What are the real reasons for this nation's unprecedented (in world history) boom in incarceration? Is the prison a tool to fight crime, or does it serve an entirely different purpose? And what about the notion of a prison-industrial complex: does that have any relation to reality? Loïc Wacquant analyzes the rise of the penal state in the context of sustained assaults on welfare and the collapse of the Black ghetto. (Encore presentation.)