The Case for Prison Abolition: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on COVID-19, Racial Capitalism & Decarceration

The spread of COVID-19 threatens the lives of more than 2.3 million people locked up in prisons and jails throughout the United States. We look at how the call to release prisoners during the coronavirus pandemic makes the case for prison abolition, with scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance and the author of Golden Gulag: Prison, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California." Her forthcoming book is Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition."