The TSANTSA special issue 25/2020 Penal Institutions and Their Hybridizations 'in Action' discusses the relationship between the penal state and the welfare state, between punishment, rehabilitation, and risk management, and between prison and non-custodial sentences. The contributions examine how these seemingly distinct areas empirically come together to constitute a “sociopenal continuum”. The contributions examine three forms of hybridization. The first form is apparent when two institutions pursuing distinct missions are called upon to collaborate in order to deal with the same public; the second emerges when two paradigms for intervention compete with each other within the same institutional framework; and the third can be observed in the trajectories of the publics of criminal justice institutions, marked by a diverse range of measures for intervention (whether social, judicial, or therapeutic).