The Prison Is Open

Khiam prison sat atop a soft hill in South Lebanon, overlooking the village of the same name, less than five kilometers from the Israeli border. The nondescript, sand-colored building, enclosed by high concrete walls and barbed wire, was built in 1933 by the French mandate forces as an army barracks complex. In 1985, the Israeli authorities converted the complex into an interrogation and detention center during their occupation of the South, and for fifteen years, the prison was run by Israel’s proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army, and the Shin Bet. During that time, it was consistently targeted by human rights groups and called “the largest interrogation and torture installation in Lebanon.” Detainees were held beyond the law, without charge or trial, subject to beatings, electrocution, suspension by their wrists for hours, and other brutal acts. One former detainee described life in Khiam as hell: “We lived all the time on the brink of death.”

In May 2000, as the Israeli Army was driven out of South Lebanon, 3,000 residents stormed the prison, taking axes and crowbars to the locks and freeing the approximately 140 inmates within its walls. Cries of exultation and euphoria rang across the hills as the villagers pulled and tugged the bewildered inmates out of this Stygian dungeon. Twenty-four years later, Syrian rebel forces from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) likewise took sledgehammers and saws to the locks of Sednaya prison in Damascus. Jubilation and takbirat echoed throughout the halls as men dragged loved ones out of the depths of this “human slaughterhouse.” This prison marked the final stop on HTS’s blitz of liberation that stretched from Aleppo Central Prison to “Branch 215” Detention Center in Damascus and culminated in the collapse of the Assad family’s fifty-year rule. As thousands of former detainees spilled into Abbasid Square, dazed, disoriented, and delighted, the world bore witness to abolition in practice.

The fall of Syria’s prisons and its regime prompted a wave of thought regarding the very notion of carceral collapse—no longer an aspiration for the oppressed but an inclement reality—throughout the region and diaspora. Palestinian factions debated the implications for the 1,784 Palestinian detainees who disappeared in Assad’s prisons, their fate unknown. On the other hand, Sudanese activists took to X in solidarity, recalling their own scenes of prison liberation in Khartoum in the aftermath of the 2019 revolution that toppled the long-standing dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir. In the United Kingdom, Egyptian activists gathered to reiterate their demands for the release of the over sixty thousand political prisoners in President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s prisons, including British Egyptian activist and writer Alaa Abdel Fattah. One former detainee recalled the horrors of Sednaya as “no less horrific” than what he witnessed in Egyptian prisons.

In Khiam and Damascus, the prison is open. But carceral abolition, as imagined and practiced, is not just about breaking chains and opening gates. Prisons across the Middle East and North Africa—including in Syria, Sudan, Egypt, and Palestine—remain the state’s single most effective means of oppression and the physical manifestations of the state’s violent carceral architecture. As such, their abolition not only demands the freedom of all the prisoners but also a complete restructuring of the societies that bred them. In the words of prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition requires we change one thing, which is everything.” The scenes of prison break from Khiam to Sednaya offer us a glimpse into that possible, yet precarious freedom.

In their coedited volume Policing and Prisons in the Middle East, Laleh Khalili and Jillian Schwedler argue that modern prisons across the Middle East and North Africa are not merely institutions of confinement but technologies of the modern nation-state, purposed, imported, and localized through colonial governance. When Major Arthur Griffiths, a British military officer and prison inspector for the Crown, visited Egyptian prisons in 1897, he recounted that “among the many and great advantages conferred upon Egypt by the British protectorate, one of the chief is the greater security afforded to life and property by a better administration of justice.” This “better administration of justice” was the same that established the 1914 Assembly Law during the British occupation to counter unrest during the First World War and has been used by successive Egyptian rulers, attracted to its authoritarian nature, to arrest and disperse with force any gathering of five or more people that they deem to be a “threat to public peace.” The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies estimates that hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have been arrested over the last century under this law.

This colonial blueprint, however, is not only confined to Egypt. In Sudan, the Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule, which lasted from 1899 to 1956, established Kober (“Cooper”) Prison in 1903. The prison, modeled after Birmingham Prison, is infamous for detaining members of the Sudanese Communist Party during President Nimeiry’s rule to former President Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Tadmor (Palmyra) Prison was initially built as a military barracks for French forces in Syria. The French later used it to imprison Druze sheikhs who opposed the occupation in the 1920s, and then by Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, who used the prison to detain political dissidents. Similarly, the Palestinian carceral landscape is built atop layers of control established during the British mandate and later inherited and modified by the Israelis, including Kishon, Damon, Ramleh, and Ashkelon prisons. 

