Grappling with the intense fallout of Russia’s war on Ukraine and more than a decade of wanton fiscal mismanagement, inflation and unemployment are punishing Egyptians across the country. While the majority of citizens in a country of more than 100 million people struggle to make ends meet, there is a flourishing “prison economy” that persists inside the country’s sprawling carceral system. According to five former prisoners interviewed in 2022, all of whom spent varying periods detained in Egypt’s prisons including the infamous Tora Prison complex, prison guards and administrative officials alike regularly solicit monetary concessions from vulnerable detainees and their families. As a result, the officials charged with oversight of Egypt’s estimated 120,000 detainees are routinely profiting off a distinct, blackmarket system of transactions. In describing this enterprise, these former detainees illustrate a semi-institutionalized exchange of goods, favors, and services that ultimately serve to line the pockets of prison wardens and their subordinates.
This ecosystem, which can be loosely referred to as Egypt’s “prison economy” can be broken down to two complementary aspects. As the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights documented in their 2018 report on the Tora Prison Complex, the prison canteen exists as a specific, local institution where detainees are authorized to purchase certain goods under the official purview of the prison administration. Several former detainees agreed that the price markup on these items was consistently 20-25 percent above street-value at each of the varying facilities they were held. Profits from the canteen are then speculated to be disbursed exclusively to the prison warden and chief of investigation. The canteen is also responsible for providing supplies, at a significant upcharge, for certain cell renovations and upgrades which can be bought to improve conditions in facilities. An individual with experience navigating these renovations specified that they were typically upgrades to the cell’s tiling, improved toilets, and in some instances ceiling fans. One former detainee stated that the chief of investigations is largely responsible for handling the prison’s day-to-day operations with respect to the “criminal” population while the warden is limited to bureaucratic obligations, which allows canteen profits to come under the remit of both figures.
However, items unavailable at the canteen, including specific food, hygiene products, cookware and more, become the domain of families that drop off packages to their loved ones on a regular basis outside of formal visitations. In turn, rank-and-file guards exploit the lack of regulation and enforcement in order to demand cash bribes from prisoners and their families just to allow these items inside the facility, creating a dynamic where numerous components of sustaining life in prison necessitates payment to one official or another.
The majority of bribes were those made by prisoners attempting to purchase back rights which are protected under the constitution and what few prison regulations exist.
Commoditization of rights and repression
The commoditization of repression in Egypt’s prisons is reportedly so pervasive that there are seldom aspects of life left untouched: prison authorities are entrepreneurial and adaptive in finding new ways to exploit their power for profit. Crucially, their authority to do so is unbridled. Numerous former detainees emphasized that payments and bribes in prison are not to buy extra liberties or ostentatious comfort above international standards. Rather, the majority of bribes were those made by prisoners attempting to purchase back rights which are protected under the constitution and what few prison regulations exist. Prison guards regularly restrict familial visits below the regulated minimum unless families paid up. Wives of detainees reported having to pay to avoid being sexually harassed or physically violated by security guards upon entry. When families deliver food and other necessities to their loved one, a few pounds are reserved just to prevent a guard from sticking their hands in meals intended for the cell. Theft of food and medicine being delivered was allegedly so prevalent in one Tora prison that family members resorted to attaching an inventory list so the detainee would know if something was missing. As new prisons pop up across the country, the interior ministry has been systematically moving detainees to new locations, sometimes hours away from their homes and difficult to access. While indirect, this also places an additional financial burden on families who not only have to fill up their tanks for several hours roundtrip, but also take costly time away from their jobs.
Under Egypt’s Law on the Organization of Prisons in Egypt (Law No. 396 of 1956, as amended) and its corresponding implementing decrees, most detention facilities in the country are under the jurisdiction of either the Interior Ministry’s Prison Authority or a governorate’s security directorate. However, the government’s internal security service, the National Security Agency (NSA), also operates facilities typically associated with enforced disappearance. In what could be considered the pinnacle of commoditization, one former detainee interviewed for this article conveyed anecdotes of families of disappeared persons being forced to offer payment at known NSA locations to learn if their family member was alive or in custody.
According to those interviewed, guards indicated that bribes amounted to a “parallel income stream.” To provide a sense of the scale of this operation, one individual stated that their family paid an average of EGP 250-300 to guards per week in order to simply allow food and medications to reach them. One detainee estimated that their family alone contributed nearly 1.5 to 2 times the monthly salary for three officers in the prison. For context, Egypt’s public sector minimum wage was only recently increased to EGP 3,000 per month ($97.75) while in 2020 the average national poverty line was EGP 856 ($27.90 at the time of writing) per person per month—a line which 31.3 million Egyptians lived under in the same period.
When outside visits were temporarily suspended during the pandemic, one detainee stated that guards complained to their captive audience that they were losing more than 50 percent of their salary because they could not elicit bribes from visiting families. At the same time, the canteen became the only source of food, hygiene products, and other items for the prison population. When supply chain issues caused prices to rise across the world, these increases were exacerbated inside prisons and canteen prices reportedly doubled during 2020 alone according to a former prisoner held in the Tora Prison complex during this period.
