In this book, the question of how far the prison system can be changed and whether the present system is an unavoidable model is posed. Awareness of the problems among decision-makers does not seem to have improved despite the most critical observations and radical denunciations of the existing prison system. Neither have the principles on which prisons are based been modified. Have prisons become an invariant of modern societies, impervious to politics and which themselves impose a repressive and disciplinary regime? Somewhere between a state of crisis and an obsessive desire for reform is it perhaps possible to identify models for change? In order to answer these questions and others, this book offers original thought on penitentiary policies in very different contexts and societies, all of which have one thing in common: they are caught up in telling and defining moments in our modern world - the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of apartheid, etc. In response to these complex situations, current penitentiary policies reveal two radically different examples of prisons today: i.e. the special prison, - a detention camp, Guantanamo Bay – and the experimental prison.