The EU has become an increasingly important penal actor, fostering a common approach to transnational forms of criminality, as well as seeking to develop mutual trust and judicial cooperationcooperation between EU member states in order to deal with a wider range of crimes. We argue in this chapter that the ECtHR’s case law is, on the one hand, relayed and supported by the EU institutions and this contributes to its dissemination and its effectiveness and, on the other hand, contradicted by the punitive aspect of some European legal framework. While the cooperation between the Council of Europe and the EU (through the funding of joint programs) could increase the intensity of the inverted panopticon and the enforcement of the ECtHR rulings, the European legal framework can also contribute to harden penal and detention policies. In the first section, we argue that the reinforced EU and CoE cooperation fosters human rights in prison (I). In the second section, we analyse the way the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union on detention aligns with the ECtHR jurisprudence and reinforces the impacts of the latter and the inverted panopticon (II). We expand in the third section on the conflicts between CoE human rights and EU policies that are more turned towards penal cooperation, deterrence and punishment (III). In the last section, we focus on the impacts of EU policies on national policies by assuming a shift from human rights to citizens’ rights and the departure from the ECtHR case law (IV).