a tank to a submarine to an airplane and I took
those out of the budget” (Sonenshein 1993: 158).
9 There are two ways a person on parole goes back to prison. The first is by
committing a new crime; that is, classically speaking, recidivism. The second is by violating the terms of parole, through commission of status
rather than criminal offenses. A status offense is something that is illegal
or demands prison time only because of the condition of the person
charged. In 2000, for example, the single largest class of admissions to
CDC custody—45 percent—were (status) parole violators, outnumbering
those who had committed new crimes by more than 3:1 (Coalition for Effective Public Safety 2004).
10 Although Gomez did not become director until 1990, he took charge of
NOTES TO PAGES 90–96 261
CDC’s budgetary and bureaucratic maneuvering under Directors Daniel
McCarthy (1983–87) and James Rowland (1987–90). McCarthy and Rowland had been career correctional officers—the old way to work up to
head warden. Gomez was the first technocrat to run the department
(Morain 1994). By 1994, Gomez’s planning staff numbered 216 people,
plus Kitchell Capital Expenditures Management, the outside consultant
that has overseen the planning, design, budget systems, and evaluation of
all CDC building projects since 1981 (Morain 1994; SPWB 1993).
11 L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin went out of business because of
trading excesses—unrelated to the municipal finance sector—that put the
company in a perilous position after the 1987 stock market crash. When
LFRUT closed, it was the leader in underwriting tax-exempt debt in California. Prager went on to form his own company, which leads the state in
higher-education facilities debt issues. The balance of this section was
shaped in part from interviews generously granted by the following: Fred
Prager (July 1996), Tom Dumphy (July 1996), and Dan Morain (July
1995); see also Morain (1994a, 1994b, 1994c, 1994d, and 1994e).
12 One of the contradictory consequences of skyrocketing interest rates in the
early 1980s was an increased willingness on the part of consumers to borrow money whenever interest rates were favorable. That was because inflation had stayed so high for so long that it seemed wise household strategy to borrow rather than pay full costs out of current income or savings,
the theory being that the present discounted value of future dollars would
always pay off in the midrun (the average term to retire a major consumer
loan). In addition, consumer interest payments were fully tax deductible
up through 1986 (Grant 1992).
13 This section was shaped in part from interviews generously granted by
Andrew Parks (July 1995), Berndt Beutenmuller (July 1995), R. Bernard
Orozco (July 1995 and July 1996), and Don Pauley (July 1995 and July
1996).
14 The balance is held for future expansion (Mike Davis 1995), although it is
sometimes used, in the interim, for state prison industry agricultural
products such as vegetables or cotton (Andrew Parks, interview, 1995;
PIA 1995).
262 NOTES TO PAGES 97–102
15 The Los Angeles prison was never canceled; the legislature made the mistake of writing into law that no new prisons authorized after the LA
Prison Act could be put into operation until the LA prison was activated.
The legislature got around its own stumbling block by deliberately failing
to appropriate funds for the site. Before the legislature devised this strategy, several completed prisons sat empty while East LA and Sacramento
went toe to toe (Jacobs and Wolinsky 1986; Baker 1987; Sussman and
Howard 1987).
16 These include smaller farmers concerned about water scarcity; exurbanites eager to keep living in the small fishing town they moved to—
even if most fishermen have given up; and so forth.
17 The targeted communities are remarkably similar to those profiled by
Cerill Associates (1984) as ideal (i.e., easily exploitable) locations for waste
plants (see also Cole and Foster 2001).
18 Lancaster is exceptional in every way. It was the political compromise in
the battle to site a prison in Los Angeles County. The region has been economically dominated by Edwards Air Force Base. It is also rapidly suburbanizing, trying deliberately to form a “pro-business” development
edge on Los Angeles County’s northern perimeter. Extremely conservative politics, dominated by retired and active police and military, brought
the town around to accepting the prison once residents heard that escapes
are extremely rare.
19 R. Bernard Orozco, interview, July 1996.
20 Because this book is about expansion of the Adult Authority, the STEP
Act might seem an extraneous item for discussion. However, while the
STEP Act came out of the Youth Gang Violence Task Force, there is no
age limit for those who fall under the act’s enhancements. Thus, anyone
over eighteen years old can be charged under the STEP Act and remanded to the Adult Authority. In some cases, younger defendants upon
convictions are assigned to the Adult Authority but spend the first part of
their sentences in the Youth Authority. Proposition 21 in 2000 expanded
on both the STEP Act and “three strikes” laws.
21 The ballot initiative campaign was set in motion by an angry and bereaved
Anglo father, Fresno photographer Mike Reynolds, whose teenage
NOTES TO PAGES 104–108 263
daughter, Kimber, was murdered during an armed robbery in 1992. A
more notorious case—the kidnap-murder of young Polly Klaas—is credited by many with having put the initiative over the top, although her father testified against the law as written (Reynolds et al. 1996). As in the
1988 Willie Horton case, the combination of white female victims and the
random viciousness of the crimes threw into stark ideological relief the
need, and indeed the ease, by which society could separate the guilty from
the innocent, although in both the Reynolds and the Klaas murders, the
killers were Anglo (D. C. Anderson 1995; Reynolds et al. 1996). The former California assemblyman and then state senator Jim Costa (D–Fresno)
was co-author with the Fresno Republican farmer-turned-politician Bill
Jones (who served in the assembly and became secretary of state) of the
1994 “three strikes” bill (AB 971). Earlier in his Sacramento career, between 1985 and 1991, Costa was politically key in siting four prisons in his
region: Avenal, Corcoran I and II, and Coalinga (LAO 1986).
22 “Wobblers” are offenses that can be charged as misdemeanors or as
felonies. Prosecutors have the discretion to charge either way. In Los Angeles County, the district attorney instructed staff always to wobble misdemeanors to felonies in order to invoke second and third strikes on defendants (Buttitta 1994). It is through prosecutorial use of the “wobble”
that defendants whose controlling offense is shoplifting an inexpensive
item have been sentenced to eight years (second strike) or twenty-five
years to life without possibility of parole (third strike). See chapter 5.
23 One of the most notorious, and relatively successful, struggles was waged
by the former Los Angeles County sheriff Sherman Block; responsible for
the county jails that hold misdemeanor offenders, felony defendants, and
convicts awaiting transport to the state prisons, Block gained funding to
build a new jail by letting 23,000 inmates go home one week. Block failed,
however, to get enough funding to run the new jail, which was built with
municipal bond funds in the heart of downtown Los Angeles in the courthouse district. The CDC director wanted Sacramento to reclaim the jail
as state property because the county had failed to use the facility in accord
with the debt agreement. However, the CDC was stymied in its efforts
because it seemed impolitic, according to the chief consultant of the
264 NOTES TO PAGES 108–109
JLCPCO, for the CDC to undermine LA County when that jurisdiction
alone produces nearly 40 percent of the annual commitments to the CDC
(R. Bernard Orozco, interview, 1996).
24 Starting with the Reagan “War on Drugs” legislation in 1984, the United
States has offered financial aid to state and local law enforcement for particular kinds of activities. For example, under drug interdiction, the federal zero-tolerance statute allows seizure of any property alleged to have
been obtained through, or used for, drug manufacturing, transport, storage, or sale; if and when local law enforcement makes a “federal” case out
of a drug bust, by bringing in federal personnel and allowing defendants
to be charged in federal rather than state court, the local jurisdiction gets
half the money of all assets seized in relation to the action (Baum 1996).
Other subventions are more direct; for example, under the 1994 Violent
Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, California local law enforcement (cities and counties) has received more than $100 million for new
personnel; and the CDC has received $80,000,000 toward the cost of new
prisons (LAO 1996).
25 The LAPD developed SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams specifically to police Black political activists (Bean 1973; Donner 1990; Newton
1996) and was among the first metropolitan police forces to use battering
rams to smash into houses—a sight now common on televised police
shows such as COPS.
26 See www.corr.ca.gov/ReportsResearch/MonthlyTpop1aArchive.html (accessed January 25, 2006).
27 Prisoners are classified according to a rating, or points, system that evaluates them on the basis of the nature of the crime(s) for which they are currently committed, prior criminal history, and a psychological profile (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). Prisoners are then assigned to one of four
levels, from I (minimum security) to IV (maximum security). Level I prisoners live in dormitories and generally work on the prison grounds and
in the towns where the prisons are sited; it is not uncommon to encounter
complaints about the “shortage” of Level I prisoners. Level II prisoners
also live in dormitory-style setups, but do not participate in extramural
work; this classification is used sparingly. Level III prisoners are under
NOTES TO PAGES 109–115 265
full-time surveillance, and live in cages most of the time, although they
have access to public rooms in the facility. Level IV prisoners live in cages
twenty-three hours per day, seven days per week. Very few CDC commitments are classified Level II, and many Level III facilities have been
upgraded by the CDC to Level IV, at the encouragement of the correctional officers’ union (CCPOA) (BRC 1990; Rudman and Berthelsen
1991; CCPOA 1996).
28 The CDF Performance Review did not, however, touch the underlying
issue of CO pay—the political power of the guards’ union, the CCPOA.
29 In truth, the university has been neither; but in representation lies the
drama of politics and power.
30 San Joaquin Delta College, outside Sacramento, made the mistake of
boasting how little it spends on its CO training program compared with
the income it generates, only to be excluded from future participation on
the recommendation of the Legislative Analyst (LAO 1996). The boast
was not made clandestinely. It seemed perfectly sensible to the administration to trumpet the college’s efficiency. Since the surplus from the guard
program was recirculated through other, more expensive programs at the
college, there was no apparent larcenous intent.
31 During a six-year battle with a statewide coalition of community, labor,
civil rights, environmental justice, antiprison, and other opponents, the
CDC briefly averred that the North Kern State Prison (Delano II) would
be its last. However, even before the activist-delayed prison, originally
scheduled for 2001, finally opened in June 2005, Sacramento was firmly
forecasting new needs. By January 2006, new prisons featured prominently in the governor’s developmental agenda (see chapter 1, note 1). The
wildly erratic forecasts produced by the department never improved in accuracy, due to the political pressures on, rather than the statistical skills of,
those in charge of crunching the numbers. The statistical branch is not directed to lie, but it is directed to use criteria and parameters that always reinforce claims of imminent shortage.
32 James Gomez served as deputy executive director of California’s Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest such pension fund in the
United States until 2002, and then became a health care industry lobbyist.
266 NOTES TO PAGES 117–123
33 More “local” control varies widely by jurisdiction and should not be understood as synonymous with more direct control. For example, Los Angeles County is the largest substate governmental unit in the United
States, and residents are far further removed, numerically, from the
county supervisors than they are from State Assembly and Senate representatives (Mike Davis 1993b).
34 The reader will note that the Lockyer plan rewards county and local criminal justice jurisdictions for doing exactly what San Joaquin Delta College
was punished for doing.
35 Tom Hayden (D–Los Angeles) did vote for the measure, arguing on the
Senate floor that while he did not like the idea, he believed that privatizing prisons was the only way to save public education (JLCPCO, April 10,
1996). Hayden’s presumption of two classes of Californians, those bound
for prison and those headed to college, is not very distant from that of former State Treasurer Kathleen Brown (Jerry’s sister), who in 1994 devised
a tax-exempt college bond that parents could buy for their children; the
proceeds of the bond sale would go to building prisons for, presumably,
other people’s children (Morain 1994d).
36 The more it changed, the more it stayed the same. When Deukmejian
took over from Jerry Brown and decided to embark on a much larger and
more ambitious prison program, he termed the facilities he would approve “megaprisons.”
37 Voters rejected GOBs in the 1990s, and they also approved diversion for
first- and second-time drug convictions (Proposition 36) in November
2000. In addition, multiple statewide polls found likely voters demanding
prison cuts (Coalition for Effective Public Safety 2004).
38 Wackenhut emerged from the CIA, for example, and GE, Lockheed, and
other defense contractors are trying to get a piece of the domestic military
action (Neumann 1996). This is a Cold War “conversion” development
explicitly called for by Markusen and Yudken (1992).
FOUR. CRIME, CROPLANDS, AND CAPITALISM
1 Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, and its proliferation throughout the U.S. South radically increased the demand for field slaves and
NOTES TO PAGES 123–132 267
thereby stepped up the international slave trade. Upon legal termination
of the international trade, an intra-U.S. trade between Virginia and the
Deep South grew and flourished through the Civil War (Tadman 1990).
The big cotton ranchers in the southern San Joaquin Valley all owned gins
(Weber 1994). It was not until 1942 and after that innovations in raw product production began to reduce cotton’s dependence on human labor, with
the introduction of the mechanical harvester (Bergman 1969).
2 Until the 1965 Williamson Act, California taxes on farmland were assessed against potential profits; thus, the productivity of the larger growers squeezed the smaller ones indirectly as well as directly (Goldman
1991).
3 Reorganized in 1930, the Bank of Italy became the Bank of America.
4 In different regions and sectors of California, agriculture arrangements of
capital and labor differ. For example, Miriam Wells (1996) documents
how contemporary Salinas Valley strawberry growers combine sharecropping, tenant farmer, and wage labor relationships to establish political security over crop production. However, for the vast commodity farms
of the San Joaquin Valley, agricultural labor was proletarianized both before, and as a consequence of, the rise of corporate cotton production
(Weber 1994; Daniel 1981).
5 Surface-water irrigated farming in the Central Valley long predates European settlement there (Caughey 1940; Preston 1981), but its expansion
since the onset of Anglo immigration in the mid nineteenth century is also
the story of battles between direct producers (whether small farmers or
wage labor) and capital (Norris 1987; Bean 1973; Pisani 1984). The two
decades following the 1880 Mussel Slough shootout near Hanford, the
Kings County seat, marked the rise of intensive farming in the area (Bean
1973; Pisani 1984). The shootout resulted from the Southern Pacific Railroad’s pricing scheme for its federally granted lands that small farmers
had contracted to buy. The sales took nearly five years to complete, during which time the farmers had irrigated their plots; when the railroad included the value of sweat equity improvements in the purchase price, it
dispossessed those who had been working the land in favor of larger landholders who had sufficient capital to buy at the higher prices. Between
268 NOTES TO PAGES 134–137
1880 and the turn of the century, most irrigation districts were privately
owned, with everything from sweat equity to local cooperative investment
to absent national and international capital sunk in their dams and ditches
(Bean 1973; Pisani 1984).
6 The idea behind the married couple rule was not to grant women equal
property rights, but rather to allow married men to accumulate more, because their responsibility as husbands would presumably make them
more reliable farmers (Pisani 1984). Pisani’s argument shows a key contradiction within the capitalist class, with San Francisco lenders who held
bad paper in 1898–99 wanting the big farms broken down so that the
“boom-bust” cycle that sent capitalist growers into ruin would be mitigated by mixed (subsistence and commodity) family farmers who could be
more flexible when it came to market or climate fluctuations (Pisani
1984). The act’s rules, which were easily and regularly broken, not only
imposed acreage limitations but also, to prevent speculation, required
those obtaining reclamation water to sell off their surplus acreage at preproject prices. The disputes over the Bureau of Reclamation acreage limitations raise interesting questions for future research concerning the desire for, and failure of, land redistribution (downward) in the United
States in the mid–twentieth century compared with its U.S. military–
organized, top-down enforcement in East Asia after World War II (Pisani
1984; Amsden 1985; Hart-Landsberg 1993; cf. Woods 1998).
