This course explores ethnographies and other qualitative accounts of prisons, jails, detention centres as well as other forms of state control and surveillance such as asylums, parole, probation and electronic monitoring. It examines the transnational history of these institutions. What has been the role of the prison in settler colonialism and in upholding a racial order throughout the hemisphere? It will centre to the voice of incarcerated and their strategies to challenge the criminal justice system.