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Prison overcrowding, resulting from specific policy choices, remains at the intersection of different decision-making powers: judges, sentence enforcement workers, and prison government services. While they all have to manage the position of inmates in and out of prison, their logics can be extremely divergent. However, they work together on the same situations and help to regulate “flow” and “stock” of inmates. Starting from an analysis of the way this different authorities deals with prison population (the examples are mainly Belgian), this article identifies their normative references and their diverse logics which, precisely, partly explain the difficulty in curbing prison overcrowding in many Western countries.