Since the 1980s, there has been a partly massive increase in the number of prisoners, a tightening of criminal law, and a harsher crackdown by the police in all liberal democracies. A new desire to punish is spreading, as Didier Fassin demonstrates in his provocative book. Fassin explores three central questions: What is punishment? How do we punish? And whom do we punish? Through numerous case studies, he compares the actual practice of punishment with classical theories of the liberal rule of law and draws on ethnological research from other cultures of punishment. It becomes clear that real punitive practices deviate significantly from liberal ideals. They reveal a highly unjust and racist repression apparatus that constitutes the dark side of neoliberal globalization.