Among the more profound cases that Gilmore makes is that the it is not just for-profit prisons and policing. Racialized exclusion of Black people from the economy has essentially created a captive class -- a pool of bodies for exploitation. Essentially the industry of incarceration at the state (that is both State and Federal level) create sources of income -- for the States, the companies that supply resources to prisons, as well as the private prisons.
Further, Gilmore [2] makes the argument that we need to do away with the presumption that there are people who are "deserving" of prison. Is the very notion of prison consistent with a civilized society?
Just a further note that the incarceration rate of Black men in the U.S. [5] is comparable to that of Uyghur population in Xianjiang [6] -- that rate was estimated to be 5% for Black men across the U.S. in 2009, 5% for Uyghurs in non-Muslim majority districts, roughly 10% in majority-Muslim districts. It would be interesting to understand how the adoption of capitalist economic practices in China correlates with the rise of the carceral.
[1] Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag
[2] Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence. In Futures of Black Radicalism, G. T.. Johnson and A. Loubin (Eds.). New York: Verso, 225–240.
[3] Are Prisons Obsolete? https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/213837/are-prisons-...
[4] If They Come in the Morning … Voices of Resistance, Edited by Angela Y. Davis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_They_Come_in_the_Morning
[5] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-just...
[6] https://qz.com/1599393/how-researchers-estimate-1-million-uy...