Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 239: The Fragmented State (w/ special guests Craig and Ruth Wilson Gilmore) [Year Zero 6]

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

For this latest installation of the Year Zero series we're joined by long time researchers, teachers, and prison abolitionists Craig and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, to help us think through the carceral state: what it is, where it's heading, and how we can change it. Please read Ruthie's book, Golden Gulag: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag And Craig's Real Cost of Prisons graphic novel, from which today's episode art was taken: http://www.realcostofprisons.org/prison_town.pdf And finally, please consider supporting us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Thank you. Tom and I did a episode about Development Arrested. And I think you wrote the, did you write the intro to that, Ruthie? I did indeed. It's a great book. We did that with Jordan Camp. And I don't know, that book blew me away

because, you know, it's like he starts with, you know, music and just kind of I don't know you could do the same thing for where we live just because music is such a important part of of life here it's it's a great book it is a great book and it it it influenced me a lot um I was actually his teacher when I was still a grad school dropout. Oh, really? He wrote a fabulous dissertation. And then that dissertation became that book. And if you've never read the whole dissertation, I urge you to do it.

It's like three times the length of the book. And it's just got more fantastic examples and analysis in it. Yeah. Our buddy Jack Norton, he's the one that recommended it to me. And he told me a story about someone, you know, talking to Clyde Woods about like Southern California. And he was like, well, if you're going to tell the story of Southern California, you got to start all the way back with like the Aztecs. He's very thorough. He started, you know, as far back as possible. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, all right. I'm just going to go ahead and get started. you know, as far back as possible. Yeah. Totally. Well, all right. I'm just going to go ahead and get started. Welcome to the show this week, everybody. We have two very special guests. Back in the U.S., just in time for the latest environmental catastrophe, which is now apparently a swarm of spiders that parachute down from the sky. Have you guys heard of this at all? No, we missed that.

Uh-oh. I guess I'm going to stay home this afternoon after all. Well, you know, I feel like a few years ago, there was these wasps that invaded from Japan. And now we've got these spiders from, i think they're also from japan maybe japan just sends us everything from kudzu to invasive uh everything they don't want yeah but i guess they should be hitting us pretty soon but yes um special guest this week craig gil and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It's been a long time coming. We've talked about doing this episode for many years now, but we're glad to have you both on.

How are y'all doing today? Really well. Thanks for having us. Yeah, we're doing great. Thanks. Yeah, there's a few reasons or occasions for having you guys on right now. You know, one we'll get to in just a second. Maybe the most important for us personally is that it's the, as of a week ago,

the five-year anniversary of this very program you are on. Oh, wow. I didn't even know. That snuck right past me. It's an honor to be here. Yeah, it's half a decade and it's appropriate because we all got started in, you know, we all got started in community radio here, which I'm sure you'll know about. But specifically, this podcast grew out of a initiative organizing project to stop a federal prison from being built here in our county. relied a lot on both of your work through that process, through just trying to understand how prisons get sided, you know, what are kind of some of the vulnerability points that we could put pressure on, on these agencies trying to do this. So we owe quite a bit to you, you know, as do many of the people here in this county. And, you know, probably didn't even know about Letcher County until maybe very recently. I don't know. Maybe

you did. You probably know Sylvia Ryerson. She had done a work about the prisons that had popped up around where we live. And her work was also very beneficial to us as well. And so, yeah, so no, it's very appropriate that we would have you both on right now. I think, you know, when I first reached out to Craig, like one of the major reasons I wanted to have you on right now is because there was an article in the New York Times a few months ago that, I don't know, we found very interesting. And Craig had done a Twitter thread about it that I, again, found very useful. And I saw a lot of parallels

to other towns around where we live in central Appalachia that have prisons, either state prisons or federal prisons. The article was in the New York Times. It was titled, Nothing Will Be the Same. A Prison Town Weighs a Future Without a Prison. And it's about a town in Northern California called Susanville. It has two prisons, one of which will soon be closing. It sounds like there might be several different reasons for why it's closing, and maybe we'll get into that. But it kind of went on to maybe highlight why this is catastrophic for the town. But the framing of it, I don't know, I think we all here are familiar with probably who planted

this story and why it was run when it was run. I was wondering if you guys could maybe just tell us a little bit about Susanville. Like what is its story? What does this article get wrong about it? You know, what's been happening there and what is its story? What does this article get wrong about it? You know, what's been happening there and what's happening now? Susanville is, as you say, it's a small town in northeast California. So it's on the east side of the Sierra Nevadas. It's easier to get to, like, if you wanted to do shopping at a place bigger than Susanville does you'd go an hour and a half south to Reno

into Nevada so that's like the closest bigger city the economy there has been largely mining, forestry and cattle. Until the first prison opened, well, there were two things that happened in the 40s and 50s. The first prison opened in Susanville.

And in the 40s, the U.S. Army built an army base just south of Susanville in a place called Hurlong as a place to store ammunition that they thought would be safe from Japanese bombers. Wow. But for the Pacific theater. Right. There's still a lot of ammunition stored there, but that site has become the place in which the U.S. Army and other armed forces destroy outdated munitions. Wow. So every afternoon at 4 o'clock, there's a huge explosion in the middle of the desert. Oh, my God. Toxins from these munitions that have just been blown up float up into the air.

That's incredible. In the early aughts, a federal prison was cited right down the road from that munitions depot. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things that the Times gets wrong, and I suspect it's a reporter who doesn't understand how rural economies work.

There are only two prisons in Susanville, but there's another one half an hour away. And the people in that prison live the same sorts of places that the people who work in the two Susanville prisons work, which may or may not be the town of Susanville. But according to the census, about half the people in the city limits of Susanville are incarcerated. Half of it's incarcerated. Incredible. The other thing I think that is worth talking about in terms of that story is that I was up there in the aughts helping some local people try to fight this proposed federal prison. And most of them worked for fish and game or forestry. And they said that

apart from the prison guard population, the most substantial source of employment were the state and federal governments, but not in their carceral aspect, in their forestry management, fishing game, da-da-da-da-da. Right. So, you know, I met some people who I think were growing a little reefer up in the mountains for part of the season and doing, like, game surveys for the U.S. government. And that's how they made their money. They lived in trailers.

