After analyzing the characteristics of prison institutions and the traditional role of the law in such a totalitarian legal order, the author attempts to identify the social factors and movements which, since the end of the 1970s, have contributed to the emergence as norms of fundamental rights for prisoners. She posits that recent developments have resulted from the prisoners' rights movement battling before the courts. As the courts developed criteria to judge the legality of practices or decision-making processes, Canadian legislators, in the course of the 1980s, gradually integrated these jurisprudential requirements. Judicial intervention in Canadian prison law has had a significant impact on the development of new norms of prison justice, establishing prisoners' fundamental rights and the duty to treat prisoners fairly.