7 The 1982 reauthorization of the Reclamation Act purported to close these
loopholes, and raised the maximum farm size to 960 acres. A political settlement that preceded (and delayed) the new regulations, which were not
promulgated until 1987, ensured that they would not directly address the
methods by which large landowners got around the acreage restriction;
therefore, the regulatory “oversight” voided the original and extended
purpose of the law (Gottlieb 1988).
8 The nationalization of surplus water was not established without struggle, and the sovereignty question has never been fully resolved: How can
the United States “claim” California surplus as a U.S. rather than California public good (Hundley 1992)?
9 The Corps’ political success in this project (Reisner 1986), coupled with the
NOTES TO PAGES 137–139 269
postwar rise of the Department of War (renamed Defense) into an enormous and insulated entity (G. Hooks 1991), gave the Corps power to displace the bureau on all major postwar western water projects (Reisner
1986).
10 Walker and Storper calculated that for 1.8 million acre-feet of water the
growers received as surplus, farmers paid $6 million and Met customers
paid $170 million (Reisner 1986; Gottlieb 1988). Central Valley cities and
towns can also contract for Met surplus, but they pay the cost of production.
11 Almost immediately after the drought ended, California winters, starting
in 1978, became inordinately wet (Reisner 1986; Cooke 1984; Gottlieb
1988); 1983 was central California’s wettest recorded year (Coalinga
Record, May 2, 1984).
12 There are several methodological problems inherent in pinning down
these “facts.” First, Boswell is privately held and divulges nothing about
its employment practices, valuations, and so forth. And California does
not have reliable records on seasonal and migrant farmworkers. “Nonfarm” employment is the ordinary indicator of jobs for a given region. The
invisible workers in the “factories in the field” (McWilliams [1939] 1969)
seem as erased from the official story as they do from the agricultural vistas that Don Mitchell (1996) deconstructed with his labor theory of landscape.
13 The balance of this section was shaped in part from interviews generously
granted by Don Pauley (July 1995 and July 1996), Jeanette Todd (July
1995), Melissa Harriman (July 1996), Charley Trujillo (May 1999), and
many anonymous Corcoran residents who talked with me during my research visits to the town.
14 Nobody talks about the great taboo of African Americans marrying anybody but African Americans; valley Okie Merle Haggard’s song “Irma
Jackson” is a down-home critique of the unspeakable.
15 CDC job classifications in 1987 at salaries of from $873 to $1,730 a month
included automobile mechanics, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, truck
drivers, maintenance mechanics, account clerks, account technicians, bakers, bookkeeping machine operators, cooks, office assistants, telephone op270 NOTES TO PAGES 139–150
erators, library assistants, dental assistants, medical technical assistants,
medical transcribers, and X-ray technicians.
16 Susanville’s second prison was sited in 1991, and the town has not recovered. When tiny Lake County, Oregon, found itself an unwilling host city
for a prison whose site was chosen by the Governor’s Office, the Susanville
City Council wrote an apparently unsolicited letter to Lake County warning it of the significant disadvantages of host city life.
17 Certainly, Okies, Mexicans, and Africans who had come to Corcoran earlier in the century as migrant workers did not universally experience the
unqualified welcome the rancher credited Corcoran with extending. My
own travels to Corcoran supported her sentiment—but I attribute some
of the positive reception I got to the fact that I came as a researcher interested in the social and economic health of the place; that is, I came in peace,
and I was not going to stay. It is also true that shortly upon my arrival in
town, each visit, I participated in a brief ritual. In the cool of the morning
I would review my notes at a picnic table in a Boswell-built park, until the
Corcoran Journal office across the street opened for business. The patrol
car on duty would slowly cruise the park perimeter (one relatively small
city block), its officer checking me out. I would fuss with my papers,
change my glasses a few times, and look very busy. The policeman would
drive away. Every time.
18 In 1942, the state’s rate of imprisonment was lower than at any time during the twentieth century. In the final scene in If He Hollers, Let Him Go,
Chester Himes’s brilliant novel about Black Los Angeles, the warfare industry, and racism in World War II, a judge sentences the narrator, who
has been framed for rape, to Uncle Sam’s rather than the CDC’s uniform
(Himes [1945] 1986; cf. C. L. R. James 1980).
19 SPWB 1986b; BRC 1990; Corcoran Journal, May 28, 1987.
20 The balance of this section was shaped in part from interviews generously
granted by Don Pauley (July 1995 and July 1996), Jeanette Todd (July
1995), R. Bernard Orozco (July 1995), and anonymous residents.
21 Corcoran Journal, June 16, 1987.
22 The more isolated, or islandlike, a prison town, the more economic activity appears to stick locally, as measured by, for example, sales tax revenue.
NOTES TO PAGES 151–161 271
However, the appearance may well be an illusion. Far-flung Blythe’s (see
map) relative tax pull seems to be more an effect of constant building (following the prisons, the town has experienced construction of one of a proposed series of power plants) than of any prison-related activity. Blythe,
like Crescent City and Ione, is also a spot where tourists spend money for
food, lodging, and supplies.
23 The utilities maintained a low profile during siting struggles. It is stunning, in retrospect, that the 1985 study by Lofting and Linton underestimated CDC expenditures in the county by failing to include utilities as a
budget item.
24 Coalinga Record, February 20, 1985.
25 By comparison, in Avenal the water issue demonstrates how the prison directly undermines local development efforts. Having been forbidden to use
groundwater as a result of the farmers’ lawsuit, the CDC negotiated with
Avenal to take a portion of the city’s contracted State Water Project–Met
water. The negotiations included no mitigating funds, or provisions
should the prison cage more inmates than anticipated. As the prison designed for 2,700 took in more than 6,000 prisoners, it consumed water at
more than twice the projected rate. Avenal buys water from the
SWP–Met at the price of production (about $35 per acre-foot), and, with
a very poor resident population, cannot afford to increase its contracted
amount. As a result, the city has not been able to recruit manufacturing or
other promising employers, because it cannot guarantee sufficient water
for industrial or expanded residential use, due to the CDC drain (Melissa
Harriman, interview, 1996).
26 For all but three of the state’s twenty-four new prisons, the allied towns
have had to annex the sites (R. Bernard Orozco, interview, 1995).
27 Fresno County rolled out a Juvenile Jail Complex in 2003; the four-stage
project will not be completed until 2040, meaning the county planned a
jail for children whose parents had not yet been born.
28 Prisoners challenging the conditions of their arrest, conviction, or sentences would return to the jurisdiction where the event(s) occurred.
29 Robert Puls, a hardworking and prosperous Tulare County rancher, did
his own study to support his group, Stop This Outrageous Prison (STOP),
272 NOTES TO PAGES 162–176
which fought back five prisons between 1989 and 1998 (interview, September 1998).
30 The origin and circulation of the number of projected jobs—72—sheds
interesting light on the geopolitics of knowledge. In the spring of 2000, I
combed through the Delano II prison’s Supplemental Environmental Impact Report to figure out what the CDC’s forecasters thought would happen. A little basic math produced 72 out of 1,600 jobs. In August, Evelyn
Nieves of the New York Times interviewed me at length concerning the
controversial prison. She subsequently interviewed Delano’s then mayor,
Napoleon Madrid, sharing the finding with him, and he is the source of
the number in her story (Nieves 2000). Joan Didion cites him, as reported
by Nieves, in her 2003 book Where I Was From.
FIVE. MOTHERS RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN
1 The LA Four were the young African American men charged with the
widely televised beating of a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, on
April 29, 1992, the first day of the uprising. Opposition to the LA Four
trial centered on the ideological use of the case to justify acquittal of the
four LAPD officers for the televised beating of Rodney King. Reginald
Denny himself objected to the railroading of his assailants and to the state
and media’s deliberate ignoring of the dozens of Black people who saved
him. (Note: In most cases the names in this chapter have been changed.)
2 Officers of the court include judges, prosecutors, prosecution and defense
attorneys, and bailiffs; untrustworthy witnesses include police and jailhouse informants who trade time for testimony.
3 I am thankful to Doracie Zoleta-Nantes for the conversations through
which these concepts emerged.
4 In the United States, the word equality seems often to connote an upward
leveling. Fortunati (1995) helpfully points out that other forms of “equality” (e.g., slavery) have analytical weight that requires political and organizational attention.
5 Outsource companies can disappear overnight, thanks to no fixed capital
or other constraints holding them in place. Labor thus lacks the leverage
it had when, for example, janitors negotiated contracts directly with the
NOTES TO PAGES 177–193 273
former employers (owners of hotels, restaurants, office buildings, factories, and so forth) who are now outsource firms’ clients.
6 According to a presentation given by a JfJ organizing committee in Los
Angeles in March 1993, organizing has in some cases stretched back to immigrant janitors’ towns of origin in Mexico and El Salvador. Insofar as it
is common for people from a particular region to migrate to both the same
area and labor-market niche as their friends and families who precede
them, JfJ started to work backward along the migratory path in an attempt to incorporate the wider-than-daily labor market into the movement’s sphere of influence. During this same presentation, when challenged by a Sandinista cadre who asked an apparently simple question
(“What became of the people who used to be janitors?”), JfJ acknowledged that its organizing had not extended to the former workers. JfJ
pledged to expand its Southern California scope of activity and reach out
to former janitors in the community, who are, as noted above, mostly
African Americans, in a project that many hoped would revive submerged knowledge from earlier labor and antiracist struggles.
7 Bear in mind that the LAPD invented the Special Weapons and Tactics
(SWAT) Team specifically to police politically organized Black people (cf.
Bean 1973; Sonenshein 1993; Mike Davis 1990). But the premier symbol of
Los Angeles’s capitalized, militarized police force is the helicopters that
pulse and hover overhead day and night, coordinating motorized ground
forces from a flexible vantage point—a mobile panoptic lacking the stealth
Bentham envisioned. The dread is renewed daily by the noise as well as by
individual encounters with police.
8 Jennifer Wolch (1989) developed the “shadow state” concept to theorize
state-sanctioned nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); I use it here to
emphasize how gangs constitute territorially bounded rule-making bodies for a mosaic in-filling vast regions that the legal state has abandoned except in the form of militarized occupation and social services–based surveillance (R. W. Gilmore 1993; Mike Davis 1990; Vigil 1996; see also
Fanon 1961). The point is not to romanticize gangs, but rather to emphasize that all social formations—even stranded communities in deindustrialized urban centers—develop some means for maintaining order
274 NOTES TO PAGES 193–200
(Mann 1988); sometimes it is necessary to look beneath the surface of apparent disorder to grasp the logic of a particular system of order. Furthermore, as Tilly (1985) argues, war making, state making, and organized
crime are distinct with reference to those who produce and enforce the
“law” but not so different in terms of actual practices, relations, and outcomes.
9 Notably, attendees at the rally—or “coming together” as many participants termed it—included survivors from the prior generation’s social
movements, such as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Thus, the
“coming together” commingled community members—who were developing their political consciousness in that particular moment of powerfully focused anger and grief—with activists representing theoretical tendencies and traditions that were forged in earlier struggles against state,
and state-sanctioned, violence.
10 Simi Valley is a conservative suburban town where many active and retired military and police make their homes. When the trial was moved
there from downtown Los Angeles, skepticism of any outcome save acquittal dominated casual discussions about the case in South Central.
11 Prisoners are “unitized”—which is CDC jargon for “segregated.” While
individual wardens have power over the social organization of their prisons, the general policy is to keep prisoners in each facility separated by
“race.” CDC demographic analyses use four basic categories: white, Black,
Latino, and “other.” “Others”—Asian-Pacific Islanders and Native
Americans—are not housed separately but distributed among the three
principal groups, such that, for example, Samoans are usually Black; Filipinos are Latino; people of Chinese, Hmong, Lao, or Vietnamese descent
might be white or Latino, but not Black; and Native Americans are usually Latino but sometimes Black. According to the testimony of some prisoners, “unitizing” helps produce and reinforce animosities, keeps internal
hierarchies intact, and discourages any kind of substantive cross-racial organizing on behalf of, for example, prisoners’ rights. In February 2005, the
U.S. Supreme Court objected to the CDC’s oft-denied practice and ordered a lower court to subject the department’s motives to “strict scrutiny”
(Savage and Warren 2005).
NOTES TO PAGES 202–205 275
12 A recurring irony in Mothers ROC cases—especially African Americans’—is how frequently the (extended) family knows, or is related to, a
police, probation, parole, or corrections officer (the frequency is related, of
course, to the historical battle by Black people to gain access to state jobs,
which became a relatively secure labor market niche until the attack on
government size launched in the past two decades). The irony has been
quite useful in helping mothers take a systemic, rather than individualized, view of their struggle. Knowing, as they do, that their friend/relative
is not a bad person, and probably not a racist (although anti-Black racism
among Black people is not uncommon), they then have to figure out another explanation for what is happening to their children, in which they
can account for people “like” themselves on the other side (cf. Guérin
1994).
13 Many new Mothers tell the same story—they mortgage the house or sell
the car in order to pay a lawyer only to discover that the contract limits the
services to the most routine rounds of court filings and appearances. Furthermore, the question of mortgaging or selling has its own racialized contradictions. Oliver and Shapiro (1995) show the ways that, for Black
people, residential apartheid and lender redlining effectively limit access
to (as well as growth of) the fundamental source of U.S. household wealth:
home equity. In the case of the ROCers who mortgage, they leverage
lower-than-average equity at higher-than-average loan costs in order
to—at best—maintain the status quo (a loved one kept out of prison)
rather than to “invest” in the future in the form of education or other potentially remunerable family or personal development.
14 That library has since restricted access; people with no formal affiliation
with the institution must pay to get in the door, and the legal database is
restricted to faculty and students, who must have a personal access code,
assigned by the university, to use it.
15 The Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, signed by Lyndon Baines
Johnson, and the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, signed by
Richard M. Nixon. These acts were designed to deal with the urban rioters of the 1960s, revolutionary organizations such the Black Panther Party
for Self Defense, and the Mafia, and indeed to merge these differently dis276 NOTES TO PAGES 208–219
ruptive groupings into an undifferentiated enemy. Given FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover’s centrality in these deliberations and his coalition with certain elements of (white) organized crime, we can see in this pair of laws the
state’s internal conflict and contradiction. See Donner 1990.
