This essay offers a schematic reflection on the institutional formation and political location of Asian-American Studies in relation to the rise of the United Sates prison industrial complex over the last three decades. The author is generally concerned with the peculiar location of "Asian-Americans" as fabricated cultural figures within a U.S. social and racial formation that is increasingly constituted by various discursive and institutional technologies of criminalization and punishment. More specifically, the author is interested in a critical assessment of the problematics--that is, the schematic sets of assumptions that frame and discipline processes of critical inquiry and intellectual formulation--through which Asian-American Studies has come to (re)narrate and cohere itself in the context of a post-civil rights, and allegedly "multicultural," civil society. In this article, the author writes an initial attempt at a counter-narration of the relationship between three contemporaneous--and in his view, overlapping and mutually constitutive--institutional formations: Asian-American Studies, Asian-American civil society, and the U.S. prison industrial complex. This essay ends with a set of questions, with the intent of: (1) gesturing toward a productive disarticulation of what the author perceives as a peculiar theoretical and political stasis within the field of Asian American Studies; and (2) articulating a political desire for a critical intellectual project structured by this historically specific, and ongoing, confrontation with the state of emergency that is the prison industrial complex. (Contains 37 notes.)