Views: How Do Political Prisoners in Egypt See Life Behind Bars?

On the first day of the coup of 3 July 2013, Egyptian police began to arrest those who opposed the new regime.The focus was initially on Islamists, who, being the ousted regime, constituted the chief opposition.As the months and years passed, however, and repression was cemented as a core practice of post-July authoritarianism, tens of thousands of citizens across the ideological, political, organisational, and professional spectrum were sent to prison, including citizens unaffiliated with any political ideologies or organisations.At the time of writing, after President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has won another six year-term in a farcical, staged election lacking transparency and integrity, thousands of political prisoners are languishing in Egyptian prisons in grim conditions. 1 Some prisoners have been incarcerated for more than a decade, others just one or two years shy of that.These years lost in inhumane conditions without due process have left prisoners in dire psychological and intellectual condition.No distinction is made here between manifestations of psychological and intellectual states as I attempt to trace them, looking at and elucidating in detail the overlapping factors and causes of these two states with the aim of showing how prisoners have come to them.This essay relies on four interviews with former male prisoners (at their own request, in fear of their personal safety and security, they are referred to here by pseudonyms).All of them left prison in the last three years, between 2021 and 2023.I reached out to a few former female prisoners for interviews as well but they declined, saying that recalling prison and its agonies causes them anguish and also citing their generally poor mental state due to the tragic events taking place in the Gaza Strip. 2 This article does not seek to observe and recount the general psychological condition of all political prisoners in Egypt held in various prisons, given the difficulty of such an endeavour.Rather, it attempts to give a brief overview of the condition of Egyptian political prisoners and its most significant psychological and intellectual manifestations.In addition, the article does not deliberately exclude or marginalise criminal prisoners, as if they are not part of the prison system, but the prison context dictates the reasons for arrest and release and other aspects of the research that are specific to political prisoners.