Citation
Mr. President, I have the honor of presenting Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, professor, scholar and author; a pioneer in the area of carceral geography, and a forceful activist in the prison abolition movement.
Dr. Gilmore, in your teaching and writings, especially in your foundational book, “Golden Gulag,” you challenge us to consider the existing policies, practices, institutions, and networks that undergird what has been termed the United States’ “prison-industrial complex.” You make the case, provocatively and precisely, that reforming our mode of criminal punishment requires not just the closing of prisons, but also the cultivation of vital systems of social, educational, and economic support to resolve the expansive inequalities that breed a culture of mass incarceration, one that disproportionately affects black and brown communities. You insist that seeking retribution is a far less powerful deterrent than supplying opportunity, and that making prisons obsolete should be our collective and ultimate aim. As you have argued, people internalize how life is valued in the society in which they live: If we want every life to be treated as precious, we must treat every life as precious.
Dr. Gilmore, your work in abolition geography and the analysis of racial capitalism has been ground-up; it has been bold; and it has often put you at odds with entrenched institutions and prevailing schools of thought. As a theorist, researcher, and organizer, you have shown us how generations of racial, gender and environmental injustice; class war, militarism, and interpersonal violence have rooted us in systems that cry out to be dissolved and reconstituted. You have plainly noted, “Abolition requires that we change one thing: Everything.”
Through your books and lectures, and as a professor and director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center, you have identified the hard work ahead of us if we are to reimagine a society where there are no bars on the doors. A society where, as you have said, we “think not only about the enormity of the problem, but the enormity of the possibilities.”
Mr. President, on behalf of the trustees, faculty, students, and staff at Clark University, it gives me great pleasure to request that the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, be conferred upon Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore.