The article provides a way of thinking that brings the sociology of the prison into a more theoretically comprehensive account of strategies of domination and transformation, without falling victim to limited understanding of how imprisonment is experienced in time and place. It describes the literature associated with “translation” and “governmentality” to indicate the key elements that enable analysis of how power operates. It also identifies the diverse forces, techniques and nationalities that comprise penal systems. The discourses containing those data are presented in relation to the dominant alignments in an English prison from 1965 to 1990, the construction of gendered conduct and contemporary strategies of exclusion in the West to illustrate some elements in a move towards a social theory of imprisonment. The point of the article is to advance a conceptual vocabulary that can connect the diversity of interactions within prisons to strategies of domination. Figure, notes, references