Naturally, some families simply cannot afford to pay the price to expedite wait times or extend visits beyond the limitations illegally imposed by guards. Per one former detainee, when families are capable of shouldering the cost of frequent visits, this can act as a signal to guards of their financial status. Guards may then increase the accepted price of a bribe for families perceived to be affluent. On the other side of the spectrum, families who lack financial resources would reportedly refrain from visiting so as to avoid the financial pitfalls if it is believed they can afford to pay more. As a result, some families are compelled to engage in a self-censorship of sorts, robbing their loved ones of desperately needed family time solely because of their socioeconomic status. In this sense, guards take on the role of the “free hand of the market,” and are particularly adept at tailoring operations to optimize their profit to the fullest extent.
Absent sufficient oversight from legal institutions, prison guards, and authorities have filled the space with a system that exploits their authority over detainees for significant monetary gain.
Despite resembling a formal economy and being subject to outside market forces such as inflation, it is precisely the lack of clear prison regulations that has allowed this ecosystem to come together. Absent sufficient oversight from legal institutions, prison guards, and authorities have filled the space with a system that exploits their authority over detainees for significant monetary gain.
Sustaining the security state
The mistreatment of political prisoners inside the walls of Egypt’s prisons is a recurring topic of conversation among the human rights community from Cairo to Washington DC. In October 2022, the Wall Street Journal released an article compiling the stories of former prisoners who were routinely tortured while in state custody. However, the sweeping socioeconomic damage incurred by Egypt’s prison population must also be reckoned with.
Campaigns to dismantle—or nominally improve—the mass carceral system fail to grasp the incentives to uphold the status quo that are in place at several levels of the prison bureaucracy. While the threat of imprisonment for political opposition serves the objectives of a regime that quells dissent and eliminates opposition, lack of adequate regulation and oversight has also decidedly worked in its favor. Whether by design or by happenstance, the government has co-opted scores of individuals to perpetuate its repression by facilitating dependency on the prison system as a supplemental source of income that can be secured through low public-sector wages. If rank-and-file prison guards are capable of capturing the system to profit from arbitrary detention, then they even have a vested interest in bolstering the lucrative cycle of extortion which effortlessly generates revenue on their behalf, and the best way to do so is ensure that prisons remain full. It is, in the words of one former detainee, “a monster that must be fed.” While the prison administration may not be able to amass the power or influence to shift Egypt’s government away from its overreliance on arresting, intimidating, and suppressing opposition, prisons nonetheless serve as the de facto punitive arm of the regime where countless individuals are complicit.
Moreover, prison guards themselves are often recruited into the interior ministry at a young age and are not afforded training or educational opportunities to build transferable skills, making it difficult to find and maintain an alternative career. There are also incalculable macroeconomic costs to Egypt’s political prisoner crisis. A considerable share of the prison population are young, well-educated and highly motivated members of society who were gainfully employed and often-times responsible for financially supporting their families prior to detention. Speaking exclusively in economic terms, removing swaths of the population from the domestic economy for purely political purposes can have devastating consequences for the local economy on aggregate.
Naturally, the ‘prison economy’ has spilled beyond the prison walls. The government’s frenzied construction of mega-prisons serve as a vehicle for capital flows from state coffers into the hands of favored sub-contractors. Whistleblower Mohamed Ali, whose videos posted to social media accusing President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi of corruption and self-enrichment sparked protests in 2019, specifically addresses prison construction in one interview: “If I wanted to be involved in constructing prisons, which is a very lucrative business, I would have worked with the ministry of interior since there are more civilian prisoners than military ones so they need to build more prisons.”
From the architects, to the builders, to the eventual prison guards, there are a number of Egyptians whose income is inexorably tied to the state’s insatiable need for detention facilities and prisoners to fill them.
From the architects, to the builders, to the eventual prison guards, there are a number of Egyptians whose income is inexorably tied to the state’s insatiable need for detention facilities and prisoners to fill them. Even the ministry of interior’s attempts to usher in “comprehensive development for the penal system” is dependent on the proliferation of new, modern facilities such as the Wadi al-Natroun Correction and Rehabilitation Center. Heralded as an “American-style” prison, Wadi al-Natroun’s grand opening in November 2021 was accompanied by an English subtitled PR video and dubious song touting the rights of prisoners held at the facility. Similar mega prisons have been completed in Badr City and construction is underway on another complex in the Sinai, each presenting fresh opportunities for profiteering.
Unlike other authoritarian states, it can be misleading to view the Egyptian regime as an exclusively top-down structure where repression is singularly driven by orders from the top. Rather, Egypt currently operates under a system where economic and political interests conveniently intersect to maintain the current distribution of power. Egypt’s prisons and those charged with running them are but one outgrowth of this dynamic. Just as corrupt military officials continue to siphon resources from the state for their own material gain, so have prison authorities and their deputies adopted an entrepreneurial approach to their official duties. Prison guards and their superiors have effectively evolved to become shareholders who invest in punishment as a tool of government control and subsequently reap the dividends of mass imprisonment.
Ryan Walsh is the Advocacy Associate at TIMEP.