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An insightful look through the history of punishment and prisons offers a new perspective on the changes that have been undergone or would occur in the Romanian penitentiary system. In the last instance the Romanian punishment and prisons have not displayed the same functions from their origin till now. The study of documents, old chronics and writings of various historians unveil huge differences in thinking the punishment and the role of prison in different historic ages. There were times when the prisons were situated either in the center of society (in country's Principe or boyars' courts) or times when they were placed at society's periphery. The execution was public or hidden. A trip in the history of the Romanian detention system opens a wide window toward the future of this social system.

The problem of truth, from the point of view of a historian, arises in clearly different forms compared to those of scientists and probably also of social scholars of other disciplines. History is a narration of past events, but this narration is subject to an arbitrary selection of its parts, its documentation, the facts that make up the event under discussion. History is organized on the basis of documents, testimonies and biographical elements, but also of considerations on the structures of power, on the articulations of society and on the forms of political regimes. As the history of the 1900s amply demonstrates – of which the Shoah and the Nazi destruction of the Jews as well as Soviet communism, the history of Italy and McCarthyism in the United States, as well as the genocides of the 1990s, are touched on in this article – the interpretation of the events involved the greatest difficulty in identifying a recognized and shared truth.