This contribution considers colonial prisons as an entrée into scholarly and public conversations about incarceration, racial profiling, discriminatory policing, and abolition, that contest the idea that prisons produce social stability. It focuses on the relations between policing and carceral practices in Tunisia under French colonial rule with those in France itself as an example of the interrelationship between colonialism and modernity in Europe and North Africa. Until the mid-nineteenth century, imprisonment in Tunisia had been a temporary measure while awaiting trial or the payment of a debt but was not a punishment itself. Local officials began to exercise greater authority over incarceration in the 1860s and 1870s as part of broader processes of legal reform and codification. French occupation and legal restructuring not only built upon these initiatives but became entangled with efforts to assert suzerainty over other European settlers and the criminalization of political dissent. The occupation and colonization of Tunisia coincided with an era of parliamentary rule in the metropole where the rights of French citizens were defined in opposition to foreigners while resting upon the denial of rights in the colonies. By the 1920s, not only had French officials established a regime of surveillance over nationalist political activism in Tunisia, but the Paris police adopted colonialist logics of racial difference in the formation of separate police forces targeting the North African community in Paris as inherently criminal. How did racial hierarchies of the colonial order and racialized strategies of policing, arrests, and detentions, inform contemporary methods of policing in France?