The U.S. prison population is now more than 2 million, an unprecedented size, but attention to and concern with the social order inside U.S. prisons has declined. Fundamental weaknesses in prison sociology are evident in increasingly ungovernable prisons. Discussion of the “society of captives” in the era of hyper-incarceration raises two questions of priority interest. First, how has inmate society changed under conditions where prison populations have experienced extraordinary growth and prison management has undergone wholesale rearrangement of mission and ideology? Second, how has the status of inmate society or community as an object of power and knowledge changed? The article notes that inmate society, represented centrally in the discourses of both prison sociology and prison literature, seems to be disappearing from public view. There are certain features of contemporary penology that suggest a valorization of popular knowledge, but there is also a significant dependence on new kinds of expertise including risk prediction, accounting and systems engineering. It is important to reconstitute sources of knowledge that can make prison social order more visible to a public whose infatuation with incarceration depends on deep ignorance as to its fundamental effects. Notes, references