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This article focuses on the supervision of persons who have been previously found to be unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible on account of a mental disorder. In Quebec, since 1992, this supervision has been carried out by an administrative tribunal whose verdicts, based on an assessment of the risks to public safety, can lead to the release of the persons or to their detention in hospital. Based on an ethnographic study, we describe the Commission as a control (and self-control) device, in which the middle path of conditional release plays a pivotal role. The practices of the defense lawyers, marked by the prevalence of a paternalistic posture, then testify to the force of a device likely to impose its own logic on even its most opposing actors.