So the question of, I mean, the closure of one prison in Susanville is going to impact the local economy, but there are two prisons and an army base still left for this town that has fewer than 10,000 free world residents. Right. And I would imagine that the prison probably doesn't employ that many people, just from what we've seen locally. people, just from what we've seen locally. I mean, it's weird because prisons are able to, you know, swing a lot of weight around when it comes to municipal policymaking and that kind of thing, but it doesn't actually employ very many people. And so maybe that's another reason why the framing of this was kind of strange. I think as you pointed out, Craig, like, in many ways, it was a victory of the I think as you pointed out, Craig, like, in many ways,

it was a victory of the prison guard union and the Chamber of Commerce, this story, anyways, like they probably, if they didn't outright just reach out to the New York Times and say, hey, do this story, then they, you know, very much the reporter was more sympathetic to them than the people incarcerated there. It sounds like anyways. Yeah, I just want to interject here that the reporter spent a lot of time talking to people who know us in California related to some other story he had done. And they spent a lot of time explaining to him

that he should talk to at least me, if not both of us, once he'd gone up to Susanville to do his repertorial duties. And he swore he would. And I await the email. Maybe there's a sequel coming. i i'm curious because i know the way things work here you know like in in particularly in places like where we're from where there's you know um you know the tax bases are small there's not a ton of political organization that kind of thing and so the things we get foisted upon us are obviously like prisons and then like landfills those type of things how what's the process for like military bases is it kind of the same calculus

or is it is it like i don't really have a whole lot of experience with that because there's nothing like that kind of in the mountains really i guess down like fort sumter in south carolina maybe but it is is is that another one of those things that like sort of gets put on people like as like this will be like an economic development thing or like is there any sort of connection you know what I'm saying to like those types of sort of like projects that nobody wants well you know that's a great question I'm glad you asked it the the history of the expansion of military bases in the United States is actually a bit different from the proliferation of what you are pointing at as industries of last resort. So incinerators, landfills, prisons,

feedlots, those kinds of things. With the military, as the U.S. Department of War transformed itself into the Pentagon after the close, the final shots were fired and bombs dropped at the end of World War II, most of that expansion looked to people on the ground like a very welcome, very big development opportunity. And it generally was not the case for many bases. I won't say this is universally the case, that many people objected to the bases. And indeed, the bases fit into or transformed local economies in ways that generally provided a little higher than normal related jobs, what we call multipliers, you know, out off the base, opportunities for civilian employment on the base, and so on and so forth. Now, of course, all of that is fraught. Like if you've ever read Homefront by Kathy Lutz about Fort, what is it, in North Carolina? Bragg? Is it Fort Bragg? Fort Bragg.

Fort Bragg. You see like how fraught it is. But anyway, that's a bit different. A bit different. And certainly a place to store and then explode munitions would fall more squarely into the industries of last resort category than the bases that kind of united a swath of the continental United States from the northeast down to the south across the southwest Southwest and up the West Coast, that some people call the gun belt. Right. And in the case of California, I mean, it seems like California, probably more than a lot of other states, that relationship with the military industrial complex was really what made it what it is, correct? Like it kind of, in a way, complemented the university system.

And I don't know, I think you call it, or Mike Davis, or, you know, it's like the military Keynesian state. It's kind of like what allowed them to provide, quote unquote, for people, you know, under the guise of this kind of like militaristic expansion, I suppose. That's really true.

And to go back to your neck of the woods, while the Tennessee Valley Authority might not be, you know, directly implicated in the landscapes where you live and live or and play, the Appalachian Commission that links, you know, Southern Ohio all the way down through Appalachia to its southernmost regions, turned to the Tennessee Valley Authority, allegedly to bring the isolated communities of Appalachia into the larger political economy starting in the 1920s, but more forcefully in the run up to and after the Second World War. And what we know about the TVA is that the power that it produced, and I mean the electrical power that it produced, mostly flows into the military bases and labs and so forth in the South and mostly bypassed, just like

the highways, the communities that allegedly were the objects of care and incorporation. Yeah. You've got Oak Ridge right there in Tennessee, you know, where they put the plutonium in the bombs or whatever. I mean, it's really grim. Well, you know, just getting back to susanville like i think that you had pointed out in golden gulag russi that like for for a lot of communities in california in the 80s and 90s susanville was kind of like the model prison town like they

touted it as the place where this had worked and where it had lifted, you know, like the rising tide, like all the boats and everybody was happy with it. I think particularly you pointed out Corcoran, which was a community in, I don't really know California geography that well. I think it's maybe Southern California, right? And Susanville is more in the north. Corcoran sounded a lot like our community here in the sense that it had lost,

in their sense it was agriculture, in our sense it's coal mining. But their leaders in their community, these boosters were looking for a solution and they were asking the state for a prison. And they had pointed out Susanville as an example. And so, you know, we reread that chapter about Corcoran, and it was really astonishing. I mean, it's, I think it's Cropland's Capitalism. I can't remember the name, the full name of the chapter.

Sorry. But, you know, it's about, it's about this town. And like I said, when we were organizing against this prison here, it's just stunning to see the similarities and all of the like rhetoric and tactics they use. Just just even down to like the most minute level, for example, them saying like the prison will unlock the doors to your economic like they use the exact same rhetoric here. Like, is it you know, why did they do that? Did they workshop it in California and then like export it elsewhere? Or you know what I mean? Like why is it uniform across the board, I wonder? Is there? Well, you might have your own ideas.

