Now more than ever, the phrases “prison industrial complex,” “mass incarceration,” “carceral state” and “abolition” are deployed frequently - evidence of heightened concern about the use of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as catch-all responses to social, political and economic problems. While encouraging, there is also a danger that in “mass awareness,” analytic specificity may be lost. With an emphasis on ethnographic and anthropological contributions, this course will draw from a range of critical scholarship to examine the numerous processes, institutions, and techniques through which people are criminalized, caged, and controlled. In doing so, the course provides an opportunity to “deep dive” into distinct (and sometimes competing) explanatory frameworks on nature, purpose, and logic that uphold and expand the U.S. carceral regime, as well as its human impacts. Throughout, we will forefront the ways people have resisted and are resisting and consider the political stakes of different ways of understanding, explaining, and addressing the problem.