The United States is home to five percent of the world's population but nearly twenty-five percent of the world's prisoners, including a disproportionate number of African Americans and Latinos. "Mass Incarceration" has been enormously profitable for corporations despite generating large public deficits and social crises in communities of color. It has also provoked public and scholarly debates about the history, ethics, and function of incarceration in modern societies. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary approach to politics, race, state-formation, capitalism, and empire, this course explores the origins of the U.S. carceral state and considers it alongside other twentieth-century carceral states in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.