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One of the characteristic features of the new prisons for 13- to 18-year-olds ( Établissements pénitentiaires pour mineurs–EPMs) is the requirement made of prison guards and educators from the Judicial Youth Protection Service (Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse–PJJ) to work in tandem in the residential units. Firstly, this article describes how educators, immersed in an a priori hostile environment, have to, in practice, draw on different moral perspectives, both educational and penological, to justify their presence in detention. On the prison administration side, this enforced closeness with educators risks further restricting prison guards to a purely guarding role, to no more than “key holders.” Thus, they need to impose the idea that educational work is not the strict preserve of their colleagues from the PJJ, even though, mutatis mutandis, it is the latter who are the “true educators.” Secondly, the article details the jurisdictional dispute over education that this gives rise to. Thirdly, a description of the system of sanctions specific to the EPMs throws light on the dominance of security rationales in detention. On one side, while prison guards can draw attention to the educational aspect of punishment, this is a prerequisite for retaining the privilege of defining what is, or is not, possible in detention, notably while preventing the emergence of any innovative or alternative forms of dispute resolution. On the other, educators are caught between a rationale of withdrawal, which at best consists of denouncing the way the system of sanctions is, by its very nature, anti-educative, and a rationale of educational reinvestment, consisting of claiming that respect for prison order, as arbitrary as it may be, is an indispensable step in the responsibilization of a prisoner, re-updating the disciplinary mission of the penal institution.