One of the great human-rights challenges in recent prison policyprison policies is the deleterious effect on prisoners’ rights of prison overcrowdingprison overcrowding in many CoE member states. Both the CPTEuropean Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) and the ECtHREuropean Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have held that, in certain circumstances, prison overcrowdingprison overcrowding can be categorized as inhumane and degrading treatmentinhumane and degrading treatment, in breach of the ECHREuropean Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In addition, prison overcrowdingprison overcrowding generates poor conditions of detentiondetention that hinder the rights of prisoners to legal assistance and to rehabilitation. The mechanisms that cause increases in prisonprison populations are well known: an increased inflow of prisoners from the courts, increasingly long sentenceslong sentences and restricted opportunities for parole. By issuing pilot judgments (see Chapter 1) and other judgments requiring a monitoring of their execution (through submission of action plans by the member states concerned detailing remedial actions to the Committee of Ministers (of the Council of Europe) of the Council of Europe), the ECtHR has attempted to tackle the structural and systemic issues encountered in certain member states particularly affected by massive prison overcrowding by ordering them to implement alternatives to detention (e.g. electronic tagging, probation, etc.), reduced penalties (e.g. for drug and traffic offences), sentence implementation measures and effective redress mechanisms. While a more consistent interpretation of Article 3 ECHR remains clearly needed, this chapter argues that an enhanced judicial supervision of penal and prison policies carried out by the ECtHR with the CPT’s back-up could result in the rise of the inverted panopticon and in the development of more moderate penal policies and new forms of control.