This article analyses transgender women and transvestites’ criminalization practices in a red-light district, from two investigations located in La Plata city, Argentina. In order to achieve this proposal, we apply urban and action research tools to analyze security ensembles between different state agencies and neighborhood groups, so that the ways in which such practices are legitimized and become possible can be addressed. The daily regulation of inhabited spaces allows us to visualize disputes over the forms of appropriation, and to historicize social control of the supply of sex in the public space. Under this casuistry, we question limitations of the notion of punitive populism. We propose the figure of punitive circuits to visualize the territorial specificities linked to the insecurity that moral and criminal control practices have over the red-light district, and the multiplicity of people and agencies that intervene in its course.