16 The Willie Horton syndrome, which I am tempted to call rational choice
fascism. Stuart Hall (1986), following Antonio Gramsci (1971) and others,
argues that common sense merits the closest attention in any study of or
movement for social change (progressive or repressive). At the current
moment, there has been a terrifying elision in common sense across three
conceptual stages: the protection and promotion of groups whose rights
and opportunities have been historically undermined or suppressed (the
usual list) are now vilified for unmerited favoritism and handouts, for
which the proper remedy is at best judged to be individually evaluated
merit, privacy, and so forth. Turning on this individualized pivot, however, is the notion that certain persons have decided to become members
of outlaw groupings (again, the usual list); it follows that all such groupings, regardless of individual differentiation within them, should be uniformly coerced, sanctioned, and incapacitated. The scariest part, of course,
is that the members the former group and those of the latter share striking demographic similarities—because of an objective, if not strategic,
continuum from the “war on poverty” to the “war on crime.”
17 The Simpson criminal trial had not been resolved during this discussion;
but even his acquittal and the aftermath supported the ROCers’ sense that
a Black man’s trial is completely unlike a white man’s trial.
18 Between 1977 and 1982, the number of white prisoners increased 50 percent, while Black prisoners doubled, producing nearly equal absolute
numbers between the two groups; from that time forward Black prisoners exceeded all other groups until 1994, when the steady increase in
Latino incarceration shifted the balance. See table 5.
19 Thanks to a surprisingly successful grassroots campaign, the city of Los
Angeles turned down the DOJ “Weed and Seed” funding, which it had
been inclined to accept before ordinary people lambasted the program and
its nefarious implications at public hearings in neighborhoods likely to
bear the brunt of the “weeding” (Urban Strategies Group 1992).
NOTES TO PAGES 219–232 277
20 A recurrent theme in discussions among many of the shyer mothers was
their avowal of, and explanation for, their own unfitness. They refused the
dominant explanations—they don’t take drugs, rely on welfare, or work
in the sex industry. But what lingered was a doubt whether they as women
(and men) who might have trouble reading or who have been afraid to
stand up to the law can ever be fit mothers for loved ones caught in a system in which book knowledge and various types of intimidation—intellectual as well as physical—feature centrally in the outcomes of cases.
Many asked me to accompany them to meetings with officials because
they felt stronger knowing that I know all the words—as well as the demographics, statistics, history, and so on. As they taught one another what
they learned, all of the ROCers gained confidence; indeed, those who
could not read well flourished by using their substantial memories to chart
and compare cases (cf. R. W. Gilmore 1991 on the boys in the California
Youth Authority).
21 Cf. Catherine MacKinnon’s (1989) stridently clear exposition of gender
displacement/subsumption. The integrations are, of course, fragile; everything is at risk, and old structures and habits of inequality easily fill social
spaces left vulnerable by uncertainty. For example, at a number of Mothers ROC meetings, men who had not been active in the organization
would often steamroller discussions when the ROCers are trying to figure
something out; and the ROCers let it happen, reenacting other relations
of love, respect, and fear.
22 Markusen and Yudken’s (1992) analysis of the Cold War economy must be
extended to the domestic warfare economy; see also Fanon 1961. At the
same time that Mothers ROC has expanded, the LA gang truce has done
so as well. By mid 2003, the LA truce included a number of Central City,
Eastside and Westside Chicano and other Latino gangs. The Fourth Anniversary T-shirt (1996) featured a drawing of Malcolm X and Emiliano
Zapata, the legend beneath their representations reading “X y Z.” Also
note, gangs engaged in peacemaking have, on a national basis, changed
their moniker from “gangs” to “street organizations.”
23 For example, a fairly recent newcomer to Mothers ROC was an immigrant Salvadorena who worked nights as a janitor; as noted above, core
278 NOTES TO PAGES 237–238
cadres among militant labor organizers in Los Angeles include Salvadorena refugees who are experienced in dealing with state terror and
with challenging state legitimacy.
24 According to the UN International Labor Organisation, women do twothirds of the world’s work, receive 5 percent of the income, and own 1 percent of the assets. Margaret Prescod of the Wages for Housework Campaign interprets these figures as illuminating both sexism and racism on a
global scale (R. W. Gilmore 1993).
NOTE TO PAGE 238 279
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A list of people interviewed during the writing of this book follows the
main bibliographical list.
Abramovitz, Mimi. 1988. Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. Boston: South End
Press.
Abu-Jamal, Mumia. 1995. Live from Death Row.Reading, Pa.: AddisonWesley.
Acoli, Sundiata. 1992. A Brief History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle. Harlem: Sundiata Acoli Freedom Campaign.
Acuña, Rudolfo F. 1984. A Community under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945–1975. Los Angeles: Chicano
Studies Research Center Publications, UCLA.
———. 1996. Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles. New York: Verso.
Adams, Jane, ed. 2003. Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Adams, John. 1990. Institutional Economics and Social Choice Economics: Commonalities and Conflicts. Journal of Economic Issues 24
(3): 845–59.
281
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INTERVIEWS
Conrad Andrews, Los Angeles, 1995, 1996
Constance Andrews, Los Angeles, 1995, 1996
Francie Arbol, Los Angeles, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002
Berndt Beutenmueller, Sacramento, 1995
Gwynnae Bird, Sacramento, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003
Pearl Daye, Los Angeles, 1995, 1996
Tom Dumphy, Sacramento, 1996
Mona Estrada, Los Angeles, 1995, 1996
June Fernandez, Los Angeles, 1995, 1996
Gilda Garcia, Pomona, 1995, 1996
Belle Gillespie, Los Angeles, 1996
Leticia Gonzales, Los Angeles, 1995, 1996
Melissa W. Harriman, Avenal, 1996
Bernice Hatfield, Covina, 1995, 1996
Paris Jackson, Los Angeles, 1995, 1996
John C. Lum, Sacramento, 2003
Barbara Meredith, Los Angeles, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000
Dan Morain, Sacramento, 1995
R. Bernard Orozco, Sacramento, 1995, 1996
Andrew Parks, Modesto, 1995
BIBLIOGRAPHY 353
Frederic Prager, San Francisco, 1996
J. Edward Tewes, Modesto, 1995
Jeanette Todd, Corcoran, 1995
Charley Trujillo, San Jose, 1999
Graciela Vega, Claremont, 1995, 1997
354 BIBLIOGRAPHY
activists, 29, 241–42, 245–48; antiracist, 37, 39, 89, 168–69, 170,
190–91, 192, 244, 246–47; antitax,
42–43, 49, 62, 80–84, 95, 97, 101,
126, 147, 258n16; campus, 38;
civic elites, 12, 22, 188; Corcoran,
152–54, 168; vs. criminalization
and imprisonment as solutions to
social problems, 1–5, 109, 172,
185, 229, 249–51; criminalization
of, 89, 90–91; for dispossessed,
12; environmentalist, 142,
258n16; environmental justice,
178, 249–51; extremist, 233; governmental, 135; grassroots organization, 178, 184, 186, 231, 251;
for “kids,” 177, 178; lawyers,
210–11; and Los Angeles uprisings, 39, 50, 196–97, 203–4; “maternal,” 195; “moral panics,” 90–
91, 93; Mothers ROC, 5–6, 181–
240, 241; vs. police brutality, 50,
190, 196, 202, 203, 212; and
power, 222, 238, 247–48; prisoner, 244–45; vs. prison siting,
103–4, 152–54, 175, 176–80, 227–
28, 266n31, 272–73n29; professionalization of, 242; rural people
vs. prisons, 152–54, 175, 176–80,
249–51, 266n31, 272–73n29;
scholar, 5–6, 27, 183–84, 241; ten
theses for, 29, 245–48; urban
people vs. prisons, 103–4, 180,
249–51; vs. “Weed and Seed”
funding by DOJ, 277n19;
women, 181–240. See also coalitions; labor activism; Mothers
ROC; Progressives; strikes; voter
propositions; voting power
aerospace industry, 36–37, 40, 60,
125–26
affirmative action, 50, 118, 160–61
Africa, activist women, 181, 184,
239
355
INDEX
African Americans. See Blacks
age of human sacrifice, 244
agency: antistate state and, 245; and
structure, 27, 248
aggressive intolerance: key to safety,
4, 24; political rewards for, 20.
See also punishment; violence
agricultural labor: Central Valley,
128, 129, 132–36, 140–46, 268n4;
cotton, 128, 129, 132–36, 140,
143–45, 147, 268nn2,4, 270n12;
ethnicities, 34, 39, 41–42, 77, 132,
135–36, 140–41, 146–47; inequalities, 26, 32–33; relative
surplus population, 77; sharecroppers, 192; unemployment,
77, 145. See also farmworker activists
agricultural water supply, 137–43;
drought and, 41, 67, 68, 141–43,
147, 155; irrigation, 3, 41, 65–69,
66 fig, 129, 132, 137, 141–42,
268–69n5; and Peripheral Canal,
142, 258n16; prison competition
for, 153, 162; state-developed, 33,
38, 139; surplus water, 137–39,
269nn6,7, 270n10; Westlands
Water District, 139–40
agriculture, 3; agribusiness, 41, 67–
68, 128–45, 144table, 268n4;
Central Valley, 3, 37, 48, 68–69,
128–46, 144table, 162, 268–
69nn1,4,5; cotton growers, 128–
45, 144table, 147, 154, 155–57,
166, 167, 258n16; dispossessed
farmers, 32, 192, 268–69n1; farm
debt crisis, 48, 67–68, 134, 147;
“farm industrialists,” 131, 135–
36; “farm management arrangements,” 137; food exports, 47, 67;
homesteader, 31, 32, 152; Inland
Empire, 68; land disinvestment,
53, 65, 68–70, 105–6, 126–27,
155–57, 162, 258n17; mechanization, 129, 132, 140, 141table, 143–
45, 268n1; small growers, 133–
35, 139, 152–56, 162, 268n5;
“surplus crops,” 67, 143; taxes on
farmland, 134, 258n17, 268n2.
See also agricultural labor; agricultural water supply
Anglos. See European immigrants;
whites
anticipatory disinvestment, 68
apartheid, 13, 36, 39; fiscal, 246; Los
Angeles, 39, 254n4; Montgomery bus boycott and, 190–91;
ROC and FACTS and, 240; sociospatial, 74, 220, 254n4;
Tuskegee model, 190. See also
segregation
Arbol, Francie, 181, 205–9, 224, 235
Argentina, Las Madres de la Plaza
de Mayo, 194–95, 226
Army Corps of Engineers (“the
Corps”), 138–39, 269–70n9
arrests: increased numbers of (1994–
95), 222; individual nature of,
235–36
Arviszu, César, 128
Aryan Brotherhood, 204–5
Ashley, David, 118
Asians, Asian Americans: California labor force, 31–32; Mothers
356 INDEX
ROC, 184; prison categories,
275n11; Yellow Power, 39. See
also Chinese; Filipinos; Japanese
Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities
(AICCU), 98
Avenal: CDC not appreciated by,
163–64, 272n25; educational results, 161; prison siting, 104, 148,
157–58, 162, 272n25; water use,
162, 272n25
Avila, Joaquin, 168–69
Bakersfield: bus riders for freedom,
3; commute to Corcoran, 156,
158; property values, 146
Bank of America, 48, 143, 156,
268n3
Bank of Italy, 134, 268n3
Bellridge Oil Company, Kings
County, 140
Berthelsen, John, 115
Birmingham, Alabama, labor activism, 192, 193
Black Panther Party, 39, 167, 255n6
Black people: agricultural labor,
135–36, 140–41; Black Power, 24,
39, 167, 255n6; Bradley, 48; civil
rights movement, 89, 168–69,
190, 216, 219; after Civil War,
12–13; club women, 187–91;
Corcoran, 135–36, 140–41, 146,
154, 271n17; dropout rate, 77; education, 75–76, 77; intermarriage, 270n14; Jim Crow laws vs.,
13, 79, 188, 189–90, 244; labor
migration, 31–32, 35; labor relations, 34–35, 135–36, 146, 192,
193; Los Angeles gangs, 197–205,
210, 217, 235; military industry,
35, 38–39; Mothers ROC, 5–6,
181–240, 276n12; NAACP, 216;
police racism against, 39, 217,
254n4, 265n25; poor, 38–39;
prison employment, 276n12;
prisoner population, 7, 20, 89,
110–11, 111table, 184–85, 225,
275n11, 277n18; relative surplus
population of male, 75, 184–85;
steady employment of male, 75;
third strike prisoners, 113; underclass, 259n20; underemployment, 75, 76; unemployment of
men, 76, 199; urban areas, 35,
126; visibility of women, 190–92,
238–39; working class women,
187–91, 194, 199
Block, Sherman, 264n23
Blue Ribbon Commission on Prison
Population Management (1990),
115
Board of Prison Terms, 89–90, 96
Boatwright, Dan, 121–23, 124
bonds, 97–102; education, 98–99,
267n35; general obligation
bonds (GOBs), 93–94, 97, 101,
115, 120, 122–23, 267n37; lease
revenue bonds (LRBs), 98–102,
116, 120, 121, 125; municipal,
62–63, 264n23; negotiated and
competitive, 120; prison construction, 93–94, 97–102, 115,
116, 120–23, 125, 126. See also
debt
INDEX 357
Boswell, J. G., 133
J. G. Boswell Company (cotton),
130, 132–33, 140, 142, 147; labor,
147, 270n12; land sale to CDC,
155–57, 162; scholarships, 147;
small growers and, 152, 154;
water supply, 136–40, 142,
258n16
Kate G. Boswell Senior Center, 157,
159
Bracero program (1942–65), 136,
140, 141
Bradley, Tom, 48, 53, 81, 95, 99,
261n8
Brown, Edmund G. “Pat,” 139
Brown, Jerry, 49, 62, 92–93, 95, 204,
267n36
Brown, Willie, 97
Brown Power, 39, 167, 168–69
Buck, Pem, 244
budget: Los Angeles crime-fighting,
95; urban police, 116. See also
California budget; costs; finance
Budget Act (1977), California, 91–
92
Buena Vista Lake, 138–39
building: boom (1980s), 48; Corcoran development, 157. See also
prison construction
Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) See
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
Bureau of Reclamation, 137–39,
152, 269–70nn6,9
business cycle, 55–56
cage, 261n3. See also prison
California Aqueduct, 139
California budget: balanced budget
requirement, 97. See also general
fund
California constitution: on debt approval, 62, 97; Peripheral Canal
amendment, 142; real estate
amendment, 36
California Correctional Center, Susanville/Lassen County, 151
California Correctional Institution,
Tehachapi/southern Kern
County, 93, 102–3, 129, 205
California Correctional Peace Officers’ Association (CCPOA), 118,
120, 123, 125, 253n1, 266nn27,28
California Department of Corrections (CDC), 8, 91–95; budget,
114–23; Facilities Master Plan
(1983), 96; Facilities Planning
Report (1978), 92; Facilities Requirement Plan (1980), 92;
Gomez, 96, 101, 115–16, 121–22,
261–62n10; Government and
Community Relations Branch,
103; internal finance capital department, 120; Performance Reviews, 117–18, 121, 266n28;
Prison Siting Office, 103–4, 105,
148–66; regional accounting office, 164; regulations, 173;
Richard McGee Training Facility, 119; state’s largest department, 8, 113. See also California
prisons
California Department of Finance
(CDF), 94; CDC Performance
Review, 117, 121, 266n28
358 INDEX
California Employment Development Department (EDD), 72,
160, 259n19
California enterprise zone (CEZ)
designation, 165, 166
California governors: Bradley campaigns, 48, 53, 81, 95; Jerry
Brown, 49, 62, 92–93, 95,
267n36; Pat Brown, 139; Deukmejian, 48–49, 53–54, 62, 94–95,
97, 267n36; elections (1978–94),
84, 85 fig; Merriam, 35; Reagan,
40, 81, 94; Schwarzenegger,
253n1; Sinclair campaign, 35;
Wilson, 49, 53–54, 62, 121, 123
California Institute of Technology,
98
California laws, 120, 226–27; cotton
“one variety law,” 134–35;
crimes reclassified by, 95–96;
drug, 96; Land
Conversion/Williamson Act
(1965), 258n17, 268n2; LA
Prison Act, 263n15; Panther
Gun Bill, 39, 255n6; Prison Construction Bond Act (1982), 97;
prison sphere of sanction, 173;
sentence-enhancing, 107–12;
STEP Act (1988), 6, 107–8, 213,
216–17, 218, 263n20; tax and
currency (after Mexican War),
31; Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act (1977), 89, 91–92,
109; “wobble” applications of,
108, 224–27, 264n22. See also
felonies; “three strikes”; voter
propositions
California political economy, 30–86,
88; restructuring, 40, 47–48, 50,
70, 79–84, 126, 131, 184–85, 221;
state and local funding of social
programs, 245. See also crises;
economics; politics; surpluses;
welfare state
California population, 31, 37–38, 42,
47 fig; nonmetropolitan, 65; and
relative surplus population, 70–
78, 73–74table. See also California prisoner population
California prisoner population, 7–8,
90–91, 102, 114; class, 7, 15, 237;
Corcoran, 130; education, 111,
267n35; explanations for growth
in, 17–24; in FACTS, 234;
guard-prisoner ratios, 115; Level
I, 151, 168, 265–66n27; Level II,
265–66n27; Level III, 265–
66n27; Level IV, 115, 265–66n27;
local population count including, 150; Los Angeles, 7, 70, 75–
76, 111, 185; “megaprisons,” 125;
overcrowding, 89, 91–92, 96–97;
race, 7, 20, 89, 110–11, 111table,
184–85, 204–5, 225, 244–45,
275n11, 277n18; relative surplus
population, 72, 73–74table, 111;
risk classifications, 115, 265–
66n27; second or third strike,
234; shot dead by guards, 121.
See also prison construction
California prisons, 10map, 253n1;
marginality, 10–11; new admissions of drug offenses (1977–90),
108; “original,” 151; overcrowdINDEX 359
California prisons (continued)
ing, 89, 91–92, 96–97; publicly
owned, 8. See also California Department of Corrections (CDC);
California prisoner population;
prison construction; prison employment
California Senate Committee on
Public Safety, 2, 4–5
California State Water Project
(SWP), 38, 139, 272n25
Cal Lutheran, bond issues, 98
capital, 47–48, 58–65, 88, 126, 147,
269n6; accumulation of, 71; “collective,” 56; cotton, 131–34; differentiation, 65; equalization, 65;
federal defense outlays, 60; flow,
64–65; and labor, 28, 33, 34, 64,
71, 77, 80, 84, 106–7, 256–58n12,
268n4; political control of, 53–
54, 63–64, 245; for prison construction, 7, 88, 93–94, 97–102,
114–22, 125; and relative surplus
population, 71–74, 76–77; surplus, 55–84, 99, 126, 256–58n12.
See also budget; capitalism; finance
capitalism, 128–80; activists vs.
(1960s), 24–25; creative destruction, 64; formal inequality of, 78;
golden age, 25, 26, 52, 58, 70, 83,
141; homesteaders and, 31; Marx
on, 71, 256n12; and prison
growth, 22; prison purpose
under, 11. See also capital; profits
Carter administration, 43, 60
CCPOA (California Correctional
Peace Officers’ Association),
118, 120, 123, 125, 253n1,
266nn27,28
CDC. See California Department of
Corrections (CDC)
Central Valley: agriculture, 3, 37,
48, 68–69, 128–46, 144table, 162,
268–69nn1,4,5; “prison alley,”
129; prison sites, 103–6, 129–30,
148–66; water supply (aside
from irrigation), 137–39, 162–63,
270n10. See also San Joaquin
Valley
Central Valley Project (1935), Bureau of Reclamation, 137–38
Chavez, César, 128
Chiapas, Zapatistas, 24
Chicago school sociology, 254n5
Chicana/os: Brown Power, 39, 167,
168–69; Corcoran, 140–41, 146,
154, 167–70; labor relations, 34–
35, 146; Los Angeles prison siting conflict, 103–4, 250; in
Mothers ROC, 184, 224; political
ascendance, 216; prisoner population, 110–11, 225; underemployment, 76; urban jobs, 126.
See also Latina/os; Mexicanos
children: of Argentina’s Las Madres
de la Plaza de Mayo, 194–95;
Corcoran, 148, 171; of COs, 178;
“kids” as activist concern, 177,
178, 179, 232; Mothers ROC and,
181–240; poverty, 52, 57, 148;
“risk factors,” 250. See also youth
Chinese, Chinese Americans: cotton
labor, 132; immigration ex360 INDEX
cluded by federal law, 33; labor
relations, 34–35
churches: Black activists, 188–90,
209, 216, 222. See also prayers
CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), 34, 193
civic elite activists, 12, 22, 188
civil rights movement, 89, 168–69,
190, 216, 219
Civil War, 12, 136, 268n1
class: capital flow and, 64; Corcoran
hierarchy, 146, 167; and gender,
237–38; labor movements and,
191–92; middle class gangs, 217;
prisoner population, 7, 15, 237;
prison sitings and, 155, 177;
racism and, 39, 64; and strife between whites, 35; struggles, 34,
80, 167; underclass, 259n20. See
also dispossessed; inequalities;
labor; poverty; wealth; working
class
classification: crime, 9 fig, 12–13,
85–86, 95–96, 108–9, 115; modern secular state’s dependence
on, 243–44; prisoner risk, 265–
66n27; prison jobs, 270–71n15
CO. See COs (correctional officers)
Coalinga: prison siting, 104; West
Hills College, 119
coalitions, 37, 241; Corcoran Concerned Citizens, 170; vs. Delano
II prison, 266n31; golden age
Black-white, 216; Mothers ROC
and, 232, 233–34. See also activists
Cold War, 36–37, 80, 118, 209,
267n38
colleges. See postsecondary education
colonizers, whites, 32
common sense, 243, 277n16; aggression as key to safety, 244; balance
of power, 78; crime and prison
connection, 12; declining crime
rate and prison construction connection, 116; gangs as “families,”
201; mothering as collective action, 236; Mothers ROC understandings, 208, 211, 219, 225–26;
“planning,” 175; restriction of
some people’s rights, 219, 244,
277n16; voter-made laws, 77–78
communism, 34; and California
agricultural water, 138–39; labor
activism, 34, 192, 193, 205–6;
Mothers ROC and, 205–10, 238
Communist Labor Party, 205–6
Communist Party (CPUSA), 192,
193, 208
community: Corcoran institutions,
146; crisis response, 54; defunded institutions, 76–77; labor
activism and, 193; “stranded
communities,” 127, 199, 204,
274n8. See also activists;
churches; families; identification
concentration camps, World War II
Japanese internment, 36, 244
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 34, 193
constitutions. See California constitution; U.S. Constitution
construction. See building; prison
construction
INDEX 361
consumer, interest payments,
262n12
consumers, business cycle, 55–56
contracts, DOD, 36–37, 43, 44 fig
Corcoran, 128–66; agricultural
labor, 128, 129, 132–36, 140–41;
Chicano majority, 141, 169;
chiefs of police scandals, 170–71;
cotton, 128–45, 144 table, 147,
154, 155–57, 166, 167; ethnicities,
129, 132, 135–36, 140–41, 146,
154, 167, 169, 271n17;
“megaprisons,” 125; politics, 133,
155–56, 161, 164, 167–70; prisoner population, 130; prisoners
shot dead by guards, 121; prison
sitings, 104, 129–30, 148–66,
175–76; retail, 146, 147, 150, 152,
161–62, 168, 175–76
Corcoran Journal, 128
Correctional Facilities Privatization
Commission, 124–25
Corrections Corporation of America, 124–25, 267n38
COs (correctional officers): in Corcoran housing, 165–66; domestic
violence, 177; families, 177, 178;
funding, 265n24; guard-prisoner
ratios, 115; job applications,
118–19; overtime, 117; pay, 117,
266n28; prisoners of color with
white guards, 22; prisoners shot
dead by, 121; private sector, 125;
training, 118–20, 266n30; union
(CCPOA), 118, 120, 123, 125,
253n1, 266nn27,28
Costa, Jim, 107, 157, 264n21
costs: CO-training, 119, 266n30;
“fictitious,” 70; infrastructure by
prison sites, 150; LAPD, 261n8;
lawyer, 211, 276n13; Pine Flat
Dam, 139; postsecondary education, 49; prison, 8, 114, 115;
prison construction, 7, 93, 97,
116; prisoner costs daily, 123–24;
prisoner labor, 166; real, 70;
water, 139. See also finance; taxation
cotton: Alcala, 132, 134, 147; ginners, 133, 134, 267–68n1; Kings
County growers, 128–45,
144table, 147, 154, 155–57, 166,
167, 258n16; labor, 128, 129,
132–36, 140, 143–45, 147,
268nn2,4, 270n12; “one variety
law,” 134–35
Counter Terrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act (1996), U.S.,
260n1
courthouses, county: activist
protests, 182, 183, 205, 210, 229;
Corcoran, 173; Southland, 204,
205, 210, 264n23. See also trials
crack cocaine, 108
credit system, 48, 58
Crescent City, CDC denounced by,
163–64
crime: capital flow and, 64; controlling offenses, 112–13, 112table;
Corcoran school officercounselor and, 172; defined and
reclassified, 9 fig, 12–13, 85–86,
95–96, 108–9, 115; “individualizing disorder” (1960s), 24–25;
362 INDEX
killing, 13; as permanent problem, 122; and prisoner risk classifications, 265–66n27; public
anxiety number one, 18, 116; status offense, 261n9; theft, 13, 19,
112–13, 112 table; “wobblers,”
108, 224–27, 264n22; workfarewarfare state vs., 85–86. See also
crime rates; criminalization;
drugs; felonies; police; “three
strikes”; violence
Crime and Delinquency, 174
crime rates: change in method of
calculating, 9; Corcoran, 173; declining, 7, 8 fig, 9 fig, 18, 19, 95,
114, 115–16, 173; drug, 19, 108;
and prison growth, 7, 15–20, 24,
114; property, 19; “three strikes”
and, 15, 112–13
criminalization: of activists, 89, 90–
91; activists vs., 2, 172; decriminalization and recriminalization
of controlled substances possession (1970s–80s), 108; deindustrialization and welfare state decline creating, 232; Gilbert
Jones, 203, 204; and imprisonment as solutions for social
problems, 1–5, 109, 172, 185,
229, 249–51; legal, fiscal, and
programmatic linkages, 124;
new laws passed, 6, 12, 96, 107–
8, 110–12, 122, 221, 227, 263n20;
politics of “law and
order”/“tough on crime” and,
40, 53–54, 88, 95–112; racist, 64,
110–11, 224–25; sentence enhancement, 107–12; Stick Hatfield, 212–14; of youth, 172, 173.
See also prison; sentencing;
“three strikes”
criminal justice: as state power, 174.
See also trials
crises, 40–51, 54–86; agribusiness,
145; defined, 26, 54; farm debt,
48, 67–68, 134, 147; fixes, 26, 129,
179; micro and macro, 186–87;
Mothers ROC responding to,
181, 185, 196–97; political economy, 26–28, 54–86, 88, 195–96,
256–58n12; and prison construction, 96–97; state, 26, 78–84, 86;
surpluses and, 54–84, 86, 88, 124,
147–48, 179. See also state of
emergency
dams, 138–39; Peripheral Canal
and, 142, 258n16
Davis, Angela Y., 181
Daye, Harry, 223–24
Daye, Pearl, 223–27
deaths: crimes causing, 13; genocide, 32, 243; Noyes, 196–97,
202, 203, 206; prisoners shot by
guards, 121; sociospatial
apartheid and, 74
debt: farm, 48, 67–68, 134, 147. See
also public debt
dehumanization, 243
deindustrialization, 7, 14, 185, 204,
232, 259n20, 274n8
Delano: Delano II prison 266n31;
“megaprisons,” 125; prison employment, 176–77, 273n30
INDEX 363
Del Norte County, prison siting,
104
Democrats: Bradley, 48; Jerry
Brown, 49, 93; California governors, 49, 81, 93; elections (1970s),
40–41; and GOB debt, 97–98; vs.
LRBs for CDC, 121; regional relationships, 79
Denny, Reginald, 206, 273n1
Department of Defense (DOD). See
U.S. Department of Defense
depressions: Great, 25, 34–35, 79,
80, 116, 141, 205–6; rural, 22, 69,
149, 176; welfare state, 25, 52.
See also recessions
deterrence, imprisonment as, 14,
107
Deukmejian, George, 48–49, 53–54,
62, 94–95, 97, 267n36
development: exurban, 69–70;
prison as antidevelopment problem, 179, 272n25; prison-related,
148–49, 157, 165–66; suburbanization, 68–70, 147; water, 137–
38, 142–43. See also building
devolution, federal, 22, 81, 245
disinvestment, 88; agricultural land,
53, 65, 68–70, 105–6, 126–27,
155–57, 162, 258n17; anticipatory, 68; enforced, 258n17;
Proposition 13 and, 260n25; surplus land and, 63, 64, 65, 68
dispossessed, 42, 106–7; activists
standing up for, 12; Black workers, 141; farmers, 32, 192, 268–
69n1; Mexicanos, 32, 132, 141;
mothers of, 185; Okies, 135;
prison and, 12; white homesteaders, 32; World War II
racial-ethnic, 35–36, 141, 244.
