Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a prison abolitionist and prison scholar. She is the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has been credited with "more or less single-handedly" inventing carceral geography, the "study of the interrelationships across space, institutions and political economy that shape and define modern incarceration". She received the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Geographers.

The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.