I'll take a first pass at answering. There is certainly a circulation of people and ideas and quote unquote studies, many of which are pretty lame, that state prison agencies, the federal DOC and more local boosters, county, city, municipality bo boosters turn to to figure out how to make this thing happen where they're at. So the kind of language about, you know, how to describe a coming prison, one could trace, you know, emerges in some studies and then circulates and people go to conferences and junkets. So it's not conspiratorial, but they definitely get together. Like they definitely get together and learn from each other and follow certain patterns. For example, it was very common in California and other places that I have done work in and studied where the person showing up to talk about how great the

prison is going to be as a woman because then a woman seems to symbolize well there's nothing to be afraid of right because I wouldn't be here talking to you about it if there were and so on yeah do you have other ideas uh only that I guess the only other thing I would add to that is that in the same ways that they study what works and doesn't work and they network those ideas at national conferences, through newsletters, on websites, et cetera, et cetera, I guess I have two things to say. One is, one of the reasons that shows like yours are so important is that we don't have national conventions in which our employers send us to get together for a long weekend, and we do panels and workshops with each other and say, this is how we stop the prison in Letcher County. Now here's how you can stop your prison, right? They're doing that. They're doing that every year on taxpayer dollars, because these are public employees who are going off to do these things.

The other thing is they're studying us. And they are learning what you did successfully in Letcher County. And they're trying to figure out how to get around it. the person who headed the push for four new jails in New York City is someone who we have worked with in the past on how to stop jails going into towns. And she knows that literature backwards and forwards. She's done organizing. And so she was able to come up with a strategy to counter a lot of the stuff that we and she had been doing. Wow. It's profound. How did that feel? Bad.

Bad. Oh, my. I would use stronger language, but I don't know what your familial warning level is. I know. You're in good company here. Go wherever you want to, Craig. Tom's got the cuss box. he'll drop a quarter in for you cuss bomb about that one

cuss bomb my biggest failure ever from star pupil to arch enemy oh my god the betrayal yeah to go back to you know the bottom up stuff that I know

all of you observed and probably tried to do some work to change the course of in the struggle there where you're at, is that the boosters use a language that seems so self-evidently good, right? Jobs is like the magic word in the United States of America where work is at the center of the possibility of being alive. Forget about maybe having healthcare. So job is magical and boosters know that. And anyone who shows up and says, but, they go, what are you telling us about these people who need jobs? There's that. into, you know, these power blocks where they've got somebody who stands to benefit and who promotes really actively, they are benefiting from getting that land that's lying idle or under producing into a sale,

a sale, which is all they're concerned about, to get some number of people in, you know, whatever civic organizations, faith community, and so forth to step up and say the jobs thing. And to talk about the future in terms not only of the employability of people in the labor market who are out of the labor market locally, but also to talk about the future in a very sentimentally charged way about the kids. So the kids can stay. And that is very hard to talk against unless you can just kind of show the kids left, the kids left, the kids left, or the kids got locked up, the kids got locked up, which was something we managed to do rather powerfully, unexpectedly, talking with kids in the region around Corcoran in Central California, who grew up being afraid of pesticides because of agriculture,

but also afraid of police and prisons because that's where they saw their future leading right in our case we had the advantage of our local oligarchs not really being what you would term exemplars of excellence so they would be like we're gonna we're gonna start a virtual gun range at the high school and we're going to teach them how to shoot if to train them to be these prison guards and it's like okay let's let's say that's not batshit insane just on the face of it but like what are they supposed to do just like kind of hang out for four years till they're like old enough to like carry a gun and then go be co's or whatever it's like it's just even by their own logic it's ridiculous it makes no sense in terms of the like how we're going to train up our youth to you know hold these jobs or whatever yeah and you talking about the jobs narrative

I wonder if you've experienced this the I feel like that that piece of it was um what made um organizing so difficult in particular because so many of the people that we were used to organizing with that we had done water quality work with that we had worked with to um hold mining companies accountable a lot of those people were like well we can't fight all the jobs you know and they were just checked out and like we're not on board and and at first it felt like our only allies were nimbies it was like are we going to work with these people it just became it was just a very bizarre yeah and that's why we we had done this thing and it's actually fascinating because throughout this process you get to display all the contradictions and all the sort of hypocrisies that the boosters put out there

and everything. But like the timeline of events is that they had talked about this prison coming to our community for like 10 years. And then out of the blue one day, they say, all right, we got the money for it. Our Congressman Hal Rogers, who's the longest serving Republican congressman in Congress, actually, you know, he's got the money for it and it's coming and it's coming to your county. $444 million prison is coming. And so what we did is we said, well, like, you know, and we did this big protest that got a lot of press and everything. We said, like, well, why does why do we have to get $444 million in the form of a prison? Like, you know, why is it not just,

why can't we just have that money for other things? And we, you know, created a kind of online forum where people could throw out their ideas of things that they would like to see done with that money. And it was fascinating because you got to watch them backpedal. They were on their heels, you know, and basically at the end of the day they just had to say well this is a this is a done deal so why would you live to look a gift horse in the mouth and then our messaging was always like it's not a done deal like this money has not the prison has not been built yet until the bulldozers are moving the money can be spent any way we wanted to um and it just it was fascinating because like once you had brought them to that point they basically just had to admit that what they wanted was a prison even though that they had

the entire time said well we didn't want this at first it's like well you you pretty you obviously do otherwise you would be fighting for something else um but i don't know it's a fascinating example of like how you know um you know organization can reveal the kind of contradictions of your opponent in a way. What's interesting after that push that I thought happened too was, so for example, in the intervening years sort of after the height of the criminalization of the opioid thing, sort of after the like the height of like the criminalization of the opioid thing you had things that certainly are not perfect but things like drug court that took a less punitive approach to like how do you deal with people that have been arrested for soft drug crimes and it kept a lot of people you know out of out of jail all these kinds of things and i noticed after that a lot of those people that had seen firsthand like some of the successes of things

like that could kind of get on board with like our messaging sort of around that to me to the degree that they were aware of it you know anyway uh but yeah like like like it's like even people that weren't necessarily aligned with us politically at least could have a vision of how you could do things differently right this is what i'm trying to say when we were fighting against a prison in delano california which is about half an hour south of corcoran um a new york times reporter interviewed ruthie and wrote up actually a very good story in the new york times uh prison. And after she had interviewed Ruthie, she went and talked to the mayor of the town. And she says to the mayor, Professor Gilmore tells me

