Starting from the Belgian criminal justice system, we propose to examine six important transformations: defining the penal sanction is more difficult than ever (1) and sanctions and measures are increasingly diverse (2), a feature which also leads to an increasing diversity of the penal aims (3). At the procedural level, trends in (de)judicialisation and juridicalisation (4), combined with the diversification of the sanctions, favours the contractualisation (5) and the privatisation (6) of the penal intervention.