Across the region, the carceral continuum persists. From Nasser to Sisi, these deceptively different iterations of the state have adopted a security-state model that relies on the prison as a governance tool, in what Collective Antigone calls a carceralocracy. The state has absorbed institutions that the population once turned to for justice and reform, including the courts, the constitution, the law, and even the revolution. Since the defeat of the Arab Spring, this trend has only intensified. As of 2022, the World Prison Brief estimated the Egyptian prison population to be 120,000 (half held on “political” grounds, while the other half for “criminal” reasons), all of them crammed into seventy-eight facilities originally designed to hold just 55,000. This carceral expansion is accompanied by severe human rights violations, including the mass arrest of political activists and dissidents, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and widespread medical neglect.

In Syria, the regimes of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar notoriously transformed the country into an “imprisonment state,” as formerly incarcerated novelist and activist Jaber Baker calls it, employing a sprawling network of surveillance, while physical prisons became only the most visible nodes of a system that coerced citizens into policing themselves. Family members were compelled to report on one another, mosque attendance was tracked, and even schoolchildren younger than twelve were detained. This culture of betrayal and omnipresent observation, articulated by the familiar saying “the walls have ears,” not only hollowed out public trust but embedded fear into the most mundane and intimate of spaces. In October 2023, the Syrian Network for Human Rights estimated that the Syrian regime was responsible for killing 15,051 individuals in its detention centers since 2011—which did not include the 136,000 individuals who remained forcibly disappeared. In their book Syrian Gulag, Jaber Baker and Ugur Üngör estimate the number of imprisoned to have been closer to 300,000.

Across Sudan, secret detention sites known by former detainees as “ghost houses” are manned and operated by national intelligence and security forces. These torture centers were often housed in buildings symbolically tied to democracy, such as the banned Bar Association, the Journalist Club, and even universities. During the 2019 protests, Omer al-Bashir’s forces utilized ghost houses to torture, dissuade, and intimidate protesters. Four years after the violent repression of the protests and the ousting of al-Bashir, the Emergency Lawyers raised the alarm on several ghost houses affiliated with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) across Khartoum. These temporary and permanent centers represented a “horrific escalation” in arbitrary detentions and torture across the country.

While precise figures are unavailable for the number of Palestinians imprisoned during the early years of Israel’s creation, nearly one million have been detained since its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. More recently, amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, approximately 1,900 detainees have been released in what has become the most extensive series of prisoner exchanges between Israel and Hamas. Among them was Khalida Jarrar, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who described the exchanges as the partial realization of Abu Obeida’s October 2023 call for “emptying of the prisons.” Despite the flailing attempts of a sinking state, including mass arrests and a doubling of the prison population, the breaking open of the prison gates is no longer an abstract or imagined goal but rather a visible and tangible act. Precipitated by the al-Aqsa Flood Operation, whose twin objectives included the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, this moment marks a turning point. As Jarrar writes, “This transformation suggests that the imaginary possibilities of breaking forms of prison subjugation are real and tangible,” achievable only through dismantling the physical and abstract colonial structures that rely on prisons to sustain domination. Yet, as Layan Kayed, a university student and former Palestinian detainee held under Israeli occupation administrative detention, reminds us in her seminal essay, “The Prison as a Text,” “Misery is the existence of prisons, even if everyone were released.” 

And the misery remains. The opening of the prisons has not ushered in the freedom once imagined. Instead, it serves as yet another stage for state power. Throughout the region, from Egypt to Sudan to Syria, the collapse of regimes and prisons has rarely resulted in complete abolition. It has merely reshuffled carceral actors, facilities, and logics. In Egypt, for instance, more than 20,000 detainees were released in the euphoric upheaval of 2011, only to witness, under President Sisi, mass incarceration swell roughly 60 percent between 2011 and 2016. In his first year alone, 41,000 people were arrested. By 2021, Sisi had presided over the construction of twenty-seven new prisons and proudly announced the building of Egypt’s largest prison complex, in a “full American-style.”

