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.”

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 reproduc- tion 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).

[...] 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 per- sons 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.

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 subsidizer. 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, unques- tioned legitimacy? 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 twenti- eth century (cf. Bartov 1996; Guérin 1994).3

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 to agribusiness” (Pisani 1984) by mixing private capital with social and political power. State intervention was crucial to guar- antee 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).

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 inter- stices 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 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.

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 po- litical 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 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?