Egypt’s Carceral Complex

Since taking power, el-Sisi has vastly expanded his country’s network of prisons and detention centres

For over a month now, hundreds of prisoners in Egypt’s notorious Badr 1 Prison, around 70 kilometres northeast of Cairo, have been staging a hunger strike against torture and abusive conditions. An unprecedented heatwave has engulfed the country, turning those dismal prison cells into ovens. Since the start of the year, rights groups have documented the death of at least 27 people in prisons and police stations run by the Ministry of Interior (MOI) — almost half of them died in June alone.

The hunger strike has received zero coverage in the local press, controlled and micromanaged by the General Intelligence Service. The state’s crackdown was immediate, subjecting some to solitary confinement, escalating the abusive treatment, and transferring scores to remote prisons. The prisoners’ families found no channel to communicate their grievances except social media. They launched a petition, already signed by more than 1,300 families of prisoners from Badr 1 Prison and other carceral centres, begging the regime to release their loved ones in exchange for a pledge to avoid any form of political activism or online writing.

While Egyptian prisons have always been infamous for notoriety, the situation severely deteriorated following the July 2013 coup. The mass crackdowns by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi following the July 2013 coup have meant a growing population behind bars, kept in dismal conditions. As the regime consolidated, prisons became a cornerstone in the survival of a new order, which, unlike previous regimes, did not manage dissent, but instead eradicated it using lethal and carceral violence.

The Carceral Regime

Some local rights activists estimated the total number of incarcerated following the coup to be as high as 120,000 convicted prisoners and pre-trial detainees. Almost half of them were held on “political” grounds, while the other half for “criminal” reasons. Reports by other rights watchdogs provided slightly more conservative estimates. Around 41,000 persons were arrested or charged during the first year after the coup. According to the state-controlled National Council for Human Rights, Egypt’s prisons were operating at 150 percent of capacity by 2015.

Among the MOI’s “achievements” highlighted by the presidency’s official mouthpiece, the State Information Service, was the arrest of 22,000 “terrorist elements” in six years (2014–20). However, it is not clear how many of those were charged or released. In 2020 and 2021, at least 16,000 people faced prosecution on political charges, according to a local independent research group. By 2024, Haitham Muhammadein, a veteran labour lawyer and former prisoner, estimated the total number of political prisoners and detainees to be anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000.

The arrests appear to surge (and largely assume a random nature) before, during, and after sporadic demonstrations or online calls for protests. For instance, more than 4,400 were rounded up following the 20 September 2019 protests. A year later, at least 2,400 people were arrested in connection to the 20 September 2020 protests. In the run-up to and during the COP27 summit in Sharm al-Sheikh, the police arrested over 800 persons as online calls for anti-Sisi protests circulated in cyberspace in November 2022.

Prisoners suffer from inadequate food, lack of sufficient access to ventilation, are deprived of exercise, prevented from family contact, and deliberately denied medical care.

The difficulty in determining accurate incarceration figures stems not only from the regime’s lack of transparency but also from a revolving door carceral policy adopted by the MOI, which Egyptian activists dubbed tadwīr, or rotation. In September 2013, Interim President Adly Mansour ratified the Criminal Procedures Law, removing time limits on pre-trial detention. From then on, the prosecutors collaborated with the police to keep thousands in a state of perpetual incarceration without trial.

Whenever detainees are ordered to be released by the prosecutor’s office, they are sent to police stations or Homeland Security (HS) facilities, where they “disappear” for days, weeks, or months before surfacing again in a new case, carrying the same charges, beginning their saga anew. This incarceration loop can stretch beyond three years, where the detainee may get “rotated” through as many as six different cases. An investigative report by the New York Times estimated that in just six months (September 2020 to February 2021), approximately 4,500 people were trapped in this vicious cycle of pre-trial detention.

Prisons, Prisons, and More Prisons

Since the coup, at least 34 new MOI-run prisons had been built by 2021 alone. Incarceration conditions are appalling. Cells are overcrowded, with dismal hygiene standards. “The cell, which used to house five or six [people], is now required to house 20 to 25”, recalls Taher Mukhtar, a medical doctor and former political prisoner himself. “People sleep on the floors, with little private space. Respiratory and skin diseases spread easily.”

Prisoners suffer from inadequate food, lack of sufficient access to ventilation, are deprived of exercise, prevented from family contact, and deliberately denied medical care. Torture, including sexual violenceagainst both men and women, has been systematically employed by the MOI in prisons, police stations, and HS sites. Some prisoners are kept in solitary confinement indefinitely. High-profile prisoners, mostly Islamists, have been locked up in isolated cells since 2013. “I have clients who have been in solitary confinement for nine years in a row”, says a Cairo lawyer representing several political prisoners. “They have also been denied any family visits for at least six years.”

