Golnar Nikpour, The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Golnar Nikpour (GN): I was first drawn to the idea of writing about prisons and prisoners in Iran because, like many Iranians, I have spent my whole life hearing stories about incarceration from friends and family members who have had encounters—some quite brutal—with Iran’s prison system, both before and after the 1979 revolution. Early on, my idea was to write an intellectual history of Iran’s copious archive of political prison writing—to examine these texts not simply as historical sources but as a form of political theory. Very quickly, though, I realized that I had foundational questions about Iran’s modern prisons to which I was having a hard time finding answers. These questions changed the direction of my project dramatically. Most crucially, I wanted to know more about just how Iran could go from a place with very few jailing facilities and very few imprisoned persons at the turn of the twentieth century to a place where prisons and prisoners were at the center of political life and public culture throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. How could such a transformative change be institutionalized and naturalized so quickly? Just how did political lives and public cultures change as a result of Iran’s transformation into a modern carceral state? And how have Iranians experienced the profound changes associated with mass criminalization and mass incarceration over the course of the last century?
I show that in drawing the line between good citizen and bad criminal, carceral techniques have shaped Iranian notions of citizenship, freedom, and nationalized inclusion.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
GN: The Incarcerated Modern studies the making of the modern prison system in Iran, the resulting incarceration of millions of people, and responses by Iranians and non-Iranians alike to these new prisons. I argue that the establishment and expansion of the modern prison system in Iran has led to an enduring and elemental transformation in Iranian lives and social worlds.
The book focuses on what I call “the public life” of the modern prison. I use this concept in two linked senses. The first of these is the more straightforward—the public life of the prison refers to new public conversations that modern prisons and punishment provoked in Iran. As my own interest in the topic shows, prisons have been a topic of major significance for Iranians for decades, eliciting an enormous body of writing, art, music, film, political activism, and more. After legal and carceral centralization—a process that began in earnest under Reza Shah Pahlavi in the 1920s and 1930s—Iranians had to learn en masse how not to get arrested and incarcerated, and what to do if they were. New genres appeared in this era addressing precisely these questions and ideas: prison memoirs, crime fiction, academic criminology, newspaper accounts of crime and punishment, and much more. Of course, most readers of Jadaliyya also know that modern prisons have been disturbingly foundational for political movements in Iran. Political parties, activists, and intellectuals in Iran have routinely had to contemplate the relationship between power, citizenship, and incarceration—often from behind prison walls.
Yet, as I argue in the book, the public life of the prison does not encompass simply that which Iranian dissidents have said or written in response to modern incarceration. Carceral practices have transformed all Iranian public worlds, not just the ones of those most politically engaged. Throughout the book, I show that in drawing the line between good citizen and bad criminal, carceral techniques have shaped Iranian notions of citizenship, freedom, and nationalized inclusion. Both before and after the 1979 revolution, for instance, state institutions have touted the rehabilitative capacity of Iranian prisons to transform socially wayward individuals into socially productive citizens. Indeed, members of both the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic governments have routinely promised that carceral methods would render Iranian citizens safer, more educated, more progressive, more civilized, and even more properly Muslim. This is the second sense in which I use the phrase the public life of the prison. My argument is not merely that modern carceral practices produced new public cultures in Iran—although of course they did—but rather that modern incarceration has shaped the very notion of the public and membership in that public.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
GN: The Incarcerated Modern is my first monograph and grows out of earlier research and writing on Iranian state institutions and political movements. The book expands on two prior published essays. One essay is on the emergence of a large and diverse transnational movement in the 1960s using the nascent language of “human rights” to advocate on behalf of Iranian prisoners. This movement was crucial in transforming the global reputation of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the then-king of Iran, from progressive monarch to the much-derided “king of torture.” The second essay is on the rise of criminological discourses in Iran and their imbrication with technocratic state-led efforts to run prisons “scientifically,” all in a nominal effort to reform prisoners and—according to these discourses—even end criminal behavior for good. The book expands dramatically on both of these histories and adds further chapters on other topics of importance for my research: the 1970s guerrilla movement in Iran, the 1980s era of post-revolutionary state consolidation and political violence, and contemporary efforts to transform Iranian carcerality yet again with the use of biometric surveillance and ankle monitors—what scholars in a different context have called “prison by another name.”
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
GN: I am genuinely thrilled to see anyone engaging with the book! That said, I hope that beyond reaching those who are interested in the history of modern Iran and the modern Middle East, the book reaches people interested in critical histories of prisons—or abolitionist approaches to prison studies—globally. The history that this book covers fundamentally transnational. I argue that Iran’s carceral story must be told as part of a worldwide trend in promoting carceral solutions—surveillance, policing, and mass punishment and imprisonment—to a wide host of social issues. As such, the book uncovers shared but hidden architectures, geographies, economies, and discourses of modern prisons and punishment. For instance, several prisons in the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran were built in the 1960s from blueprints taken from USP Marion in Illinois, now part of the US federal supermax system. The same blueprints were used around the world, from Israel to New Zealand to Iran. This history undercuts neo-Orientalist views that imagine that the Islamic Republic’s legal and penal systems have a singularly sharia-based pedigree unlike those found anywhere else in the modern world. For me, these global links and histories demand analysis for everyone interested in a horizon of freedom beyond the prison.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
GN: I have begun work on a second book project about what I am calling the “ephemeral archive” of the 1979 revolution in Iran, in which I analyze fleeting revolutionary material cultures: revolutionary broadsides, Xeroxed pamphlets, hand-dubbed cassettes, clandestine papers, and more. This ephemera was often hastily copied and furtively circulated in its day and is now scattered across the world, if not lost or destroyed. This means that this is also a history of an archive that is by definition forever incomplete. I am also researching another ephemeral archive of the revolution: that of revolutionary feeling, particularly the sense of openness and possibility experienced in the earliest days of upheaval, what some Iranians called the springtime of revolution.
