Between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, the population of California’s prisons and jails grew by a staggering 500 percent. In her 2007 book, Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore showed that California’s mass incarceration was a not a response to violence, a drug epidemic, or even the crime rate: rather, it was a political-economic strategy that came out of a series of economic crises, which left behind a surplus of unused labor, land, capital, and state capacity. This surplus went into what one state report described as “the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.”

With this definitive Marxist analysis, Gilmore established herself as a leading abolitionist critic of the prison-industrial complex. Earlier this year, she released Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, an essay collection featuring an introduction from two other groundbreaking radical scholars: Alberto Toscano and Brenna Bhandar. A codirector of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London, Toscano is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea and coeditor of The SAGE Handbook of Marxism. Bhandar is a law professor at the University of British Columbia, the author of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership, and a coeditor of Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought.

Daniel Denvir recently interviewed Gilmore, Toscano, and Bhandar for The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Radio. In their conversation, which has been edited for clarity, these thinkers take on the many urgent questions that face the Left as we attempt to understand and confront mass incarceration: Where do the prison-industrial complex’s boundaries lie? Is the neoliberal state suffering from a legitimacy crisis? And what is the relationship between abolitionist organizing in the United States and global struggles against capitalism, racism, and colonialism?