that of the 1,500 jobs that this prison is going to provide, they estimate that no more than 77 are going to go to local residents, and that those are very likely going to be the lowest wage jobs in the prison. And it turns out, there was another story that happened a year or two later, when the prison advertised for two $17,000 a year clerical jobs, 800 people lined up to get those. Oh, my God. thousand dollar a year clerical jobs 800 people lined up to get those oh my god so the reporter says to the mayor so why are you supporting this and the mayor said the state of california didn't offer me 335 million to do with what i want the state of california is offering me a 30335 million prison. And we are

so poor here, and we have such high unemployment, I can't turn my back on 77 jobs, 77 low wage jobs to help our town. And I think if you're asking me, is it a waste of $335 million? Yes. Am I going to oppose it? No, because I want those jobs. And that was sort of the barrel he was over was, it wasn't a question of what could... Use it as an organizing strategy. What would you do with $400 million? Or what could we do with $400 million? I think that's a great strategy. But in reality, they're not just going to give you that money. Right. So it's then like, okay, when people stand up at the meeting and say, well, tell me, Terrence, can you call D.C. and tell them here's what we're going to do with the $400 million instead

and we'll get it anyway, then that's one of the places we get stuck, right? Although I want to say this is true and yet there's a reason when we win that we win. Because in the cases when we win, the sort of outlines of the struggle are not all that different from the cases that we lose. Big ticket item, money coming through, not going to stick locally, and the perception that's nurtured by the boosters that this thing, the prison, or the feedlot or the incinerator is natural, it's necessary, and it's inevitable. So the question is, how are we going to arrange ourselves around this natural, necessary, and inevitable thing? But here's what changes, I think, and what makes it possible for people to bust through.

And that has to do with a term you used in another question you asked, and I'll just jump ahead to it, and that's the question of fragmentation and how fragmented people are, urban and rural, in every kind of way. So communities have been broken because of mass criminalization with or without incarceration, and communities are broken because of huge changes in the landscape for jobs and well-being and so on and so forth. So all of that fragmentation is reality. And so when the mayor, who, like Craig said, was not opposed to us opposing the prison, he just couldn't join us to oppose the prison. When the mayor made that statement, he was expressing a reality that could change if people were able to bring themselves together and kind of defragment all of the pieces that they've been broken into. The pieces where people struggling for jobs were struggling against people struggling against environmental racism,

and people struggling against environmental racism found themselves struggling against people who are for greater opportunities in the public schools. So one of the questions that we put to ourselves or challenges, I should say, it's not a question that we put to ourselves over and over again, and that is how might we at least provisionally piece together a united front from all of these disparate concerns about which people feel life and death urgency. And that includes some NIMBY people. Because certainly, when we first started organizing

in rural California, we learned, one, there's always one, and two, very often they start out NIMBY until they realize, and sometimes they do, that if they only say NIMBY, a prison is going to pop up in two years or an incinerator is going to pop up in two years. There's got to be a systematic refusal rather than a local refusal of the thing. rather than a local refusal of the thing. So that's something that I think your struggle in Letcher County showed a way forward through. And that's what I wish we could get together every year and trade at somebody's expense and trade tips and consolidate and resources. Because, for example, when Critical Resistance used to have relatively regular big conferences, that kind of exchange happened.

That we can't count on people even listening to a podcast, much less reading an article or doing other things, because everybody's busy. That might be what we need to sow our ill-gotten podcast gain into but it's but it's it's a good point it's a good point ruthie i think because i think that was the subject of a lot of contention early on in our organizing because it's like that knee-jerk reaction when you have somebody particularly somebody with some standing in the community is like hell no i'm not for that but it's because of ms-13 or you know whatever other you know element is going to be coming through there and like i think the challenge becomes okay how do you how do you engage that in a way that doesn't sort of validate you know the sort of racisms and

different isms you know inherent in that and uh i think that's something that that yeah we had to to work through and in the end i guess probably utilized fairly effectively and some of those folks even had some changes of heart you know you know what i mean about about that they definitely did yeah it was an emotional time for everybody yeah you know i think there's a line in Golden Gulag that puts it very perfectly. The nature of arrests is itself a kind of act of fragmentation, because every arrest is individual, right? It's like an individual interaction with the state.

And, you know, everybody, you know, I guess what you are often being arrested for is a criminalization of, I think, as you've put it, a survival strategy, some sort of survival, you know, mechanism. And due to that sort of fragmentation, which is all over the book, you know, that's why I put it in the question. It's a recurring theme, fragmentation that occurs at this very macro level. It occurs at a societal level in these massive sweeping changes down to the, you know, our lives, like the familial units we're in, the households, the individual lives we lead, this constant movement of fragmentation, but also restructuring. I think that it's the dialectic, obviously, right? It's this process of fragmentation and restructuring.

And I guess, you know, I guess what we've outlined here of, you know, organization and kind of knitting together these fragments into a vision that we can all sort of use to make sense of our world is what we're, you know, shooting for, aiming for. I think what I wanted to talk about, especially by bringing up Corcoran, Susanville, Letcher County, where we live, is this idea, and you mentioned it earlier, Ruthie, of idle land and of surplus. I want to talk a little bit about why are we talking so much in this conversation about rural economies? You know what I mean? This has been the dominant thing that we've all been discussing so far.

Why are we talking so much about that in this conversation in reference to prisons? Great question. Well, although in the late 18th and early through long middle of the 19th century, prisons tended to be not all that far from urban centers. And in fact, some of the early ones, like the one in Philadelphia is right smack in the middle of downtown.

