This article combines the analytical perspectives ‘legal’ and ‘penal’ consciousness in order to analyse how ethnic minority prisoners in remand anticipate their upcoming court trial and how they subsequently make sense of the legal process and their sentence. Based on fieldwork in a Danish remand prison and courts, the study explores how prisoners’ experiences in prison and more broadly in society shape these expectations. Prisoners reflect critically on majority perceptions of immigration and social deprivation while simultaneously embracing these cultural schemas of difference by trying not to act and speak as ‘immigrants’ or ‘gang members’ in court. The article thus contributes to our understanding of how remand prisoners engage with law, combining notions of its neutrality with internalized notions of ‘important differences’.