This composition is about prison sentence. The purpose with this study is to investigate how the concept of prison sentence as a punishment is constructed in media, analyses and reports, from a social constructivist point of view. The composition has an issue that follows like this: “How do people in the society speak, think and write about the concept of prison sentence?” To get a background as to how the concept is used today, a understanding about how it was used through time is needed. It was under the 17th century that changes started to happen that gave the physical punishment a compliment, the imprisonment of people. The methodological starting point in this report is hermeneutical and the qualitative emphasis the report is to stand on before the discourse analysis, is the main method of the composition. The material for this discourse analysis has been picked out with the help of a specification of the problem and the purpose. Articles, reports/analyses and a TV-show were picked out as material and were analysed along the discourses on prison sentences that were found. The result can been divided into four different discourse groups. The first is “Discourse about an alternative to the institutional prison sentence” where there has been a replacement of the pure prison sentence, the second group is “Discourse about prison sentence and society” where the society reflects upon the punishment, the third is “Discourse about prison sentence and rehabilitation” which is talked about a lot, but maybe not with so much action according to some and the fourth discourse group is “Discourse about the prison sentence nobody escapes from” that is about a punishment that one should not be able to escape from and a tougher control. The social constructivism, which is the main theory of this report, says that a concept only survives as long as people use it and that is used to show how we have gone from calling prisons houses of correction to super prisons. The discourse that exists in the material for this composition points out that the prison sentence does not have to be a pure punishment in prison, but that it is constructed as the punishment is served.