A 2001 article from The New York Times about economic revitalization in rural America said that building prisons was more effective than building Walmarts or meatpacking plants in stimulating economic growth. As the abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes in her book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, prisons were purposefully constructed in rural California throughout the 1990s with an economic agenda. The rural prison industry was fueled by policy makers trying to alleviate the economic crisis, because even as crime rates declined
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