See also hierarchical relationships
District of Columbia, highest per
capita income and highest
poverty in U.S., 30
diversity: California’s, 30–32. See
also class; immigrants; race
DOD. See U.S. Department of Defense
DOJ (U.S. Department of Justice),
“Weed and Seed” funding, 231–
32, 277n19
Doolittle, Marvin, 204
Downey, Sheridan, 138–39
drought, 126, 270n11; agriculture
and, 41, 67, 68, 141–43, 147, 155;
and groundwater, 141–42, 162
drugs, 87; controlling offense, 112–
13, 112 table; decline in illegal
use, 19, 108; decriminalization
(1970s), 108; diversion for firstand second-time drug convictions, 267n37; laws, 96, 265n24;
legal/illegal, 13, 96; prison
growth explained by epidemic
of, 18–19; recriminalization
(1980s), 108; treatment programs, 101
Dumphy, Tom, 97, 99, 100–101, 120
economics, 6, 7; arms buildup, 43;
booms, 19–20, 43, 48, 49, 125–26,
199, 269n6; business cycle, 55–
56; California as “principal en364 INDEX
gine” of U.S. growth, 52; crash
(1990–91), 50; “devolution,” 245;
inequalities, 38; informal, 74,
200; laissez-faire, 76–77; neoclassical, 254n5; prison siting, 146–
52, 155, 157–66, 168, 174, 175–
76, 247, 271–72nn22,23; Proposition 13 and, 43, 83, 147; recessions, 40–46, 50, 116, 125–26,
199; state and local fiscal crises,
81–84; stock market bust (October 1987), 50, 63; wartime
(1940s), 35. See also capitalism;
depressions; employment; finance; gross domestic product
(GDP); income; Keynesianism;
political economy; poverty; restructuring; surpluses; taxation;
wealth; welfare state
education: CO, 119; Corcoran system, 161, 171–73; dropout rate,
77; and employment declines,
75–77; government funding, 37,
42; prisoner population, 111,
267n35; and prison privatization, 267n35; surplus labor, 184–
85. See also postsecondary education; schools
electronics industry, 36–37, 60
El Niño, 67–68, 142
El Salvador, labor migration from,
42
emergency. See crises; state of emergency
eminent domain, 102
employment, 19, 246; Corcoran
strategies, 158–61, 165; education and declines in, 75–77; before imprisonment, 7, 15, 111–
12, 237; prison construction, 149;
prison construction spin-off,
150, 152, 161–62; relative surplus
population and, 72, 73–74table.
See also capitalism; labor; prison
employment; unemployment;
working poor
Employment Development Department (EDD). See California
Employment Development Department
End Poverty in California (EPIC),
35
environmentalists, and Peripheral
Canal, 142, 258n16
environmental justice, 178, 247,
249–51
equality, 273n4; in Share Croppers
Union, 192. See also inequalities
equalization, capital, 65
Equal Rights Congress (ERC), 206–
7, 210, 229
escaped prisoners, prison siting concern, 153
ethnicities. See immigrants; race
European immigrants, 31–32, 188,
268n5. See also whites
extremism, activist, 233
exurban development, 69–70
FACTS. See Families to Amend
California’s Three Strikes
families: CO, 177, 178; domestic violence, 177; gangs as, 201; police,
177; prisoners’, 1–5, 153, 181–
INDEX 365
families (continued)
240. See also children; intermarriage; mothers
Families to Amend California’s
Three Strikes (FACTS), 233,
234, 235, 238–40
Farm Credit System, 48
Farmersville, activists vs. prison siting, 177, 249–50
farmworker activists: Delano, 176;
Great Depression, 34; Kings
County, 128, 129, 135–36, 140,
146–47, 167; Okies and Mexicanos, 146–47; strikes (1930s),
136, 146–47, 169; UFW, 39, 128,
129, 140, 167, 176, 177
FBI, 18, 222, 277n15
federal government: California investment by (1940), 35; Carter
administration, 43, 60; devolution, 22, 81, 245; FBI, 18, 222,
277n15; job funds (1977), 42;
monetary policy, 40–41, 44–45,
71–72; New Deal, 25, 35, 79, 80,
136, 140; Nixon administration,
40; Reagan administration, 43,
45, 60, 81, 256n10, 265n24; Roosevelt administration, 138; tax
reduction wave, 81, 83table. See
also federal laws; military;
U.S. entries
federal laws: vs. Chinese immigration, 33; Counter Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act
(1996), 260n1; Habeas Corpus
Act (1867), 89; Morrill Act
(1862), 37; prison sphere of sanction, 173; state governments regulate municipal finance, 60; vs.
street crime, 219, 276–77n15;
Wagner Act, 136; “War on
Drugs” legislation (1984),
265n24; Water Reclamation,
137–38, 269nn6,7
Federal Reserve, 41, 71–72
Feldman, Allen, 25, 235
felonies: decline in the number of
arrests (1991), 115–16; reclassifications, 95–96, 108; “wobblers,”
108, 224, 225–26, 264n22. See
also crime; criminalization;
“three strikes”
feminist/gender politics, white, 188
Filipinos: farmworkers, 34; prisoner
categories, 275n11
finance: Bank of America, 48, 143,
156, 268n3; Bank of Italy, 134,
268n3; campaign contributions,
105; COs, 265n24; education, 49,
98–99, 147, 254n3; Federal Reserve, 41, 71–72; irrigation, 41,
269n5; mitigation funds, 150;
Mothers ROC, 230, 231–32; municipal/local, 58–65, 81–84, 147,
262n11, 264n23; prison construction, 7, 88, 93–94, 97–102, 114–
23, 125, 126, 265n24; small
growers, 134; subventions, 31,
33, 105, 150, 163–65, 171–72,
258n17, 265n24. See also bonds;
budget; capital; costs; debt; disinvestment; monetary policy
fixes, 251; crime, 13; crisis and, 26,
129, 179; postsecondary admis366 INDEX
sions policies, 167; prison, 86,
129–30; social, 23
flood control, and agricultural
water, 138–39
Folsom prison, 92, 129
food exports: California, 47, 67. See
also agriculture
food service, Corcoran, 150
freedom, 12, 14; bus riders for, 1–5
Freire, Paolo, 186
Fresno County: agriculture, 68, 130,
134; commute to Corcoran, 156,
158; conference vs. prisons, 249;
legislators, 107, 157, 264n21;
property values, 146; suburbanization, 68; youth jail projects,
173, 272n27
Friedman, Lawrence M., 174
gangs: Black, 197–205, 210, 217,
235; Brown, 217; Los Angeles
truce, 181, 196–204, 235, 278n22;
police mis-identifying members
of, 213, 214, 217, 220–21;
“shadow states,” 200, 274–75n8;
State Task Force on Youth Gang
Violence, 96, 107, 113, 217,
263n20; STEP Act (1988) vs., 6,
107–8, 213, 216–17, 218, 263n20;
urban enclaves, 19; white, 204–5,
217
Garcia, Gilda, 220–21
Gates, Daryl, 254n4
gender: and class, 237–38; feminist/gender politics, 188; work
site segregation, 191. See also
men; sexism; women
general fund, 84, 85 fig; CDC budget, 114–23; CO-training costs,
119, 266n30; prison costs, 8, 114.
See also California budget
general obligation bonds (GOBs),
93–94, 97, 101, 115, 120, 122–23,
267n37. See also bonds, debt
genocide: to acquire land, 32; and
dehumanization, 243
gentrification, capital and, 64, 69
George Noyes Justice Committee,
196–203, 211, 235
golden age: Black-white coalitions,
216; of capitalism, 25, 26, 52, 58,
70, 83, 141
Golden Gulag, 4, 55, 251
Gomez, James: with CalPERS,
266n32; with CDC, 96, 101,
115–16, 121–22, 261–62n10,
266n32
Gonzales, Leticia, 224, 226
Gordon, David, 58
government. See California entries;
federal government; local government
governors. See California governors
grassroots organization, 178, 184,
186, 231, 251. See also activists
gross domestic product (GDP): California, 30, 58–62, 59 fig, 61 fig;
U.S., 35, 187
guards. See COs (correctional officers)
Guatemala, labor migration from,
42
Guiberson, and cotton, 132–33
“gunbelt,” 36
INDEX 367
gun control, 39, 255n6
Gutierrez, Juana, 250
habeas corpus, 89, 91, 260n1
Habeas Corpus Act (1867), U.S., 89
Hall, Stuart, 54, 277n16
Hammond, Joe, 148
Hanford, Kings County, 151, 156,
158, 268n5
Hansen, Jim, 129, 143
Hansen, and cotton, 129, 132–33
Hatfield, Bernice, 210, 212–15, 218–
21; son Stick, 212–15, 218–19, 221
“Heavy Metal” gangs, 217
helicopter surveillance, 274n7
“Herrenvolk republic,” 32
hierarchical relationships, 28, 90;
class, 146, 167; labor, 32; race,
146, 167, 169, 187–88, 259n20.
See also inequalities
highways: development along, 38;
prison siting along, 4, 155
Holiday, George, 203
homeowners: Black, 35, 276n13;
markets, 46; Mothers ROC, 211;
and Proposition 13, 81, 260n25.
See also homesteaders; real estate
homesteaders, 31, 32, 152
Horton, Myles, 186
Horton, Willie, 264n21, 277n16
hospitals: Kaiser Permanente strike
(1986), 46; prison, Vacaville, 103;
Vacaville prison, 103. See also
medical care
households: average California, 69;
crisis response, 54. See also families
housing: Corcoran, 157–59,
159table, 165–66; Imperial
Courts public housing project,
196–207, 211, 235; income levels
and costs of, 44, 46; “Las
Madres del Este de Los Angeles”/Mothers of East Los Angeles, 103; residential segregation,
34, 36, 43, 276n13. See also
homeowners
human sacrifice, age of, 244
identification: activist groups, 191–
93, 233, 236–38, 246–47; coalition building, 233–34; mothers
and gangs, 201–2; solidarity
among activists, 238, 245, 247,
249–50
ideology: dehumanization, 243–44;
lived, 243; militarism, 244. See
also common sense; politics
immigrants: to California, 3, 31–32,
35, 41–42, 70; European, 31–32,
188, 268n5; janitors, 194, 274n6;
labor, 31–32, 35, 41–42, 145; laws
vs., 33, 50, 172–73, 246; relative
surplus population and, 70, 240;
undocumented status, 7, 226. See
also Latina/os
immiseration, Marx’s concept of, 71,
258–59n18
Imperial County, vs. prison sitings,
178
Imperial Courts public housing
project, Mothers ROC, 196–207,
211, 235
incapacitation: imprisonment as,
368 INDEX
14–15, 16, 21, 95, 185; intensified, 107–8
income: property and proprietors’,
59–61, 59 fig, 61 fig. See also personal income
industrial labor, 3, 26, 32–40, 44 fig;
aerospace, 37, 40, 125–26; Black,
199; California (1980–95),
51table; electronics, 37; military,
35–39, 44 fig, 50, 125–26; organizing, 192; overtime practices,
117; recession, 41, 45–46, 50. See
also agricultural labor; prison
employment; prisoner labor
industry, 2–3, 33–40, 120; aerospace,
36–37, 40, 60, 125–26; agribusiness, 41, 67–68, 128–45, 144 table,
268n4; deindustrialization, 7, 14,
185, 204, 232, 259n20, 274n8;
electronics, 36–37, 60; “farm industrialists,” 131, 135–36; vs.
janitorial unions, 193; light, 46–
47; location issues, 179; military,
3, 35–39, 43, 44 fig, 50, 125–27,
136, 267n38; prison as, 129, 185.
See also industrial labor
inequalities, 26, 278n21; agricultural
labor, 26, 32–33; campus activists
vs., 38; of capitalism, 78; legal,
225–26; mothers’ experiences,
212, 222–23; prison siting and,
171, 174, 177; state’s responsibility, 52; Watts Rebellion vs., 39;
“wobblers,” 225–27; women, 26,
279n24. See also class; economics;
equality; hierarchical relationships; race; segregation; sexism
informal economies, 74, 200
infrastructure. See public infrastructure
Inland Empire: agriculture, 68;
Mothers ROC, 216, 218
Inland Valley, prison sites, 106
intermarriage: African Americans,
270n14; Okies and Mexicanos,
146
International Harvester reaper, 140
Interstate 5, 155
irrigation: California acreage, 65–
68, 66 fig; Central Valley, 3, 68–
69, 129, 132, 137, 141–42, 268–
69n5; finance, 41, 269n5; private
irrigation districts, 268–69n5.
See also agricultural water supply
jails, 15, 21, 259n19; Corcoran local,
150, 173; Fresno County youth,
173, 272n27; Los Angeles
County, 183, 226, 264–65n23;
Mothers ROC becoming known
in, 183, 226. See also prison
janitors, unions, 192–93, 194, 274n6,
278–97n23
Japanese Americans: labor relations,
34–35; World War II internment, 36, 244
JfJ (Justice for Janitors), 192–93,
274n6
Jim Crow laws, 13, 79, 188, 189–90,
244
JLCPCO. See Joint Legislative
Committee on Prison Construction and Operations
INDEX 369
Johnson, Diana, 153
“Joining Forces: The Fight for Environmental Justice and against
Prisons” conference, 249–51
Joint Legislative Committee on
Prison Construction and Operations (JLCPCO), 264–65n23;
prison construction, 94, 95, 106,
121–22, 127, 150, 162–63
Jones, Bill, 107, 264n21
Jones, Gilbert, 196, 197–205, 210,
235
Justice for Janitors (JfJ), 192–93,
274n6
Kaiser Permanente strike (1986),
46
Kern County: agribusiness, 134,
138; California Correctional Institution (Tehachapi), 93, 102–3,
129, 205. See also Delano
Kern Land Company, 138
Kern River, 138
Kettleman Plains (Kings County),
148, 162, 165
Keynesianism, 52–53, 63–64, 255n9;
military welfare-warfare state,
25, 37–39, 45, 78–86, 126
King, Rodney, 201, 203, 273n1,
275n10
Kings County, 130; Board of Supervisors, 128–29; California enterprise zone (CEZ) designation,
165, 166; cotton growers, 128–
45, 144table, 147, 154, 155–57,
166, 167, 258n16; Hanford, 151,
156, 158, 268n5; labor activists,
128, 129, 135–36, 140, 146–47,
167; Lemoore, 156, 158; Local
Agency Formation Committee
(LAFCO), 163; prison sitings,
104, 129–30, 148–66, 175–76;
public assistance, 145, 160; Westlands Water District, 139–40.
