The present volume—focused on studies that aim to account the prison phenomenon from a local, critical and human rights perspective—reviews various problematics based on different perspectives. From the political-criminals, linked to a reform of criminal law and punitive populism; the economic structural ones, linked to the relations between labor market and prison; the institutional ones, that investigate on the forms of penitentiary governance; even those with subaltern and gender approaches, particularize in the representations of the social order of the punished women. Finally, from a proactive dimension, we also go from the past to the present, in the design of political strategies to reduce the damage that penitenciary practices introduce in our societies.