This book was published on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Ghent jailhouse "Nieuwewandeling". Chapter 1 describes the criminal justice system and the old jails of Ghent in the early modern period and the 19th century. Chapter two concentrates on the new ideas on criminal justice in the 19th century, and their influence on prison architecture. Chapters 3 and 5 deal with daily prison life before and after the second world war. The use of the Ghent prison during the German occupation and the special circumstances of the repression are described in chapter 4. Chapter 6 is a purely photographic view on contemporary detention in Ghent. The book closes with a commented bibliography, pointing, for each of the chapters, at the most important published studies and archival material