See also Avenal; Corcoran
Kings River, 138
Klaas, Polly, 264n21
labor: “abstract,” 71; California diversity in, 31–32; capital and, 28,
33, 34, 64, 71, 77, 80, 84, 106–7,
256–58n12, 268n4; human replacement, 71; layoffs, 71; Los
Angeles job-loss concentration
(1990–91), 50; mechanical replacement, 71, 129, 132, 143–45,
268n1; migration of, 31–32, 35,
41–42, 145; military, 35, 38–39,
50, 125–26; outsourced, 187,
273–74n5; Proposition 13 and,
81, 260n25; rural areas abandoned by, 70; shift from highwage to low-wage, 50, 52; slavery, 21, 189, 254n5, 267–68n1;
surplus, 70–78, 73–74table, 106,
126, 129, 184–85, 256–58n12; underemployment, 75, 76, 113, 127;
unskilled, 42; workfare programs, 48–49. See also agricultural labor; employment; industrial labor; labor activism; prison
employment; prisoner labor; unemployment; working class;
working poor
370 INDEX
labor activism, 25–26, 32–33, 246;
CCPOA, 118, 120, 123, 125,
253n1, 266nn27,28; CIO, 34, 193;
communist, 34, 192, 193, 205–6;
decline in, 52–53; hierarchies,
32; identification with, 191–93;
janitors, 192–93, 194, 274n6,
278–97n23; prison siting and,
167; recession, 40–41, 46; Share
Croppers Union, 192. See also
farmworker activists; strikes
LA Four, 181–82, 206, 207–8, 210,
215, 273n1
Lambert, George, 148
Lancaster, 263n18
land, 28; agricultural disinvestment
of, 53, 65, 68–70, 105–6, 126–27,
155–57, 162, 258n17; California
changes in control over (1800s),
31; Corcoran ground rent, 157–
58; eminent domain, 102; fiscalization of, 246; homesteaders,
31, 32, 152; “land lease out lease
back agreements,” 137; locally
unwanted land uses (LULUs),
102; prices, 106, 268n5; prison
siting, 88, 102–7, 149–50, 155–
57, 175; surplus, 64–70, 88, 106,
126, 129, 269n6; taxes on farmland, 134, 259n17, 268n2. See also
real estate
Land Conversion/Williamson Act
(1965), 258n17, 268n2
LA Prison Act, 263n15
Lassen County. See Susanville
Latina/os: Corcoran, 129, 132, 135–
36, 140–41, 146–47, 154, 167–70,
271n17; dropout rate, 77; farmworkers, 34, 39, 42, 77, 132, 135–
36, 146–47; mother activists, 103,
184, 194–95, 223–27, 239, 250,
278–79n23; prisoner population,
7, 110–11, 111table, 225, 275n11,
277n18; third strike prisoners,
113; voting power, 103–4. See
also Chicana/os; Mexicana/os
laws, 17, 259–60n23; arcana of, 6,
217, 218; crime defined by, 12–
13; vs. immigrants, 33, 50, 172–
73, 246; intoxicating substances,
13, 18; Jim Crow, 13, 79, 188,
189–90, 244. See also California
laws; criminalization; federal
laws; lawyers; police; trials
lawyers: Mothers ROC and, 210–11,
276n13; state-appointed, 7, 211
lease revenue bonds (LRBs), 98–
102, 116, 120, 121, 125. See also
bonds; debt
Legislative Analyst, 266n30; “The
New Prison Construction Program at Midstream” (1986),
114–15, 120
Lemoore, near Corcoran (Kings
County), 156, 158
Léon, Daniel, 167–68
LFRUT (L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin), 97–98, 99,
262n11
library research, Mothers ROC,
216–17, 218, 276n14
Linebaugh, Peter, 221
Local Agency Formation Committee (LAFCO), Kings County, 163
INDEX 371
local government: vs. CDC facilities, 123–24; finance, 58–65, 81–
84, 82–83 table; funding of social
programs, 245; public infrastructure, 60–62; surpluses, 42–
43, 78–84, 147–48. See also jails;
rural areas; urban areas
Lockyer, Bill, 121, 122–24
Los Angeles County, 2–3, 267n33;
Black homeowners, 35; Black
poverty, 39; Black prosperity decreasing, 199; California Aqueduct, 139; East, 103–4, 250,
263n15; gang truce, 181, 196–
204, 235, 278n22; housing costs,
46; jails, 183, 226, 264–65n23;
job-loss concentration (1990–91),
50; LA Four, 181–82, 206, 207–8,
210, 215, 273n1; LA Prison Act,
263n15; Lancaster, 263n18;
Mayor Bradley, 95, 99, 261n8;
Metropolitan Water District
(Met), 139, 162, 270n10;
military-industrial district, 37;
Mothers ROC, 5–6, 181–240; organized labor, 33; prisoner population, 7, 70, 75–76, 111, 185;
prison siting conflicts, 103–4,
227–28, 250, 263nn15,18; relative
surplus population, 70, 111, 184–
85; South Central, 1, 6, 185, 196–
206, 227–29, 239, 249, 275n10;
uprising (1992), 39, 50, 116, 196–
97, 203–4, 273n1; vigorous enforcement campaigns, 109–10,
116, 226–27; Watts Rebellion
(1965), 39, 50; “wobblers,” 224,
264n22. See also activists; police
Los Angeles Times, 121
Lucasville, prisoner activists, 244–
45
lumber, labor, 41
lynching, of Blacks, 189, 190
Lynd, Staughton, 244–45
Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo,
Argentina, 194–95, 226
Las Madres/Mothers of East Los
Angeles, vs. prison siting, 103,
250
mandatory sentencing, 15, 20, 96,
110, 224. See also “three strikes”
manufacturing. See industry
marginality, 10–11
marriage, intermarriage, 146,
270n14
Marx, Karl, 71, 80, 256–59nn12,
18
McWilliams, Carey, 131
mechanization: agricultural, 129,
132, 140, 141table, 143–45,
268n1; labor replaced by, 71, 129,
132, 143–45, 268n1
medical care: prison, 117. See also
hospitals
Meeting the Challenge of Affordable
Prisons (CCPOA), 125
“megaprisons,” 125, 267n36
men: Black employment, 75, 76,
199; Chicano employment, 76; in
Mothers ROC, 184, 216, 278n21;
prisoner population, 111; steady
372 INDEX
employment, 75; surplus labor,
184–85; underemployment, 75,
113; unemployment, 75, 76, 113;
white employment, 76
mental illness, in prisoners, 16
Meredith, Barbara, 181, 197–209,
235, 236
Merriam, Frank, 35
Metropolitan Water District (Met),
Los Angeles County, 139, 162,
270n10
Mexican American Political Alliance (MAPA), 168–69
Mexicanos, 31–32; Bracero program (1942–65), 136, 140, 141;
Corcoran, 132, 135–36, 140–41,
146–47, 271n17; dispossessed,
32, 132, 141; farmworkers, 34,
39, 42, 132, 135–36, 146–47; Los
Angeles prison siting conflict,
103–4, 250; prisoner population,
225. See also Chicana/os;
Latina/os
Mexico: Mexican War with U.S., 31;
Zapatistas, 24
middle class, gangs, 217
migration. See immigrants
militarism: chopper surveillance,
274n7; classification and, 244;
domestic, 86, 238–39. See also
military; police
military: Alcala cotton uses, 134;
Army Corps of Engineers (“the
Corps”), 138–39, 269–70n9;
DOD contracts, 36–37, 43, 44
fig; economics of arms buildup,
43; industrial, 3, 35–39, 43, 44 fig,
50, 125–27, 136, 267n38; Keynesian welfare-warfare state, 25,
37–39, 45, 78–86, 126; labor, 35–
39, 44 fig, 50, 125–26; segregation in armed forces, 35–36, 38;
spending cuts (1969–70), 40; universal conscription, 244. See also
militarism; Pentagon; wars
military industrial complex, 3, 35–
38, 43
Miller-Lux, 138
millworkers, organizing, 192
mining, labor, 41, 192
mitigation funds, 150
monetary policy: California currency laws, 31; “collective capital,” 56; U.S. government, 40–
41, 44–45, 71–72. See also prime
rate; taxation
Montgomery bus boycott, 190–91
“moral panics,” 18, 90–91, 93
Morrill Act (1862), U.S., 37
Morris, Ruth, 15
mothers, 3, 5, 7; Argentina’s Las
Madres de la Plaza de Mayo,
194–95, 226; vs. East Los Angeles prison siting, 103, 250;
mother-prisoner centers, 7; social parenting, 74, 236; Third
World activist, 184, 239; workfare, 49. See also Mothers ROC
Mothers of East Los Angeles/“Las
Madres del Este de Los Angeles,” 103, 250
A Mother’s Plea for Help, 212, 215
INDEX 373
Mothers ROC (Mothers Reclaiming
Our Children), 5–6, 181–240,
241, 246–47; Bernice’s newsletter, 212, 215; Black, 5–6, 181–
240, 276n12; “consciencization”
of motherhood, 196; “each one
teach one” approach, 237;
founding, 181, 198–206; Imperial Courts mothering sessions,
200, 207; institutionalizing, 229–
35; and lawyers, 210–11, 276n13;
leaflets and flyers, 182, 196, 217–
18, 229; men in, 184, 216,
278n21; not-for-profit status,
230–32, 234; office and meeting
place, 206–7, 210, 229, 234–35;
personality conflicts, 233; and
police, 182, 83, 196, 198, 202, 207,
209, 212–14, 220, 223–25, 233;
politics of motherhood, 189–90,
222–23, 238–39, 246; prison employees known among, 276n12;
self-confidence with cases,
278n20; “social mothering,” 236;
and “three strikes,” 6, 223–24,
227, 229, 231, 232, 233; workingclass, 187–91, 194, 211, 239
MOTHERS WARN YOUR CHILDREN flyer, 217–18
Mouren, Bill, 162
Muslims, racialization of, 244
NAACP, 216
NAIRU (nonaccelerating-inflation
rate of unemployment), 71–74
nationalism, relative surplus population and, 70
National Rifle Association, 123
Native Americans, prison categories, 275n11
neo-Nazi gangs, 217
“nested scales,” of rising prison
state, 240
New Deal, 25, 35, 79, 80, 136, 140
“The New Prison Construction
Program at Midstream” (1986),
Legislative Analyst’s report,
114–15, 120
“new slavery” argument, 21
New York, Rockefeller minimum
mandatory sentence laws, 96
NIMBY (not in my back yard) attitude, 22, 102
Nixon, Richard, 40
nonaccelerating-inflation rate of
unemployment (NAIRU), 71–
74
not-for-profits: FACTS, 234, investment in, 99; Mothers ROC, 230–
32, 234; postsecondary education, 98
“not in my back yard” (NIMBY),
22, 102
Novey, Don, 121, 123
Noyes, George, 196–203, 206
nursing jobs, Bernice Hatfield, 219
O’Connor, James, 81–82
Office of General Services, California, 94
Okies, 34–35, 135, 146–47, 271n17
Orange County, Mothers ROC,
184
organized labor. See labor activism
374 INDEX
overcrowding: prison, 89, 91–92,
96–97. See also prisoner population
Owens, Martha, 152–53
Pacific Islanders, prison categories,
275n11
Palestinians, activist mothers, 184,
239
Panther Gun Bill, California, 39,
255n6
Parker, William, 39, 254n4
parole, 89–90, 96, 261n9
Peery, Nelson, 205–6
Pentagon: postwar era, 36; transformation (1960s), 25. See also U.S.
Department of Defense (DOD)
Peripheral Canal, 67, 142, 258n16
personal income: “central contradictions,” 57; District of Columbia,
30; housing costs vs. levels of, 44,
46; Kings County, 130; and
property crimes, 19; relative
poverty and, 30; segregation into
richer and poorer, 16, 43–44, 46,
57, 126, 246; steady upward
climb, 40; tax reduction, 81;
women’s work percentage and,
279n24. See also poverty; public
assistance; taxation; wages;
wealth
Phillips, A. W., 72
Pine Flat Dam, 139
planning, 175, 178–80; California
Master Plan for Postsecondary
Education, 37, 49, 254n3; CDC
Facilities Master Plan (1983), 96;
CDC Facilities Planning Report
(1978), 92. See also development;
prison siting
plea bargain, Stick Hatfield and,
213–15
police: brutality, 39, 50, 190, 196–97,
202, 203, 212, 273n1; budgetary
constraints, 116; capital flow
and, 64; Corcoran, 171–72; cost
control, 261n8; crisis response,
54–55; domestic violence, 177;
and extremism, 233; gang members mis-identified by, 213, 214,
217, 220–21; Mothers ROC and,
205, 207–8, 233, 238; Noyes
shooting, 196–97, 206; racism vs.
Blacks, 39, 217, 254n4, 265n25;
SWAT (Special Weapons and
Tactics) teams, 265n25; vigorous
enforcement campaigns, 109–10,
116, 226–27
political economy: crises, 26–28, 54–
86, 88, 195–96, 256–58n12. See
also California political economy; economics; politics; state
politics: Black club women, 188–91;
capital control, 53–54, 63–64,
245; conflict and, 194; Corcoran,
133, 155–56, 161, 164, 167–70;
crisis, 56–57; of dehumanization, 243–44; feminist/gender,
188; golden age Black-white
coalitions, 216; “law and
order”/“tough on crime,” 40,
53–54, 88, 95–112; of motherhood, 189–90, 222–23, 238–39,
246; in Mothers ROC, 209–10,
INDEX 375
politics (continued)
229, 236; prison siting, 156–57,
164; U.S. governmental power,
242–43. See also activists; communism; Democrats; power;
Progressives; Republicans; restructuring; social movements
population: CDC workforce, 8;
Central Valley, 69; Corcoran,
130, 150, 152, 158; Kings
County, 130; relative surplus,
70–78, 73–74table, 111, 113, 184–
85, 240; taxation based on, 150,
163. See also California population
postsecondary education: antiracist
admissions policies, 167; California Master Plan for, 37, 49,
254n3; CO training, 118–20,
266n30; finance, 49, 98–99,
267n35; Morrill Act funding, 37;
private, 98–99, 254n3; tuition
and scholarships, 49, 98–99, 147,
254n3
poverty, 30, 43–44, 70, 179; Black,
38–39; child, 52, 57, 148; Corcoran, 129, 145, 146, 148, 155, 160;
Mothers ROC and, 224–25, 228,
229, 230–31, 237; relative, 30;
Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign, 35; tax
changes and, 43, 44, 95, 246; underclass, 259n20; white, 15. See
also welfare state; working poor;
workless poor
power, 247–48; balance of, 78–80,
84; criminal justice, 174; gun
control and, 255n6; Mothers
ROC meditating on, 222, 238;
planning, 175; prison sitings
and, 154, 156; social change, 29;
status determinations used to
concentrate, 110; and surplus
state capacity, 113–14, 126. See
also politics
Prager, Frederic, 97–98, 99, 100–101
prayers: Mothers ROC, 221–22, 227.
See also churches
Presley, Robert, 97–98, 107
prices: land for prison siting, 106;
near prison sites, 157–58; Southern Pacific Railroad land, 268n5;
wages and, 72
prime rate: decline (1989), 60, 61 fig;
savings and loans reaction, 48;
and unemployment, 44–45
prison, 21–22, 353; as deterrence, 14,
107; as incapacitation, 14–15, 16,
21, 95, 185; measure of capacity,
261n4; “megaprisons,” 125,
267n36; percentage of public, 21;
privatized, 21–22, 124–25, 227–
28, 253n1, 267n35; for public
safety, 18, 94, 122; as punishment, 91, 95; purposes of, 11–17,
18, 91, 94, 95–96, 242; as rehabilitation, 14, 88–93; as retribution,
14; as solution to social problems, 1–5, 172, 229, 249–51;
three spheres of sanction, 173.
See also California prisons; jails;
prisoner labor; prisoner populations
“prison alley,” Central Valley, 129
376 INDEX
prison construction, 4–8, 54, 85, 88–
89, 92–126, 246–47, 253n1; crime
rate decline and, 7, 15–20, 24,
114, 115–16; finances, 7, 88, 93–
94, 97–102, 114–23, 125, 126;
Folsom replacement, 92; JLCPCO, 94, 95, 106, 121–22, 127,
150, 162–63; land, 88, 102–7,
149–50, 155–57; Legislative Analyst’s report (1986), 114–15, 120;
local labor for, 149; prisoner
labor for, 125, 151; for rehabilitation, 92–93; San Quentin replacement, 92, 103. See also
prison siting
Prison Construction Bond Act
(1982), California, 97
prison employment, 88, 149–50, 246;
Black, 276n12; Corcoran, 130–
31, 149, 150, 152, 154, 158–61,
165–66, 168, 171, 175–76; Delano, 176–77, 273n30; East Los
Angeles, 103; job classifications,
270–71n15; population of workforce, 8; rural areas, 22–23, 104,
106–7; South Central Los Angeles, 228; training, 118–19,
266n30. See also COs (correctional officers); prisoner labor
prisoner labor: cheap, 12–13, 21;
Corcoran public works, 166,
168; free, 185; prison construction, 125, 151
prisoner populations: relative
poverty and, 30. See also California prisoner population; prison
construction
prison growth. See prison construction; prisoner populations
prison guards. See COs (correctional officers)
prison labor. See prison employment; prisoner labor
Prison Reform Conference Committee (PRCC), California,
123
prison siting, 102–7, 129–30, 148–
66, 174–79; activists vs., 103–4,
152–54, 175, 176–80, 227–28,
266n31, 272–73n29; Avenal, 104,
148, 157–58, 162, 272n25; CDC
Office, 103–4, 105, 148–66; class
and, 155, 177; Corcoran, 104,
129–30, 148–66, 175–76; Costa
politically key in, 157, 264n21;
economics, 146–52, 155, 157–66,
168, 174, 175–76, 247, 271–
72nn22,23; “fear” vs. “finances,”
174–78; land, 88, 102–7, 149–50,
155–57, 175; Los Angeles
County, 103–4, 227–28, 250,
263nn15,18; politics, 156–57,
164; race and, 154, 155, 177; Susanville experience, 151, 158,
164, 166, 271n16; water supply
concern, 153, 162, 177, 272n25
private colleges and universities,
public finances for, 98–99,
254n3
private irrigation districts, 268–
69n5
private prisons, 21–22, 124–25, 227–
28, 253n1, 267n35
private security industry, 125
INDEX 377
profits, 28, 256–58n12; California
political economy, 36, 39–40, 42,
58–63, 106, 126; golden age of
U.S. capitalism, 25, 58; prison
growth as pursuit of, 21–22;
small farmers, 134, 268n2; surplus and, 55, 57, 58–63, 71, 78;
tax struggle and, 80–81; “underwriter’s spread,” 258n15
Progressives: and agricultural labor,
135; Black women, 187–90; and
class war, 35; professionalism in
government, 119–20; rehabilitation philosophy, 89–90, 91, 93;
UC and, 118; white women,
187–88
property: agricultural land, 105–6;
crimes involving, 13, 19, 112–13,
112 table; GDP income share
(rent, profits, interest), 58–61, 59
fig, 61 fig; Progressives preserving hierarchies in, 90; taxes, 43,
81, 83, 147. See also homeowners;
land
Proposition 13/taxpayers’ revolt
(1978), 42–43, 49, 62, 97, 147;
labor and, 81, 260n25; local government crises and, 83
propositions. See voter propositions
prostitution, legality, 13
public assistance, Kings County,
145, 160
public debt, 8, 62–64, 88, 97–101,
245; debt service, 101; municipal
finance, 58–65, 262n11, 264n23;
repayment of, 245; voter approval required for, 62, 97, 100–
101, 258n14. See also bonds
public infrastructure: “net value per
person,” 60; owned by state and
local governments, 60–62; by
prison sites, 106, 150; waterbearing, 65–67
public safety, 178; militarist view,
244; prison purpose, 18, 94, 122;
prison towns, 164, 175. See also
laws; police; safety net
Public Works Board, and prison finance, 8, 94, 99–100
Puls, Robert, 272–73n29
punishment: bodily, 11; imprisonment as, 91, 95–96; industrialized, 185; order derived from, 23
“Questions of Theory” (Hall and
Schwarz), 54
Quintinilla, Ruben, 168
race: affirmative action, 50, 118,
160–61; agricultural labor, 34,
39, 41–42, 77, 132, 135–36, 140–
41, 146–47; California majority,
42, 52, 57; CDC employment
policies, 160–61; “convict,” 244–
45; Corcoran numerical majority, 140–41, 169; hierarchical relationships of, 146, 167, 169,
187–88, 259n20; Muslims racialized, 244; prisoner population, 7,
20, 89, 110–11, 111table, 184–85,
204–5, 225, 244–45, 275n11,
277n18; segregation by, 34, 35–
36, 191, 275n11; struggles, 34, 38,
39, 167, 185, 216, 255n6, 274n6;
378 INDEX
white supremacy, 33–37, 42, 135,
204–5. See also Asians; Blacks;
Latina/os; race-based movements; racism; whites
race-based movements: Black
Power, 24, 39, 167, 255n6;
Brown Power, 39, 167, 168–69;
civil rights movement, 89, 168–
69, 190, 216, 219; white supremacists, 33, 204–5; Yellow
Power, 39
racism, 6, 15–16, 20–21, 26, 28, 29,
247; activism vs., 37, 39, 89, 168–
69, 170, 190–91, 192, 244, 246–47;
capital flow and, 64; and class,
39, 64; Corcoran scandals, 170–
71; criminalization based on, 64,
110–11, 224–25; dehumanization
and, 243; in gang identifications,
217; gendered economic power
of, 188; “institutional,” 40, 255n7;
Jim Crow laws, 13, 79, 188, 189–
90, 244; labor organizing rights,
136; “new slavery” argument, 21;
parole boards, 90; police, 39, 217,
254n4, 265n25; politics of motherhood and, 189–90, 222–23,
238–39; and postsecondary admissions policies, 167; prison sitings and, 154, 155; relative surplus population and, 70;
urbanization and, 254–55n5;
wartime (1940s), 35–36; white
supremacists, 33, 204–5;
women’s work and income/asset
percentage and, 279n24. See also
apartheid
railroads: agricultural lands of, 140,
268n5; California’s incorporation into U.S. empire of, 31; high
cost of transport, 33; prison siting near, 155
Ramey, Melvin, 118
Rand Corporation, 177–78
Reagan, Ronald: California governor, 40, 81, 94; U.S. president,
43, 45, 60, 81, 256n10, 265n24
Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 232
real estate: constitutional amendment, 36; Corcoran, 146, 158–59;
prison siting and, 104–5, 158–59;
property taxes, 43, 81, 83, 147;
restrictive covenants, 34, 36. See
also building; development;
homeowners; housing; land
recessions, 40–46, 50, 116, 125–26,
199
reforms, 23, 28; control-as-reform,
188; nonreformist, 242; Prison
Reform Conference Committee
(PRCC), 123. See also activists;
Progressives
rehabilitation, prison as, 14, 88–
93
relative poverty, 30
relative surplus population, 70–78,
73–74table, 111, 113, 184–85,
240
religion. See churches; Muslims;
prayers
Republicans: California governors,
35, 48, 49, 81, 93; Deukmejian,
48, 49, 97; and GOB debt, 97–98;
Merriam, 35; Wilson, 49
INDEX 379
research: Mothers ROC’s library research, 216–17, 218, 276n14. See
also scholar activists
research and development: electronics, 36–37; military, 43
resource extraction: and prison siting, 105. See also agriculture;
lumber; mining
restricted airway disease, 250
restrictive covenants, on real property, 34, 36
restructuring: California political
economy, 40, 47–48, 50, 70, 79–
84, 126, 131, 184–85, 221; Kings
County, 131, 143, 147; labor
markets, 70, 114; regional, 113,
246; relative surplus population
and, 72–74; state tax base, 83–84;
voter-made laws and, 78–79
retail, Corcoran, 146, 147, 150, 152,
161–62, 168, 175–76
retribution, as imprisonment purpose, 14
revolutionaries (1960s), 24–25
Reynolds, Mike, 263–64n21
Richard McGee Training Facility,
119
Richfield Oil Company, Kings
County, 140
rights: agricultural/nonagricultural
labor organizing, 136; Black
families’, 214–15; dispossession
and, 12; eminent domain, 102;
prisoners’, 89, 91, 260n1; property, 36; social wages, 29; workers’, 26; workers of color vs.
white workers, 136. See also voting power
risk classifications, prisoner population, 115, 265–66n27
“risk factors,” children’s, 250
Riverside County: Mothers ROC,
184; prison construction, 93
Robinson, Dick, 97–98
ROC. See Mothers ROC (Mothers
Reclaiming Our Children)
Rocha, Theresa, 149
Roosevelt administration, 138; New
Deal, 25, 35, 79, 80, 136, 140
Rosser, Paul, 92–93
Rudman, Cary J., 115
rural areas: activists vs. prisons, 152–
54, 175, 176–80, 249–51, 266n31,
272–73n29; capital flow and, 64,
65; depressions, 22, 69, 149, 176;
labor abandoning, 70; poor unfixed, 179; prison employment,
22–23, 104, 106–7; prison siting,
104–5, 247; Share Croppers
Union, 192; struggling, 7, 34,
133, 148, 156, 169, 247, 249, 250;
suburban/exurban development,
68–70; unemployment, 41, 46–
47, 69. See also agriculture; Central Valley; Kings County; San
Joaquin Valley
safety net, 45, 48, 77. See also public
safety
St. Mary’s College, bond issues, 98
Salyer American, 132–33, 156; finance, 128, 132–33, 142, 143,
380 INDEX
147; labor, 128, 147, 167; water
supply, 136–39, 142, 258n16
San Bernardino County, Mothers
ROC, 184
San Diego County, prison construction, 93
San Francisco Bay Area: Black
homeowners, 35; Black poverty,
39; General Strike (May-July
1934), 34; housing costs, 46;
Mexican American Political Alliance (MAPA), 168–69; migration to, 35, 41; Silicon Valley
military-industrial district, 37;
Summer of Love, 39; white
workers, 32–33
San Joaquin Valley: agriculture,
131–46, 162, 268nn1,4; water
supply, 137–39, 162–63. See also
Bakersfield; Central Valley;
Fresno County; Kern County;
Kings County; Tulare County
San Jose Mercury News, 98
San Quentin, 92, 103, 260–61n2
Santa Clara County (“Silicon Valley”), military-industrial district,
37
“Satanic” gangs, 217
scholar activists, 5–6, 27, 183–84,
241
scholarships, 147, 254n3
schools: Corcoran, 147, 161, 168,
171–73; Proposition 13 and, 43;
segregation repealed, 36; tracking, 168. See also education
Schwarz, Bill, 54
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 253n1
segregation: armed forces, 35–36,
38; income (rich/poor), 16, 43–
44, 46, 57, 126, 246; prisoner,
275n11; racial, 34, 35–36, 191,
275n11; residential, 34, 36, 43,
276n13; school, 36; work site,
191, 199. See also apartheid
Senate Committee on Public Safety,
California, 2, 4–5
sentencing: California Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act (1977),
89, 91–92, 109; mandatory, 15,
20, 96, 110, 224; sentence enhancement, 107–12; “twentyfive to . . . without,” 223, 226. See
also “three strikes”
sexism: women’s work and income/asset percentage, 279n24.
See also gender
Share Croppers Union, 192
Silicon Valley, military-industrial
district, 37
Simi Valley, trial venue, 203, 273n1,
275n10
Simpson, O. J., 224, 277n17
Sinclair, Upton, 35
siting. See prison siting
skinhead gangs, 217
slave narratives, 185
slavery, 21, 189, 254n5, 267–68n1
Smith, Neil, 64, 65
social movements, 29, 181–82, 186,
191; “organic,” 186; Share Croppers Union, 192. See also activists; race-based movements
INDEX 381
social parenting, 74, 236
Social Science Research Council, 27
social wages, 29, 79, 239, 245, 247
sociology, Chicago school, 254n5
solidarity: among activists, 238, 245,
247, 249–50. See also community;
identification
South Africans, activist women,
181, 184, 239
Southeast Asia, U.S. war, 24
Southern Pacific Railroad, 140,
268n5
Sputnik (1958), 37
stability: crisis in, 26–28; laws related to, 12; prisons
producing/not producing, 11, 13,
14–15, 16–17
Standard Oil Company, Kings
County, 140, 162
Stanford University: bond issues,
98; development of, 37
state, 22–24, 28; antistate, 245; balance of power, 78–80, 84; criminal justice as power of, 174;
crises, 26, 78–84, 86, 88; gangs as
“shadow states,” 200, 274–75n8;
public infrastructure, 60–62;
surplus capacity, 42–43, 78–84,
86, 88, 113–14, 126–27; tax
struggle and illegitimacy of, 80,
81; technical capacity, 113–14;
terrorism of or sanctioned by,
190, 194–97, 278–79n23;
workfare-warfare, 79, 85–86;
workfare-warfare, 48–49, 86.