During the period from 30 June 2013 to 30 November 2019, a local rights group documented at least 958 deaths in custody, including nine minors. Around 70 percent of the deaths resulted from intentional denial of medical care, 14 percent from torture, and 7 percent from suicide. By 2022, the deaths had already exceeded 1,000.

The Torturers

The MOI’s carceral brutality following the coup was enabled by police major generals who ran Qiṭāʿ al-Suǧūn, the Prison Sector, and were infamous for their long records of involvement in human rights violations, such as Hassan el-Suhagi, Hisham el-Baradie, and Tarek Marzouk. However, the conditions, especially for the political prisoners, grew even worse after the HS got involved.

Before 2011, the State Security Police (SS), the forerunner to the HS, had a presence in the prison facilities, assigned to a group under the Counter-Extremism Administration dubbed Maǧmūʿat Amn al-Suǧūn, Prisons Security Group. The SS commanding officer usually had the final say in how maximum-security prisons were run. This continued to be the case with HS following the coup. There were even some prisons that did not have stationed HS officers.

However, since 2016 or 2017, HS control of the prison system has evolved into a semi-absolute authority, bypassing the wardens and regular officers in all prisons. HS officers and their designated informers micromanage all details related to incarceration conditions, mostly for political rather than “criminal” prisoners. In rare cases, a warden or a regular prison officer could be as powerful as the HS due to family connections and unofficial patronage relations.

Egypt’s Orwellian Turn

The MOI declared in August 2021 that it was officially changing the name of the Prison Sector to Qiṭāʿ al-Ḥimāya al-Muǧtamaʿiyya, the Community Protection Sector. Prisons were to be renamed as “reform and rehabilitation centres”. Wardens were to be called “centre directors”, while prisoners would be referred to as “inmates”. In the following month, Sisi announced the construction of Egypt’s “biggest prison complex”, built “US-style”, in a phone call with a talk show host.

This new direction was marketed by Sisi’s publicists as part of his democratic reforms at a time when the regime was lambasted locally and internationally over its human rights record. But beneath the changes in titles, a more brutal carceral policing was evolving.

In October 2021, the first of these complexes was inaugurated in Wadi al-Natron, around 90 kilometres northwest of Cairo, and was hailed by the MOI as one of the achievements of Sisi’s New Republic. The local media also celebrated the event, proudly describing it as the “biggest prison complex in the world”. By the end of the same year, the second complex built in Badr City, around 70 kilometres northeast of Cairo, started operations.

Already paranoid about the prospects for another 2011 scenario and with little support in the country outside the ranks of the military and security services, the Sisi regime is unlikely to reverse its carceral policies anytime soon.

According to interviews I conducted with rights lawyers and activists, fluorescent lights are switched on in most cells that confine political prisoners in both complexes, constituting psychological torture. The following year, after protests by the prisoners and their families raising the issue on social media, the lights were dimmed by midnight.

CCTV cameras are installed not just in the corridors but also to peer inside the cells, leaving no space for privacy except in the toilets. These video feeds appear part of a centralized grid run from the Prison Sector administrative office. Food rations are insufficient. Extra clothes or blankets to provide warmth in winter are not allowed. Those in pre-trial detention no longer leave their prison facility to go to courts or prosecutors’ offices. Instead, they are taken handcuffed to a room in their prison section, where the hearings are conducted through video conference calls.

By October 2023, the Interior Minister announced that five new mega-prison complexes had been built. Twenty-six old prisons, he added, were shut down or demolished to be used as real estate assets for the Egyptian state.

A Blocked Horizon

Human rights activists and political pundits have long been warning of the social costs of the regime’s carceral drive and severe repression. Yet, for a counterrevolutionary regime ideologically and structurally geared towards considering popular unrest as its dominant threat, the use of carceral and lethal violence is “inescapable”, as Egyptian pundit Maged Mandour remarks. “Simply put, in order for the regime to justify the dominance of the military, insidious enemies need to exist — otherwise, its continued dominance is no longer justified.”

A decade of white elephant projects and mismanagement of the country’s wealth has brought the Egyptian economy to its worst economic malaise since the Free Officers founded the Republican order in 1953. Already paranoid about the prospects for another 2011 scenario and with little support in the country outside the ranks of the military and security services, the Sisi regime is unlikely to reverse its carceral policies anytime soon.

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian journalist and socialist activist currently based in Berlin. His posts appear regularly on Substack and Twitter.