This study discusses the ambivalence that often characterizes perspectives on justice: justice is always sought and seen as indispensable. From the prisoners’ perspective, however, it is also a subject of maneuvering, deal-making, and even neglect. For this paper, in-depth interviews were conducted inside two Tunisian prisons—a men’s prison (al-Marnaqaia) and a women’s prison (Mannouba)—between June and September 2012. As part of an anthropological and sociological approach to justice that takes multiple variables into account, this study is capable of relativizing the concept of justice, and revealing its hierarchies in accordance with the circumstances, contexts, and power balances that frame the social relationships in question, in addition to cultural and social specificities that also affect the notion of justice. The study argues that justice is simultaneously desired and condemned, an ambiguity that is reflected in the various stances toward justice—as seen by prisoners, law makers, society—and discusses these three stances at length. Justice as a value is sought and, as an institution, condemned. By doing so, prisoners are fundamentally arguing in their deep consciousness against a social system that has constantly marginalized them. At heart, the prisoners’ problem is not with the concept of justice, but with a social situation that has excluded them, leading them to a confrontation with a justice system that did not understand them. A detained person awaiting trial is attempting to maneuver against “formal justice” and seek ways to skirt it from within. The convicted prisoner, however, tends to surrender himself to “justice”. Moderating justice with fairness is the main demand of prisoners; as there is a process of mutual accusation between justice and the prisoner. While the system sees the prisoner as a “natural born criminal,” the prisoner sees the system’s justice as unfair by its very nature, and crime as a shared responsibility between parties: circumstances that paved the way for criminality—a judge who passed his ruling, an accident that led to the imprisonment of a marginalized member of society, and so on. Thusly, the prisoner distances themself from the label of criminal, presenting him/herself as a victim of justice and society. Similarly, society, which punishes the prisoner through sequestration and the isolation of the prison from the city, avoids seeing its own failures and incapacity to assimilate its weakest members. As such, the problem appears, at least on a certain one level, to be one of communication between the prisoner and the system of justice.