And in Trenton, New Jersey, right smack in the middle of downtown. They were central. smack in the middle of downtown. They were central. But over time, as urban land use changed and as the sort of seesaw, if you will, of capital back and forth to urban and rural landscapes changed, it seems that prison siters all over the place look to rural land that might be available to move from one use to another to go through the process of prison siting. Now, that's a little long-winded because the fact is

that the U.S. didn't build all that many prisons altogether everywhere until this modern or more contemporary period of the last 45 or so years, a little bit more. So in that context, we can see, for example, in the Kentucky context, the shift away from coal, or in the California context, shift away from certain kinds of land use, or more intensive agriculture in one place, making surplus marginal land prone to subsidence or whatever in another place, and so forth. And we can kind of follow this around the United States and see, you know, really similar patterns. And then the third thing that we can see around the United States is sometimes in places that are not necessarily, strictly speaking, rural, but kind of on the small town edge, the repurposing of already existing land from one kind of general social use, let us call it hospitals, to another, to prison. But in all cases, we are looking at the fact that what seems to be a relentless move of labor market opportunities away from rural areas, whatever their extractive

activity was, and into more and more urban areas or out of the U.S. altogether is part of what underlies the production of idle land, which, of course, our indigenous comrades would say, yeah, we'll give it back to us. We've been waiting a long time. Right. I guess the other thing I would throw in here is that whether the land is literally being surplused, and a lot of it is,

the other thing that's happening is that, as Ruth was saying, a lot of agriculture and a lot of other extractive industries become more and more mechanized. So it might be that coal is still being mined. It certainly is the case that cotton is still being grown and harvested. But it takes far fewer people to harvest a ton of a bale of cotton than it did 30 or 40 years ago. Which means those people are surplus. But it also means that the town in which they used to live, the towns in which they shopped, the petty bourgeois in those towns is desperate because there are fewer people coming to the restaurants. There are fewer people buying school clothes for their kids.

And that small town petty bourgeoisie becomes the core of let's bring a prison in yeah they're trying to recreate a set of customers and taxpayers so on the one hand the commercial people want more customers and um uh you know, Tom, you mentioned that the tax base is also suffering with fewer people in town. So they want taxes paid so that they can pave their roads or whatever it is the city needs to do. And it's an attempt to bring customers and taxpayers back into the county or back into the town that um that hypes these boosters up yeah i think that's a good point craig and i think it's no accident that the same year that they were really pushing to get this bill was the same year this report came out that the two major towns in our county had both experienced like massive uh just depopulation i think that

like letcher county went from something like around 30 000 people to like less than 20 000 people like from the last time of the last it wasn't the census but whenever the last time they really looked at the population and uh and and you're right and it's like all the same sort of you know local oligarchs and stuff in our case this guy don childers who's like the local oil magnate uh you know he wanted to put like another gas station up there where like the proposed prison site was and all this stuff and you see all these sorts of like cottage industries too springing off of like this what they perceive to be is going to be this like population boom based on like the one prison you know uh industry and all that kind of stuff and it's it's it's interesting and that's uh it's interesting that's universal

it wasn't just us but like you all experienced that in other places too and tax revenue is one of the ways they kind of got around the jobs when we were like no this actually isn't going to create any jobs they peddled this theory that the county would pass this occupational tax so that whoever did work even if they lived somewhere else whoever did work at the prison would have to pay taxes in our county and when we were trying to you know find solidarity in nearby counties that had gotten prisons and just learn from what they knew we found out even from local even from those uh politicians that brought them there were like yeah that was a mistake they won't even pay the occupational tax because the prison like the facility has to has to cooperate and they didn't even do that they wouldn't even do that the task of the like the municipal

planner is basically to keep revenue to make it stick you know where their constituency is and so they face a kind of crisis too when you know this one tax base starts to leave and you know it's interesting like in the scenarios and and answers we laid out, there's two kind of phenomena we identified, which is like surplus. And now you have these surpluses built up and crisis. One of the questions I had on the list was what is this relationship between surplus and crisis? Or maybe it would even make more sense to just identify what surplus is. I know that's probably a very long answer, but I don't know. I don't know if you guys want to talk about,

go down that route at all. I'm going to try to be really brief. So surplus. Surplus comes into being when some category of the productive economy isn't absorbed into the economy for the next round of production,

whatever the timeframe of that round is. So surplus land isn't absorbed in for whatever reason. Surplus labor, there's no absorption of people's ability to make, do, grow, move, and care for things in other people. Finance capital is the one that, as you know, I spent some time trying to figure out in Golden Gulag because the fact is all of these big ticket items, we talk about $444 million this and $330 million that. That's not like

cash out of the bottom drawer. It's somebody who's putting into a truck and driving a ledger or driving to Queens County. They're just found in their couch cushions. It's generally revenue that's created by selling bonds, by selling municipal bonds at the state or federal level to raise the money to do the thing. So then we ask ourselves, well, those people who would buy those bonds, which is to say people who would make a safe investment, because bonds are safe as against equity investments in a for-profit business. Why that rather than something else? And the answer is they don't really care. As long as they know when they clip their coupon, they're going to get their 2%. They don't care if that money goes to build a prison, a school, a dam, a highway.

They don't care. They care about the return, which gives us to the politics of finance capital. care about the return, which gives us to the politics of finance capital. Right. And the fact that capitalists who work in the finance realm are amoral and politically active, both. They're it's they really don't care even if they themselves, you know, write a check for, you know, some good thing, some good deed. They're amoral and politically active. So when there's a kind of a a combination of these surpluses in a particular place, and that place can be big, all of California can be small, the city of Corcoran, it could be Letcher County, it can be, you know, the EU. When this impossibility to absorb the surpluses comes into play, we've got a crisis, which is to say the society that this economy is part of and shapes cannot reproduce itself on the basis of already existing activities. So something new comes into being. Then something new could be a Keynesian,

Keynesian welfare state. Let's hand around a lot of money like they did, you know, in the immediate wake of the early days of the pandemic so that people can keep on getting what they need. early days of the pandemic so that people can keep on getting what they need or let me interrupt and and disagree okay i actually think societies can exist with significant surpluses the question is whether the surplus makes it impossible for the productive forces to continue reproducing themselves. But I think that between, let's say, 1980, roughly, and 2008, we had massively surplus populations being funneled into prisons and jails. The society was not in crisis. The productive forces were not in crisis. Families were in crisis.

