Foreigners in the prison populations of the European Union in 1997 ranged from a low of 8 percent (estimated) in England to a high of 39 percent in Greece. To the foreigners and quasi-foreigners held in jails and prisons must be added the thousands of immigrants held in “waiting areas” and “detention centers” that have proliferated in the past decade throughout the European Union. Police, judicial, and penal practices throughout Europe converge at least in that they are applied with special diligence and severity to persons of non-European phenotype, who are easily spotted and made to bend to the police and the judiciary, to the point that one may speak of a veritable process of criminalization of immigrants. Its main impact is to push its target populations deeper into secrecy and illegality and to encourage the durable structuring of specific networks of sociability and mutual help as well as of a parallel economy that escapes all state regulation, a result that is evidently well suited to justify in return the special attention given to these groups by the police services. The European Union to a degree conforms to the American policy of criminalization of poverty as a complement to the generalization of wage instability and social insecurity. Like the incarceration fate of blacks in America, it gives a prescient indication of the type of society and state that Europe is in the process of building. Table, notes, references