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With 41 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017, prison may seem like a small part of Burkina Faso’s security policy. But the lives of the bakoroman – young men at odds with the law, living on the streets of the capital city – remind us that, for some segments of the population, prison is a routine prospect. This is a specific population, but one that is emblematic of the issue. Studying these young men allows us to pursue the hypothesis that there exists a carceral continuum, where ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are constructed in relation to each other, forming an autonomous social world, but one that is not supported by the imaginary of a rewarding delinquent counterculture. After a short introduction to the world of the bakoro, this article explores the norms that regulate the bakoroman’s trajectories in the courts, within the prison walls, and after their release, as well as their room for manoeuvre. Instead of leading these career criminals away from their lives of crime, this study shows that their experiences tie them ever more closely to law-breaking. In Burkina Faso, as elsewhere, it is not through the individualisation of sentences or the panoptic surveillance described by Foucault that prison encourages repentance. Rather, prison succeeds in discouraging crime by exhausting the logic of social disaffiliation and the negotiation of violence within delinquent spaces, either by confining offenders to the repetition of crimes and jail time, or by forcing them into unconditional surrender.