The author believes the recent upsurge in black incarceration in the United States results from the crisis of the ghetto as a device for social control and the related need for a substitute mechanism to contain lower class black Americans. In the post-Civil Rights era, the vestiges of the dark ghetto and the expanding prison system have become linked by relationships among functional equivalency, structural homology, and cultural fusion. These relationships have generated a continuum that tends to entrap a population of young black men rejected by the deregulated wage-labor market. In addition, these relationships have been solidified by changes that have reshaped the urban "black belt" so as to make the ghetto more like a prison and that have undermined the inmate society residing in U.S. penitentiaries in ways that make the prison more like a ghetto. The resulting symbiosis between ghetto and prison perpetuates the socioeconomic marginality of blacks due to the replacement of the social-welfare treatment of poverty by penal management. 123 references, 42 notes, 2 tables, and 1 figure