Individuals were in crisis. But the political economic system was using those surpluses in ways that were not exactly productive, but they didn't keep the rest of the society from falling apart. So the question is, the relationship to me between surplus and crisis is, does the surplus produce a crisis such that things can't be reproduced or not? Or can society, I mean, you know, what's his name? Charles Murray famously said, you know how we should deal with poor black people? We should just build walls and keep them in their ghettos and not let them out. And that for him was like, we keep them from keeping the rest of society in crisis by just keeping them out of it

well i don't think you disagree with me you just gave some more specific examples all right of of the general phenomenon so we agree there can be major surpluses without a crisis. Right. Yeah, okay. Right, right. Well, and it does seem like, well, obviously, like, another surplus we haven't identified here. Like, you identify four in your book. And the fourth that we haven't identified is state capacity, which is this myth, you know, that, like, there is no government anymore. Like, you know, we've all defunded it and everything. We all know that's not true. The government, as you put it in the book, did not become leaner, but it did become meaner. Wow.

And so that is, you know, obviously like it has this sort of idled capacity from what, I don't know, what I think you identified in the book as a crisis moment in the late 60s, early 70s, when these surpluses weren't being able, they weren't able to be absorbed back up into the system. And so I don't know, I guess maybe what you're saying is that for a time, we were running things in such a way that we could reabsorb these surpluses, but maybe we are in another moment when they can't be, or at least I felt that way several times during the early pandemic. I don't know how I feel now.

It seems like in my community what's happening is that less people are going to prison and more people are either just going to jail or they are being surveilled in a way that they have no autonomy at all like it feels like and i've said this on the show i don't know if this is universal but it feels like in eastern kentucky and i wrote this article about this last year it feels like they have managed to find a way to, instead of move people to prisons, move the prisons to people in the sense that they now you don't have any control over your own life because now you have to go see a counselor and piss in a cup twice a week. And, you know, do all these things that may that, you know, you're technically free.

You're not in a prison cell. But at any moment you could be thrown back into a jail cell. And, you know, you like I said, you can't leave town or anything like that so it feels like and maybe that's kind of what the Susanville story was kind of getting at too like yes maybe prisons are closing and there are less prisoners but I guess we should be hesitant right of anything that says incarceration is declining because we know that there are still these surpluses and the state needs to be able to control and manage them or else they get revved or something you know what i mean like they get something like that's good that would wind up happening the pitchforks come out yeah no this is this is a really really great observation i don't know if you all know james kilgore's new book, Understanding Ecarceration, but you might want to talk with him. Fantastic. But it's one of the pieces of what you just pointed to, Terrence, so clearly about how various governmental levels are outsourcing prison and unfreedom to people's living rooms.

Yes. And outsourcing and people are paying. So people who are thus unfree are having the sort of dual drain of their time, which is the non-renewable resource, whether you're locked up or out, all you've got is the time you've got, and it never comes back, and or money, because the cost of that outsourcing falls on the household that's providing, you know, room and board and shelter, but also on the person in the ankle shackle who has to pay the cost of having the ankle shackle on their ankle, and so on and so forth. So as well as the cost of perhaps not being able to go to work if there's a job for them at all.

And thinking though, to go back to the general question of state capacity reminds me of something I've been thinking about a lot. sort of threw up at a variety of different scales and intensities, surpluses, that then in the 80s and 90s, people organized power blocks to congeal in a number of ways that included prisons. Those people, or at least the people who benefited from that congealing, including prison guards, cops, sheriffs, and so forth, are extremely well organized. And when there's a big shift in political economic activity at the city level, at the municipal level, county level, state or federal, they are first in line to say, we have a solution to the problem you are describing. Whatever that problem is, whether it's school shootings or a rise in crime or sexual harassment, I mean, whatever it is,

they're the ones who say, or mental illness, we have a solution. And if you give us the money, we will solve it. So there's not only the, you know, constant flow of dollars to the forces of organized violence to, you know, continually, quote unquote, reform themselves as though they're ever going to reform themselves out of killing George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or all of the people that they kill, but also they are ready, willing, and able to marshal the forces of fiscal and bureaucratic power of the state to make more of what they then can control. And I'll say that in a related way, many of the agencies that exist to create opportunities for health, education, and welfare have imitated the mission of organized violence to justify themselves. So notably, the United States Department of Education has a SWAT team,

but more low down, it's cops in schools, but also schools taking on a policing function, whether by force of order of the state of Texas or in other ways, that that movement has been so profound that today, again, I'm just going to repeat, we're fighting on a different terrain from the terrain we were fighting on even 20 years ago. There's a push in our statehouse now, and correct me if I'm wrong, Terrence or Tanya, but what they're trying to shoot for is every school, what do you call it? District. Or whatever school district can have their own police force.

So you go from having like a resource officer there that's there to break up fights or whatever to like yet another full-blown police agency that's under the banner of the school district. You know, it's you know it's fascinating i've talked a lot a bit a lot about this with our friend jack norton but in the eyes of a lot of these municipal planners you know so you're right uh ruthie like they go to the planners and they say well we have a solution to these crises and then the planners like the way they

work backwards from that is they say like okay well, you know, we may not always have civilians for civic infrastructure anymore, but we will always have prisoners. We will always have people in prison and jail so they can justify these municipal bonds and this public spending in a way that builds up their own local police forces and their own jails. And so I don't know. It's another example of how you see that kind of like, you know, relationship between surplus and crisis and how it is terrifying. Right. But it's also at the same time because it's crisis, as you've pointed out in the book, it reveals also these sort of rupture points, these points where intervention is possible. And you point out, like in your book, in the second to last chapter, you've profiled this organization, which was very fascinating, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, or Mothers Rock, you know,

and they, you know, basically started from a very basic premise, which was, you know, our children are being taken away from us. Where are they going? Why? You know, and this was in the early 90s. This was in the wake of the Rodney King, you know, the LA riots and everything. This was a long time ago, and things have changed a lot since then. But I think the overall premise is the same is that you start with crisis. You look for points of like rupture and intervention and you, and you work out from there. You know, without, I guess getting too deep into the weeds on you know,

