Mark Hamm would like to write a new chapter in the genealogy of terrorism. His ambition is to forge a link between thinking in criminology and the imminent threat of terrorism in Western prisons. He seeks a new mode of subjection to counter prisoner’s use of ‘criminal cunning, collective resistance, and nihilism to incite terrorism against Western targets’. Hamm’s ‘alternative criminology’ enlists mainstream social science in the service of fighting the war on terror (WOT). He couples this ‘biopolitical’ project with a ‘progressive’ critical intention to reform penology and the prison.