Envisioning a New World Through Abolition Geography

By Sonali Kolhatkar, YES! Magazine

For more than 30 years, Ruth Wilson Gilmore has created scholarship on an idea once considered radical: that society can and should abolish prisons and policing.

Today, with greater attention being paid to how people of color, and Black people in particular, are disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system and prison industrial complex, Gilmore’s ideas are being taken seriously.

[…]

Gilmore is a professor of earth and environmental sciences and American studies, and she is the director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She co-founded several grassroots organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, all of which are actively working to abolish prisons.

[Gilmore] spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar about her latest book, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso, 2022). The book is based on Gilmore’s numerous abolition-themed lectures and papers spanning several decades.

Read the rest of the article, including Gilmore’s full interview, here.

To explore an exhibit concerning mass incarceration, click here.

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