that organization or our organization here in Letcher County, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, and this is the one of the last questions I have on here, like how do organizations like Mothers Rock or even Defund the Police, you know, or Black Lives Matter or like ours here in Letcher County, how do they build power? And maybe even a more general question is what even is power? Because you talk a lot about this in the book, and it's a very fascinating topic, in my opinion. Well, I stick with the old, I think, political science or sociology definition of power. Power

is the capacity to get somebody else to do something they wouldn't do on their own. And so that can be really icky, but it also could be really great. So the example I always give is Craig is my best friend. He has power over me. He can get me to be happy. I cannot do that on my own. So that's power also. So it doesn't necessarily come tinged with violence, even though it might come tinged with, you know, many tears over the 45 years we've been together, trying to like stay happy, but managed to do it. the opportunity to throw themselves into the kind of organizing that you've managed to do in Letcher County, people think power is a thing. It's over in the corner of the room. And if we can just make our way to the corner of the room, we will grab the thing and then we'll have power rather than we make it. We make it by defragmenting the various people who might line up with us against this thing, by explaining patiently in the registers that people are willing and excited to hear, however that might happen,

how the future as presented by the power block and oligarchs is not the only possible future. That doing this kind of work together, sometimes across really long distances, is how power is made. And it can dissipate really quickly, but it's actually made by people.

I guess the other thing I would say is that the mothers and others who were in Mother's Rock were not new. It was not new to them or their families that there would be state violence against children or young adults in the family. That was something that their families had multi-generational experience of. 90s was an escalation of that violence, state violence, in ways that made it both recognizable but particularly horrifying to those mothers. And, you know, some of their mothers and grandmothers would have been part of anti-lynching campaigns. Again, they were not the first people in their families to do organizing against this sort of violence. But what they saw was more and more of the people in their family were going to prison longer and longer. More were being beat up by the cops, more were being killed by the cops.

The capitalist, racial capitalist crisis in California, as you were saying, had fissures that went everywhere into society. The way those fissures showed up in black and brown households was that it was destroying the households. And it pushed the mothers, who might not individually have been particularly involved politically up to that point, to say, my job as a mother is not simply to be in the home. It's not simply to be in the place of worship. It's not simply to work with the educational system. I need to go to the police station. I need to go to the courthouse. I need to band together with other

mothers and figure out what we can do to get our kids back. And so the crisis produced not just an opportunity, but a necessity for these women. None of them saw this as an opportunity. They were like, I'm doing what I have to do. We're going to do what we have to do to get our kids. What do we need to do? And so that's a place in which I think they were open to anything. I mean, they were like, I mean, they were not going to many of them, for example, were Christians. They weren't going to give up God, I don't think, but I mean, you can say to them, we need to topple capitalism. And they go, what do we do? What's the next step? Like they were open,

like bringing their understanding that it wasn't just their family. It was all kinds of families like them. They understood that there was a systemic problem in the systematic change, even if they didn't have a particularly clear idea how the system worked, but they wanted to know that. I mean, one of the things that they said to Ruthie when Ruthie was starting to research her dissertation that became golden gulag was finish it. Like we need that, get it back, finish it. Like, we need that.

Get it back. Get it. Get it. Get it to us. So they were like her original commissioning editors, you might say, for that book. And, you know, I'll add that, you know, I didn't show up at Mother's Rock researching a dissertation. I went to graduate school after already working with Mother's Rock. And while I was part of the Rock, what we did to learn about what was going on from any angle that anybody could bring up was we would have these Saturday workshops. And somebody, very often me,

cause I was like the resident nerd, but not the only nerd was, you know, somebody would go off and, and find out about, so what is this three strikes or so what is the relationship between the youth authority and the adults authority? So what is, so what, so we had all kinds of people come and people would show up on Saturday at this Quaker meeting house that was a neutral place in South Central that was still beset really significantly with struggle between and among various street organizations to learn stuff. tell this story in the book, but it was really stunning to us when after a Mother's Rock meeting that happened out on the east side of LA in the city of Pomona, in de-industrialized downtown Pomona, already a story about surplus and crisis, a guy who was an attorney offered us his law library and said, you want to go and research this, whatever law it was,

go ahead. You can be in there all day. Nobody's going to throw you out. It's yours. So we go in, me, nerd, Craig, bookseller, best read person I know, two friends of ours with PhDs, which I didn't have then. We could not make head or tail. We didn't know how to crack the code. didn't have that, we could not make head or tail. Like we didn't know how to crack the code. We had no idea what we were doing. And we were willing, literate students of this. And we said, aha, the opacity of all of this is in self meaningful and undoing the opacity, lifting curtain after curtain, after curtain, after curtain to go back to the fragmentation problem is exactly what we all have to do. So one of the keys that I learn over and over and over again, we learn over and over and over again, is if when we're doing things, to quote Marion Kaba, it's things that are worthwhile doing are worthwhile doing,

only worthwhile doing with other people. That is true. It is also true that if you're part of this tiny, tiny cadre of people against something that everybody else thinks is necessary, natural, and inevitable, then the only way to organize is to organize with organized people. So the, you know, Mothers Rock developed in the context of another organization that was leaving one position and taking up a new presence in the community. And working with people in unions, like against the big guards union and all of the police and so on and so forth unions, had been really powerful for us because within unions, as you might well know, there's been a lot of struggle in the rank and file to democratize or re-democratize those formations. So to throw out

the old guard at the top, but also to use the power of organization to win things for the people. Faith community is the same kind of thing where it was relatively easy for us to persuade people kind of at the upper echelons of whatever, you know, name your whoever Methodist or African Methodist or this or that or Baptist, harder to get like on the ground in the various congregations that very often would ignore the message coming down from above saying criminalization is wrong, it's against God's will. So getting in there with organized people, with students and so forth, with nurses, using prayer. And one other example I want to give of people who self-organized

and really set an incredible model for us that we followed without even in some ways at the outset realizing we were following it and that was the mothers of east los angeles and they organized themselves in the early 80s when we weren't doing any work along these lines uh in east la to stop the state of california from building a prison in their neighborhood. And they were mostly housewives, working class Mexican American housewives. And they just got their hackles up because the Sacramento, the state government said, well, we know that some huge number of future prisoners are gonna come from communities like East LA.