See also California entries; federal government; political economy; welfare state
state of emergency: CDC state-ofemergency approach, 101; deindustrialization and welfare state
decline creating, 232; South
Central Los Angeles, 185, 196–
97. See also crises
State Task Force on Youth Gang
Violence (California), 96, 107,
113, 217, 263n20
State Water Project (SWP) California, 38, 139, 272n25
steel workers, 41; strikes, 256n10
STEP (Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention) Act
(1988), 6, 107–8, 213, 216–17,
218, 263n20
stock market bust (October 1987),
50, 63
Stop This Outrageous Prison
(STOP), 272–73n29
“stranded communities,” 127, 199,
204, 274n8
“street terrorism,” 96; laws vs., 6,
107–8, 213, 216–19, 263n20, 276–
77n15. See also gangs
strikes, 40, 255n8, 256n10; farmworker (1930s), 136, 146–47,
169; Kaiser Permanente (1986),
46; monetary policy (1970s) and,
40; San Francisco /West Coast
General Strike (May-July 1934),
34
structure: and agency, 27, 248. See
also hierarchical relationships
382 INDEX
struggles, 6, 7, 24, 28, 32, 178, 186;
class, 34, 80, 167; coalition building, 232; crisis and, 54; labor, 32,
34, 52, 70, 141, 274n6; prisoner,
89; prison siting, 102, 176–77,
272n23; race, 34, 38, 39, 167, 185,
216, 255n6, 274n6; rural, 7, 34,
133, 148, 156, 169, 247, 249, 250;
tax, 42–43, 49, 62, 80–84, 95, 97,
101, 126, 147, 258n16; urban, 34–
35, 249, 250; water, 139, 269n8;
women’s, 184, 195–96, 201–8,
218, 238, 276n12. See also activists; voter propositions
suburbanization, 3, 147, 263n18; of
farmlands, 53, 68–70, 106,
258n17
Summer of Love, 39
surpluses, 54–86, 88, 122, 129; capital, 55–84, 99, 126, 256–58n12;
Corcoran, 147; and crises, 54–84,
86, 88, 124, 147–48, 179; crops,
67, 143; defined, 55; four, 57–85;
future, 245; labor, 70–78, 73–
74table, 106, 126, 129, 184–85,
256–58n12; land, 64–70, 88, 106,
126, 129, 269n6; local, 42–43, 58–
63, 78–84, 147–48; prison construction and, 88, 99; relative
surplus population, 70–78, 73–
74table, 111, 113, 184–85, 240;
state capacity, 42–43, 78–84, 86,
88, 113–14, 126–27; water, 137–
39, 162, 269nn6,7,8, 270n10
Susanville, Lassen County, 164;
Gilbert Jones, 204–5; prison siting experience, 151, 158, 164,
166, 271n16
taxation: activists vs., 42–43, 49, 62,
80–84, 95, 97, 101, 126, 147,
258n16; California structural
change in, 79–84, 82–83table;
consumer interest payments,
262n12; Corcoran revenues and
subventions, 146, 147, 150, 161–
65, 171–72; debt/bonds exempt
from, 59, 98, 100, 262n11, 267n35;
effect of employer leaving a
place, 54; on farmland, 134,
258n17, 268n2; federal devolution and, 81, 245; Mexican War
and, 31; not-for-profits exempt
from, 98, 231; population basis
for, 150, 163; poverty and changes
in, 43, 44, 95, 246; property, 43,
81, 83, 147; public defenders paid
through, 211; regressive, 43, 246;
as social wages, 245; subventions,
31, 33, 105, 150, 163–65, 171–72,
258n17, 265n24; waves of tax reduction, 81, 82–83 table
Tehachapi/southern Kern County,
California Correctional Institution, 93, 102–3, 129, 205
“terrible few,” 15
terrorism: state and statesanctioned, 190, 194–97, 278–
79n23; STEP Act (1988) vs., 6,
107–8, 213, 216–17, 218, 263n20;
“street terrorism,” 96; vigilante,
33, 136. See also gangs
INDEX 383
theft crimes, 13, 19, 112–13, 112 table
“three strikes,” 2, 108, 221; CDC
bed shortage estimates and, 96;
co-authors of law, 157, 264n21;
and crime rate, 15, 112–13; Families to Amend California’s
Three Strikes (FACTS), 233,
234, 235, 238–40; Mothers ROC
and, 6, 223–24, 227, 229, 231,
232, 233; Proposition 21 (2000)
expanding on, 263n20; Proposition 184 (1994), 6, 50; second law
(March 1994), 108; “Three
Strikes Awareness Month,” 229
Tidewater Oil Company, Kings
County, 140
“tipping point,” 16
transportation: bus riders for freedom, 1–5; housing prices and,
158; Montgomery bus boycott,
190–91; workers in, 41. See also
highways; railroads
treatment programs, for substance
abusers, 101
trials: California system, 120; LA
Four, 181–82, 215, 273n1; Los
Angeles police brutality cases,
204, 273n1; Mothers ROC attendance, 210; officers of the court
and untrustworthy witnesses,
183, 273n2; Simi Valley venue,
203, 273n1, 275n10; O. J. Simpson, 224, 277n17. See also courthouses, county
Tulare County: activists vs. prison
sitings, 177–78, 272–73n29;
CDC regional accounting office, 164. See also Tulare Lake;
Visalia
Tulare Lake, 138–39; Tulare Lake
Basin, 132–33, 137, 142–43, 152,
156
Tuskegee model, of cooperative
apartheid, 190
UC. See University of California
(UC)
underclass, 259n20
underemployment, 75, 76, 113, 127
unemployment, 127, 259n19; agricultural, 77, 145; Black men, 76,
199; California, 40, 41, 44–47, 69;
Corcoran, 129, 148, 155, 176; Delano, 176–77; Mothers ROC concerns, 199, 200; nonacceleratinginflation rate of unemployment
(NAIRU), 71–74; relative surplus population, 72–77, 73–
74table, 113
UNICOR, 21
Uniform Determinate Sentencing
Act (1977), California, 89, 91–92,
109
unions. See labor activism
United Farm Workers (UFW), 39,
128, 129, 140, 167, 176, 177
university education. See postsecondary education
University of California (UC): and
affirmative action, 161; CDC
performance review, 117–18,
121; development of, 37; UCLA
Law School library, 218,
276n14
384 INDEX
University of Southern California,
bond issues, 98
University of the Pacific, bond issues, 98
Unruh, Jess, 97, 98–99
urban areas: activists vs. prisons,
103–4, 180, 227–28, 249–51; capital flow through, 64; gang enclaves, 19; industrial workers’
rights, 26; labor organizations,
32–33, 34; police budgetary constraints, 116; poor unfixed, 179;
prisoner population from, 7, 17;
racial structure, 35; racism’s
marginal utility in, 254–55n5;
redivision into units controlled
by street organizations, 74; reductions in well-waged jobs,
126; Share Croppers Union, 192;
social safety net replaced by
criminal dragnet, 77; surplus
population, 240; unemployment, 41, 46. See also Los Angeles County; San Francisco Bay
Area
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
(BJS), 18, 19
U.S. Constitution: Eighteenth
Amendment (1919), 13; Thirteenth Amendment, 20–21
U.S. Department of Agriculture,
134
U.S. Department of Defense
(DOD): contracts, 36–37, 43, 44
fig. See also Pentagon; U.S. Department of War
U.S. Department of Interior, 137–
38; Bureau of Reclamation, 137–
39, 152, 269–70nn6,9
U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ),
“Weed and Seed” funding, 231–
32, 277n19. See also U.S. Bureau
of Justice Statistics (BJS)
U.S. Department of War, 25, 137–
39, 269–70n9. See also U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)
U.S. State Department, 244
utilities: CDC expenditures on,
161–63, 175–76, 272n23. See also
water supply
Vacaville, hospital prison, 103
Vietnam war, 24
vigilante terror, 33, 136
violence: domestic, 177; imprisonment offenses, 112–13, 112 table;
lynching of Blacks, 189, 190;
after Persian Gulf victory, 116;
police brutality, 39, 50, 190, 196–
97, 202, 203, 212, 273n1; sociospatial apartheid and, 74;
State Task Force on Youth
Gang Violence, 96, 107, 113,
217, 263n20. See also terrorism
Visalia: CDC regional accounting
office, 164; commute to Corcoran, 158. See also Tulare County
voter propositions, 53, 77–78;
Proposition 187/anti–immigration (1994), 50, 172–73; Proposition 209/anti–affirmative action
(1996), 50. See also Proposition
13/taxpayers’ revolt (1978);
“three strikes”
INDEX 385
voting power: to approve public
debt, 62, 97, 100–101, 258n14;
Latina/os, 103–4; taxpayers, 127.
See also activists; voter propositions
Wackenhut, 124–25, 267n38
wages: control by low-wage work,
45; COs, 117, 266n28; fair, 29;
farmworkers, 128, 145; freeze
(1970s), 41; and housing costs,
44; janitorial unions and, 193;
job opportunity shift from highwage to low-wage, 50, 52; military, 35, 39; minimum, 46; prices
and, 72; prisoner labor costs
compared, 166; social, 29, 79,
239, 245, 247; surplus capital
and, 256–58n12. See also personal income
Wagner Act, 136
Walker, Richard, 39, 57
Walters, Dan, 77
wars, 35; California migration after,
3; Civil War, 12, 136, 268n1;
class, 34–35, 64; Cold War, 36–
37, 80, 118, 209, 267n38; Mexican, 31; opposition to (1960s),
24–25; Vietnam, 24; welfarewarfare/military Keynesian
state, 25, 37–39, 45, 78–86, 126;
workfare-warfare state, 79, 85–
86; World War I, 134. See also
military; U.S. Department of
War; World War II
Washington, Booker T., 190
Waters, Maxine, 107, 204
water supply: California Aqueduct,
139; Federal Water Reclamation
acts, 137–38, 269nn6,7; fossil
aquifer, 137, 139; groundwater,
141–42, 162, 272n25; Metropolitan Water District (Met), 139,
162, 270n10; Peripheral Canal,
67, 142, 258n16; prison siting
concern, 153, 162, 177, 272n25;
San Joaquin Valley, 137–39,
162–63; State Water Project
(SWP), 38, 139, 272n25; surplus,
137–39, 162, 269nn6,7,8, 270n10;
Westlands Water District, 139–
40. See also agricultural water
supply; drought
Watts Rebellion (1965), 39, 50
wealth, 57, 245, 246; income segregation into richer and poorer, 16,
43–44, 46, 57, 126, 246; O. J.
Simpson, 224; whites controlling, 26, 34. See also capital; personal income; property
“Weed and Seed” funding, 231–32,
277n19
welfare state, 93; declining, 52, 185,
232, 238, 239; Deukmejian target, 95; military Keynesian
welfare-warfare state, 25, 37–39,
45, 78–86, 126; UC and, 118; voters vs., 53; workfare programs,
48–49, 86. See also New Deal;
public assistance; safety net
Westlands Water District, 139–40
whites: agricultural labor, 132,
386 INDEX
135–36; Black-white coalitions,
216; California settlement
(1800s), 31; class-based strife between, 35; colonizers, 32; Corcoran chiefs of police scandal,
170; Corcoran dominance, 146,
169; dispossessed homesteaders,
32; employers, 34–35; feminist/gender politics, 188; gangs,
204–5, 217; guards with prisoners of color, 22; labor activists,
32–33, 135–36, 146, 192; majority status lost in California, 42,
52, 57; male employment, 76;
Mothers ROC, 184, 207, 209;
Okies, 34–35, 135, 146–47,
271n17; poor, 15; prisoner population, 110–11, 111table, 204–
5, 244–45, 275n11, 277n18; and
prison sitings, 154; Progressive
women, 187–88; “reserve army
of whiteness,” 244; supremacy
of, 33–37, 42, 135, 204–5; third
strike prisoners, 113; wealth
controlled by, 26, 34; “wobbler”
charges, 225. See also European
immigrants
Williamson Act (1965), 258n17,
268n2
Wilson, Pete, 49, 53–54, 62, 121, 123
“wobblers,” 108, 224–27, 264n22.
See also felonies
women: activists, 181–240; Argentina’s presumptions about,
194; Black club women, 187–91;
employment declines among
Black, 75–76; feminist/gender
politics, 188; income/asset percentages (world), 279n24; inequalities, 26, 279n24; prisoner
population, 7; Progressive, 187–
90; social parenting, 74; struggles, 184, 195–96, 201–8, 218,
238, 276n12; unemployment, 75;
visibility of, 190–92, 238–39;
workfare programs, 49;
working-class, 187–91, 194, 199,
239. See also mothers
workers. See labor
workfare-warfare state, 79, 85–86
workfare, 48–49, 86
working class, 119; bus riders for
freedom, 2; Corcoran, 148, 156;
criminalization, 110; education,
181; Mothers ROC, 187–91, 194,
199, 211, 224–25, 239; and prison
siting, 103. See also labor; prison
employment; working poor
Workingmen’s Party, 33
working poor: Mothers ROC, 237;
prisoner population, 7, 15, 237;
relative surplus population, 77;
underclass, 259n20; welfare state
and, 45; workfare programs, 48–
49
workless poor, prisoner population,
7, 15
World War I, 134
World War II, 80; “creative destruction,” 35; defense boom in Los
Angeles County, 199; farmworkers and, 136, 141; golden
INDEX 387
World War II (continued)
age of U.S. capitalism, 25; janitorial unions during and after,
193; Japanese internment, 36,
244; Peery, 206; water politics,
137–38; white supremacy,
35–36
Yellow Power, 39
youth: criminalization of, 172, 173;
juvenile justice institutions, 183,
188, 272n27. See also children;
gangs
Zapatistas, Chiapas, 24
388 INDEX
AMERICAN CROSSROADS
EDITED BY EARL LEWIS, GEORGE LIPSITZ, PEGGY PASCOE, GEORGE SÁNCHEZ,
AND DANA TAKAGI
1. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, by José David Saldívar
2. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, by Neil Foley
3. Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget
Sound, by Alexandra Harmon
4. Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War, edited by
George Mariscal
5. Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and
American Indian Minneapolis, 1945–1992, by Rachel Buff
6. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since
1945, by Melani McAlister
7. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, by
Nayan Shah
8. Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and
Festival, 1934–1990, by Lon Kurashige
9. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture,
by Shelley Streeby
10. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past, by David R. Roediger
11. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto
Rico, by Laura Briggs
12. meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands, by
Rosa Linda Fregoso
13. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban
Los Angeles, by Eric Avila
14. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, by Tiya Miles
15. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation, by
Herman S. Gray
16. Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White
Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, by
Paul Ortiz
17. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America,
by Alexandra Stern
18. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, by Josh Kun
19. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles, by Laura
Pulido
20. Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939, by
Natalia Molina
21. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, 1982–2000, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
TEXT
11/15 Granjon
DISPLAY
HTF Knockout; Akzidenz Grotesk
COMPOSITOR
Binghamton Valley Composition, LLC
PRINTER AND BINDER
Maple-Vail Manufacturing Group
INDEXER
Barbara Roos
CARTOGRAPHER/ILLUSTRATOR
Bill Nelson

Because reform won’t happen.
By Mariame Kaba
Ms. Kaba is an organizer against criminalization.
June 12, 2020
Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300
million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.
Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.
There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South
emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police
departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized
populations to protect the status quo.
So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a
police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.
Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe.
The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints,
issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they
chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn
College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If
they make two, they’re cop of the month.”
We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.
Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest,
incarceration, violence and death.
I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police
or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in
half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas,
Los Angeles and other cities.
History is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act in the present but because it can help us ask better questions for the
future.
The Lexow Committee undertook the first major investigation into police misconduct in New York City in 1894. At the time, the most common
complaint against the police was about “clubbing” — “the routine bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks or blackjacks,”
as the historian Marilynn Johnson has written.
The Wickersham Commission, convened to study the criminal justice system and examine the problem of Prohibition enforcement, offered a
scathing indictment in 1931, including evidence of brutal interrogation strategies. It put the blame on a lack of professionalism among the
police.
After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of
the 24 surveyed disorders.” Its report listed a now-familiar set of recommendations, like working to build “community support for law
enforcement” and reviewing police operations “in the ghetto, to ensure proper conduct by police officers.”
These commissions didn’t stop the violence; they just served as a kind of counterinsurgent function each time police violence led to protests.
Calls for similar reforms were trotted out in response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the rebellion that followed, and
again after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The final report of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st
Century Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force
policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.
But even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
Opinion | Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police – The New… https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abo…
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The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what
has happened over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and
protesters. These officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose
chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would back him up and he was
right. He stayed on the job for five more years.
Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints
over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.
Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence
is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.
But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make
them obsolete.
We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did
this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.
We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone
needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.
What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who
experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police
officers themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently
reported form of police misconduct. In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days.
When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without
law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging
people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.
People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of
individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on
housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to
embrace a different vision of safety and justice.
When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more black police officers or create more civilian review boards, I hope that
we remember all the times those efforts have failed.
Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) is the director of Project NIA, a grass-roots group that works to end youth incarceration, and an anti-criminalization organizer.
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A version of this article appears in print on June 14, 2020, Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
Opinion | Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police – The New… https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abo…
2 of 2 9/8/20, 5:03 PM