This book deals with the emergence of prison management in Brazil, understanding it as an effect of forces between different orders of the penitentiary apparatus, in which the Justice and Security bundles are highlighted, based on disputes and accommodations between actors, institutions and perspectives that, within each order or in their external interactions, configure the dynamics of the Brazilian Penitentiary Administration, within which a penitentiary bureaucracy is produced, specialized in mediating the conflicts and the approximations between the orders. In recent times, these mediations also suffer the influence of a third line of force, represented by the criminal groups originating inside prisons. Traveling thousands of kilometers through prisons, suburbs, government palaces and courtroom hallways, the study describes the constant updating of the brazilian penitentiary apparatus, which operates with the goal of ensuring it's reproduction by different strategies of accomodation of Law resulting from the preponderance of Security in the correlation of forces, which manifests in the composition, the functioning, the characterization and the processes of professional formation of the penitentiarist bureaucracy, comprehended as a diffuse and fragmented body that, far from characterizing a rationalization of the prison system, manifests itself, above all, as a government mentality.