How did California go about “the largest prison building program in the history of the world” (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991: i)? We have already seen that California’s political economy changed significantly in the 1970s, due both to changes in the location of industrial investment—capital movement—and to “natural” disasters. Those changes, and responses to them, provided the foundation upon which new rounds of capital movement and new natural disasters were played out. These shifts produced surpluses of finance capital, land, labor, and state capacity, not all of which were politically, economically, socially, or regionally absorbed. The new California prison system of the 1980s and 1990s was constructed deliberately—but not conspiratorially—of surpluses that were not put back to work in other ways. Make no mistake: prison building was and is not the inevitable outcome of these surpluses. It did, however, put certain state capacities into motion, make use of a lot of idle land, get capital invested via public debt, and take more than 160,000 low-wage workers off the streets.

In less than a decade, the amount of state debt for the prison construction project expanded from $763 million to $4.9 billion dollars, a proportional increase of from 3.8 percent to 16.6 percent of the state’s total debt for all purposes (SPWB 1985, 1993). During the same period, state debt service (annual expenditure for principal plus interest) increased from 1 percent to 2.8 percent of per capita income (California State Controller 1996: 161).

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