So we're gonna put the prison there because that's who should bear the brunt of the prison. So to go back to the why rural, this is another reason. And the mom said, what the entire fuck? Why do you think that like our kids are going to prison? Like what, what is this? So they fought and it was really hard because they were in, you know, cishet households and their husbands were worried and some of them lived in public housing and they were afraid of, you know, being, you know, de-housed and so on and so forth. But they organized and organized and organized. They had a priest from a church that helped them organize from the Catholic church and eventually they won. But they weren't satisfied with that win because they still wanted to know why did they assume our kids were going to prison? And like racism is the answer, but that's not an answer you can like do anything with. It's like, well, what about racism?

So they got interested in why did so many of our kids miss so much school and fall behind in school? And the answer was asthma. And the asthma was produced by their proximity to diesel exhaust in the roadways of Los Angeles. So they became environmental justice advocates. So when we finally got urban and rural together and environmental justice advocates in urban and rural places together, we got one of the founders of the Mothers of East LA to come and keynote that because we just like had this art. We had unions, urban people, rural people. We had people speaking all these different languages.

I mean, we had Hmong, Japanese, Urdu, Spanish, English, and so forth. Like we, this is possible, but it's also necessary yeah well i like the image of multiple people sort of taking over a law library for a day and trying to piece together this you know long decades long process that had kind of gone you know gone down you know like you said the the sort of motion is fragmentation and trying to piece it all together. I was it's funny you say that, like I was explaining to my girlfriend the other day that like when I think of Golden Gulag, when I think of the book, like in the same way that when I think of capital, like Das Capital, like I think of like a diamond. And the reason why the reason why, like I say that about Golden Gulag is because you included the bibliography and it's like a good one fourth of the book. And so you really get to

see how much like just organic matter was, you know, condensed down into this understanding of, and it sounds like it was a collective understanding, a process of multiple people trying to figure out this thing at once. But, you know, you see how much information and data out there was sort of condensed down into this clear and concise explanation of, you know, why the world is or this aspect of the world is the way it is. And so, you know, in that way, that is also building power. You know, you are with other people trying to understand this very complicated process. And, you know, especially coming from us, like I said to you at the very beginning of the program, we are very indebted to that, to that very basic act of people just assembling in a room

and trying to piece together how this happened. And we wouldn't have been able to do what we did if that wouldn't have happened. And so it's this process of building off of things and making these linkages and connections that you don't even know that you're putting out into the world, and they build up like that and that that is an inspiring i think image to um uh to to sort of you know go forth with yeah we uh we made copies of the prison town scene for our library yeah that you all put together

back in the day we were like like, okay, we're just going to leave this everywhere. And then we built a whole workshop around it. Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah. Well, you know, and so I don't really have much else. I don't know Tom, Tanya, if you guys had anything you wanted to ask or if you guys wanted to talk.

I mean, you know, you have a footnote in there about Marx's theory of the falling rate of profit. And we could go on. We could riff on that for the next 30 minutes if you want. But you're also trying to get to London before, you know, decent hours. That'll be our next episode. That sounds good. We'll table that one. All right.

Let me let me offer this one. This will be my closing thought. I was taken with your comparison of Bolden, Gulag, and Kapital. And one thing that those two books have in common is that they come out of struggle. books have in common is that they come out of struggle. As inspiring as they might be as books for people who are not yet engaged in struggle, the people who wrote them wrote them coming out of particular political, economic, racial, and gender struggles as ways to provide tools for their comrades in those struggles, a clear understanding of what we're up against, a clear notion of what the road forward might be, what those obstacles

in the road might be, and how to get around them or over them or how to blow them up. And, you know, I have been simultaneously encouraged and discouraged at the explosion of literature about prisons, policing, and jails over the last 10 or 15 years. And a lot of the stuff that I read, you know, it's not bad writing, it's not bad scholarship, but I'm like, why did you write this? What question are you trying to answer with this book? And who on the ground who's trying to do something is asking that same question? That's not my point at all. But that I fear that people who are trying to educate themselves, I meet a lot of people who think they need to educate themselves a lot before they start fighting. And what we know about how the state works, what we know about how the police works, what we know about how prison works is 90% from fighting them.

And then coming up against the problem and then going back and reading to try to solve the problem that we encountered in the struggle on the ground. And I think people need to think, people need to embrace that they don't need to know everything before they start fighting. And in fact, if they don't start fighting, they're not going to learn the right things in the first place. So that's going to be my parting remark. And I think, you know, the sort of people you guys have on the show, I would hold up as other exemplars of that style of practice and theory. And in the interest of world peace, I'm in agreement with you. and in the interest of world peace i'm in agreement with you in the interest of a nice flight across the pond well i i couldn't uh i couldn't agree more um

tanya tanya has talked a lot about how like you know we've studied the world quite a bit we know quite a bit about it but like what good is that going to do you to just know about the world you know and exactly it's like mark said the point is to change it and as you pointed out like golden gulag is a perfect example of a um of a document of literature that was written both from struggle and with that in mind to continue the struggle. And so it's a challenge to not just us, but also to, you know, anybody that is trying to understand the world, like exactly as you said, Craig, like what, what is the question we're trying to answer here and what are we trying to do? Um, so, you know, um, we thank you both for coming on. Like I said, been a long time in the making,

but it definitely lived up to expectations. We can love to have a round two. We'll be like the New York Times reporter who you're waiting to get an email from. We'll make good on it. We'll make good on it, for sure. All right. I'd be happy to do round two. And I never say that if I don't mean it.

Thank you so much. Great. This is really special. This was great. Thank you. This was great. And I really hope not only that we can do another round, but in real life, I hope. Yes.

Thank you. Be safe. Be careful. Bye. Thank you.