This chapter provides an analysis of the relationship between the academy and U.S. imperialism, which benefits from an examination of new regimes of mass incarceration and their imbrication within the fabric of institutions of higher education. It argues that a symbiotic relationship developed between the academy and the “prison-industrial complex”—a conglomeration of state surveillance and punishment machinery—and corporate profit making. This has emerged as a response to the rising numbers of “refugees” displaced by and troubling to global economic and political elites. The chapter also identifies four ways that carceral dependency ties the university to the political economy of prisons. Additionally, it explores what it would mean to work toward the abolition of the academic-military-prison-industrial complex.