The paper aims to discuss how the dual educational-sanctionary objective, based on the United Nations’ Doctrine for Child Protection, is implemented in three different institutions focused on sanctioning adolescents in conflict with the law. By comparing one Brazilian institution against two French ones, we were able to observe different possibilities to operationalize the principle that understands the adolescent as a developing subject, based on different connections between security and education. The exposed data suggests a trend to emphasize the sanctioning aspect, in spite of the different configurations observed in each context