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To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied

ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. I can't count the number of conversations

I've had on and off just in the last year alone, in which she was invoked as a mentor and

teacher on thought and action and humanity to a new generation of social creativity.

People like Dream Hampton and Darnell Moore and Adrian Marie Brown.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore created the field and the language of carceral geography.

This is a frame to see and map and connect all of the dynamics, spatial to spiritual,

that make my country the United States one of the most punitive in the world.

We can measure this simply by the size of our prison populations.

Yet when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of abolition, a radical vision of a world without prisons,

and another word she's helped popularize. She is working with a long, long view towards making

a whole world starting now in which prisons and policing, as we do them now, become unnecessary,

unthinkable. In this sense, abolition is not primarily a matter of what to get rid of,

but what to build and to orient around, being present, for example, to human vulnerability

and to the ingredients that make for deep human flourishing. The language of abolition,

the matters of policing and prisons are fraught and polarizing at the public level.

But meeting Ruth Wilson Gilmore and drawing out her vision is an exercise in muscular hope,

and in understanding the passion of a new generation that is shaping what we will collectively

become. I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

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