Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer and prison abolitionist and a co-founder of Critical Resistance. Her work frames abolition not simply as removing prisons and police but as building the social conditions — housing, healthcare, education, meaningful work — that make them unnecessary; abolition as presence and construction, not only absence.
She analyses the prison-industrial complex through racial capitalism, and describes the state’s response to crisis as the “organised abandonment” of communities deemed surplus. Her phrase “where life is precious, life is precious” captures the ethic behind it. Key works: Golden Gulag (2007) and Abolition Geography (2022).