Abstract
The book was published in 2007 and remains without translation into Portuguese. The author remains little known, due to this gap. However, the book Golden Gulag is an important framework for understanding the prison expansion in the State of California, which occurred between 1982 and 2000. In this book, Gilmore offers an interesting interpretation about the motivations and articulations that have driven the construction of prisons within the state, and provides an analytical framework that discussed again the political economy of punishment. Gilmore is also known for being one of the main authors who formulated a contemporary interpretation of prison expansion prison, called Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). She is also a founding member of a prison abolition movement named Critical Resistence. This article conducts a careful reading of the Golden Gulag in order to extract the main theoretical and empirical formulations of the book. With this reading done, we intend to test possible contributions of this material for understanding the recent prison expansion in São Paulo.
Keywords:
prison expansion; political economy of punishment; prison policies; prison fix; prison abolition movement