A similar script unfolded in Sudan. Following the 2019 uprising, de facto leader General Burhan proclaimed the release of all political detainees, parading it as a triumph for the revolution. Former President Omar al-Bashir and his associates were transferred to Kober Maximum Security Prison, only to be quietly released in 2023 amid clashes between the RSF and the SAF that resulted in the jailbreak of Kober. Since then, both the SAF and the RSF have continued to operate a parallel network of ghost houses and ad hoc prisons across Khartoum and other contested regions, where the UN has raised the alarm on the tens of thousands who have vanished without a trace.

Syria’s new president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, came into office with a promise to dismantle the Assad regime’s prison apparatus and to deny amnesty for former regime torturers and killers. In May 2025, just five months after taking over the presidency, he issued a presidential decree establishing the National Commission for Transnational Justice and the National Commission for the Missing, mandating investigations into state-sponsored atrocities and the fates of the over one hundred thousand disappeared. But beneath these promising declarations, pardons for war criminals continued, including the recent, shocking reintegration of Fadi Saqr, the leading commander of Assad-aligned forces widely believed to be responsible for the 2013 Tadamon massacre, into Damascene society with state approval. Meanwhile, Syria’s northern regions have failed to eschew the carceral grip. The Kurdish, U.S.-backed Syrian Defense Forces and HTS factions maintain detention centers housing thousands of detainees. From these overlapping realities, apprehensive citizens descend onto the streets chanting: “No Bashar after Bashar, and no Sednaya after Sednaya.”

True liberation demands more than symbolic release. As Angela Davis reminds us, we must “imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions or a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization” of the state’s institutions and “a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.” Thinking and looking beyond the telos of the state, some abolitionist scholars frame abolition as a fundamental anarchist project, necessitating the complete dissolution of the state and the crowding out of its resources and institutions by localized structures of mutual aid and community-based justice. In this view, true freedom demands nothing less than the total undoing of the nation-state. Still, others, including scholars like Ti Lamusse, argue that abolition can be pursued even within a post-revolutionary state, so long as the new regime actively redirects its resources and legitimacy towards building democratic alternatives to incarceration.

Post-revolutionary contexts, like Syria today, highlight the debate’s urgency. The Al-Sharaa government has the extraordinary opportunity, and profound responsibility, to forge new systems of justice in a country where the prison has left an indelible scar on the population. The British criminologist and abolitionist David Scott, in Visualising an Abolitionist Real Utopia, offers a set of guiding principles that inform abolitionist alternatives, including the need to ensure: “the protection of human dignity”; social justice; the construction of alternatives that challenge dominant systems; genuine alternatives to the criminal processes; legal safeguards and mechanisms of accountability; and that all interventions are “meaningful, relevant, and constructive.”

A day after the Assad regime’s collapse, a middle-aged man spoke from within a crowded mosque in Damascus. The weight of his swelling emotions pressed against his trembling voice as he told the crowd that he was imprisoned seven times. The regime killed his brother. They killed his nephew. His wrists, still marked by the scars of torture, trembled as he lifted them to show the men around him. “If I saw the man who killed my nephew today,” he said,  “I would forgive him.” “Today is not the day of vengeance,” he continued. “We are just now beginning.”

From the bowels of an Egyptian prison, Alaa Abdel Fattah writes with this same refusal: “We think of vengeance as a willful decision to pursue a feud and inflict pain, but, if you see and hear me, there’s a chance for retreat and a truce.” Abolition is this truce. One that begins with the release of the detainees, the “emptying of prisons,” and culminates with an imaginative vision of a world without prisons—open or closed.

As I write, Dr. Laila Soueif, Alaa Abdel Fattah’s sixty-nine-year-old mother, is recovering from her more than 250-day hunger strike in protest of her son’s continued imprisonment. Her body was the last frontier, pounding relentlessly against the prison walls—the body of a mother refusing, with the last ounce of her being, to surrender her child into the ravenous mouth of the carceral state. Alaa, a father himself, has spent over a decade behind bars. His words, smuggled out from cells, insist we can dream of a world where “we protect our children’s bodies from the legacy of prisons.” In Damascus, hundreds gather on the steps of al-Hijaz Square in solidarity with Alaa, calling for his release and the world he dreams of—a world that already exists, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in “fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.”