This article examines the use of isolation, as a means of producing discipline, in a Montreal closed custody unit for young offenders. It shows that isolation, well beyond “isolation measures”, extends to a set of measures which, for legal reasons, are renamed “removal measures”. An analysis of these measures, as well as the attempts of the unit’s management to control their use, suggests that this wordplay (and lawplay) is linked to a form of custodial paternalism which, in the name of a mandate to rehabilitate the youths, which tends to relegate concerns about their rights to the background.