Excerpt from the book (from pp. 16-20)
Which Prisoners?
Throughout the book, I interrogate received wisdom on different forms of incarceration and different populations of prisoners. Despite the significance of political prisoners to Iranian carceral modernity, The Incarcerated Modern does not limit its analysis to prisoners of conscience (to use the language founded by Amnesty International) or prisoners of politics detained by subsequent Iranian governments. Instead, in distinction from most of the extant scholarship on Iranian prisons – which has largely taken political incarceration and/or torture as its major focus – I look at Iran’s prisons more broadly and also include a closer look at those who in Persian are typically referred to as Iran’s “ordinary” [zendani-ye ‘adi], or common law prisoners. This long-standing historiographical focus on incarcerated political dissidents in Iran has arisen in no small part from the herculean efforts undertaken by these same prisoners – often under profound physical and psychological duress – to have their stories heard. In some cases, former imprisoned dissidents have become scholars, and have written moving and insightful accounts of their experiences of incarceration. In other cases, scholarly and philosophical work about torture in Iran has been produced by former prisoners. Still other works, particularly on the brutal prison massacre of 1988, represent the joint efforts of activist-scholars and former prisoners to shed light on those stories the Iranian government has tried to suppress. The most detailed historiographical excavation on prisons in Iran to date – a pathbreaking monograph by historian Ervand Abrahamian –focuses on the history of torture, forced confessions, and public recantations of incarcerated political dissidents in both pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. In the past decade, there have also several important new works by Iran-based scholars written in Persian, many of which analyze histories of both political and common law incarceration in Iran. These texts invariably end the story at the 1979 revolution, however, presumably a direct result of the political climate in the Islamic Republic.
Despite the public focus on political prisoners, it is common law prisoners who have always represented and continue to represent the vast majority of Iran’s incarcerated population, both in the Pahlavi and now in the Islamic Republic periods. It is not simply because large numbers of prisoners have been held on ostensibly “non-political” charges – drug offenses (which both before and after the revolution represent the overwhelming majority of Iran’s detainees), sex work and sexual deviance, vagrancy, theft, brigandage, border crossing, corruption, murder, etc. – that I turn part of my attention to those detainees or what has been said about or done with them. Beyond the practical fact of their large numbers, I argue that we must work to denaturalize the entrenched logic through which we conceptually (and thus politically) separate these two populations of prisoners.
The taxonomic divide between “political” and “non-political” prisoners in Iran has historical roots in the different way these detainees have often been treated by subsequent Iranian governments, as well as by the way political movements have advocated on behalf of certain detained populations. The divide has its roots partly in the institutionalizing efforts of the early Pahlavi state, which typically grouped and housed Iranian prisoners into two distinct if uneven categories: “ordinary” prisoners (or zendani-ye ‘adi), who comprised the vast majority of Iran’s incarcerated population, and “security” prisoners (or zendani-ye amniyati), the smaller but significant population typically understood by dissidents and human rights organizations alike to be Iran’s political prisoners. So important is this division that political prisoners, who are typically (though not always) housed separately, have been sent to general holding or to small provincial prisons with no other “politicals” as a form of punishment since the late Qajar era. The “divide and conquer” strategy of sending lone dissidents to less central or provincial prisons housing common law prisoner populations, typically against the protests of the detainees, remains in use as punishment today. Resultantly, this division perseveres not only in the carceral institutions of the Islamic Republic – which polices the boundary between detained populations while nonetheless continuing to avow, as then-Chief Justice Ayatollah Amoli Larijani did in 2019, that there are no “political prisoners” in Iran – but in the political work and imaginations of those global human rights advocates and organizations who campaign principally on behalf of Iran’s incarcerated dissidents.
Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have a longstanding record of advocating on behalf of their preferred category of non-violent “prisoners of conscience,” largely bypassing the hundreds of thousands of incarcerated Iranians – not to mention millions of global detainees – who do not fit this narrow classification. (Even Nelson Mandela famously and controversially did not fit AI’s definition of the category.) This logic perseveres among Iranian writers and activists who have dedicated their prison writing and advocacy to “Iran’s unknown prisoners of conscience.” The widespread public focus on Iran’s political detainees comes despite the fact that “political prisoners and prisoners of conscience constitute a tiny fraction of prisoners in Iran,” a fact noted by the widely cited (and State Department-funded) Iran Human Rights Documentation Center in its 2015 report on Iranian prisons. Yet despite the enduring view that would divide prisoners into hermetically sealed categories of “political” and “non-political” – a logic that tacitly (if not explicitly) imagines common law prisoners as the “real” criminals, just as it imagines that political imprisonment is only a problem “over there” in illiberal places like Iran – many of the ostensibly non-political charges for which people are detained in Iran, as elsewhere in the world, stem from self-evidently political issues. In other words, the historical processes through which all modern states including Iran have naturalized the notion that social issues from drug use to sex work to refugee border crossings to certain (but not all) forms of violence demand carceral intervention – as opposed to investment in mental and public health, education, community-building, a stronger social safety net, or various forms of accountability or reparative justice – have themselves been a product of profoundly political processes, and relatively recent ones at that. In the words of France’s Groupe d’Information Sur Les Prisons (GIP), a prison activist group co-founded in the 1970s by French philosopher Michel Foucault, prison is by definition “a political experience, a hostage experience, a concentration camp experience, a class warfare experience, a colonized experience.” Thus, while this book centers the particularities of this story in Iranian history, it also endeavors to push our thinking about prisons and prisoners – and what political horizons we struggle towards with and on behalf of prisoners – all over the world.
