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Since 2014, the non-governmental organization Amnesty International has constantly criticized the management of detainees linked to the “fight against terrorism” in the North and Far-North regions of Cameroon. Adding to other local political and social issues (the “Anglophone crisis,” the arrest of public figures accused of embezzlement of public funds, reforms of the penal code and criminal procedure code), this new media coverage of places of detention revived the tentative debate on penalty and confinement in this country with a high rate of imprisonment (115 people per 100,000 inhabitants). In this article, we take the penitentiary reform as an entry point to discuss the issue of prison. A focus on the reform makes it possible to shed light on the dynamics of confinement in Cameroon since the 1990s. We do so by analyzing, on the one hand, the practices and discourses of the actors of the reform (development agencies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, states) and, on the other hand, those who experience the prison as much as they reproduce it day after day (guards, directors, detainees, and their relatives).