LEWISTON – Give Ruth Wilson Gilmore the power to do so, and she’d shutter the country’s prisons.

Instead of building newer, bigger cages to house ever-worsening criminals, Gilmore, a social activist and college professor, instead would increase funding for affordable housing, education, job training, new industry and social services – money that she said was siphoned off to pay for prison construction.

Doing hard time only hardens convicts instead of rehabilitating them, she said, adding that it’s time to shift from punishing criminals to preventing the social ills that create them.

“Prisons are bad for everybody because incarceration doesn’t work,” Gilmore told 35 people at Bates College on Thursday.

“Politically, socially, culturally, prisons destroy places and people,” she said. “They are urban machines for human destruction, and neither political party has demonstrated the will to fix the mess they cooperated to create.”

Speaking as a guest of the Bertha May Bell Andrews lecture series on ethics, Gilmore addressed more than 35 students and community members during a 90-minute talk and question-and-answer session Thursday at Bates College. A Connecticut native, Gilmore is a third-generation civil disobedient, a professor of geography at University of Southern California, and an advocate for drastic reform within America’s criminal justice system.

Instead of “using cages to solve political, social and economic problems,” she said, society should be working harder to eliminate the causes of crime, as well as providing more resources to those recently released from jail to improve the odds that they’ll stay out.

“People emerge from incarceration to a perpetuating cycle that makes it very hard to remain out of prison,” she said. “The majority of people are sent back to prison on technical parole violations rather than for the commission of new crimes.”

With more than 258,000 people in cells, California leads the country in prison population per capita. Some of its prisons are bigger in size and population than many entire Maine towns. Many of the inmates are from southern California, and were funneled there one way or another by circumstance after the region’s blue-collar jobs began to be shipped elsewhere in the early 1980s.

The labor market’s collapse started with closure of car factories and steel mills. Soon after, the state started what Gilmore describes as its decline into a “prison-industrial complex.” It’s a variation of the phrase coined by former President Dwight Eisenhower to describe exponential growth of defense industry spending after World War II.

California built 23 prisons in as many years. Gilmore likened burgeoning prison construction across the country to the military’s now self-sustaining economy.

Many of California’s prisons were built on the outskirts of small towns, on what had been farm land, with the intention that local economies would benefit from their presence. But Gilmore said that hasn’t happened. Instead, communities that host prisons are suffering, she said. The town of Corcoran has two prison facilities.

“There are 8,800 in the free world and 11,000 inside,” Gilmore said. “More than $1 billion has been invested in operating and capital costs, and there are more people living in poverty now than when the prisons opened.”