close button
Switch to Iranwire Light?
It looks like you’re having trouble loading the content on this page. Switch to Iranwire Light instead.
Prisoners

The Islamic Kapo: Prized Convicts Making Fellow Inmates' Lives a Misery

January 4, 2022
Ziba Yari
6 min read
The Islamic Kapo: Prized Convicts Making Fellow Inmates' Lives a Misery

Prison Narratives is a collection of reports told by prisoners. The narrators of the series are political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, as well as people who have been detained for “ordinary," non-political crimes. They talk about their lives in prison and guide the reader through the environment and the people they encounter. This article is drawn from the testimonies of current and ex-detainees at Greater Tehran Penitentiary about the so-called “ward lawyers”: convicts elevated to the status of guards, informants and torturers.

As Jewish detainees were being released from concentration camps in Nazi Germany and began to write their memoirs, many spoke of a figure known as the Kapo: a detainee placed in charge of other prisoners and of monitoring their performance, generally regarded by others as an accomplice to Nazi crimes. According to many accounts, Kapos sometimes used their privileged position to inflict more violence on their fellow inmates than even the Nazis themselves.

Today, at Greater Tehran Penitentiary, otherwise known as Fashafuyeh, prisoners cite the presence of a new type of Islamic Kapo: one that works hand in glove with the guards to inflict torture on other detainees. Contrary to Prison Organization regulations, the management of prison wards, including both admin and enforcement, is being conducted by hired detainees known as “ward lawyers”.

In the past, prisoners would choose their own “ward lawyer” to represent them in collective bargaining with the prison. Now, in Fashafuyeh, it is the prison’s own intelligence department that appoints them. Their team of assistants and enforcers are also appointed by this division. They then take control of the ward and, of course, act as informants.

Of the 50 such “ward lawyers” in Greater Tehran Penitentiary, most are politically affiliated with the Islamic Republic, some have family or financial ties to the intelligence division, and many are ex-employees of either the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the Basij, convicted of some form of financial crime. These effective agents are put in charge of reporting on their wards’ affairs, from counting the prisoners, to depriving them of breaks and beating them with pipes and hoses.

The same teams often have ties to behind-bars drug distribution. In fact, major drug dealers can and have operated freely by being selected by “ward lawyers” to join the teams, acting under their supervision.

Arash Ramezani has previously written about this matter in his book Songs Behind the Wall: "He [the ward lawyer] did his utmost to gain the positive opinion of the prisoners. He always treated other inmates as though he were not a prisoner himself. In fact, in order to escape the internal pressure of being a prisoner, Nasser tried to forget about being imprisoned as much as possible, by associating himself with the guards – and humiliating others."

This is far from the full story. Ali, a prisoner in the 4th Brigade of Greater Tehran Penitentiary, told IranWire of his own “ward lawyer” and associates: "The intelligence [division] has agents inside the ward who report about other prisoners both by telephone and in writing. We call them 'behind-the-doors'. At the behest of a guard or security guard, they’d beat a prisoner with a view to killing them.

“My ‘lawyer’ on my previous ward was an IRGC officer himself, and said he was still working with the IRGC. He had put a photo of Ghasem Soleimani over his bedpost. of his bed. I think his case was financial and he was protected from the above. From the first day he was imprisoned, he replaced the current lawyer of the ward."

Today’s Islamic Kapos are thus distinct from the Kapos of Nazi concentration camps: many are selected precisely because of their pro-regime tendencies or elite connections. Furnished with a separate cell, regular “Sharia meetings” [seeing women], furlough opportunities and the freedom to buy what they like from the central store, the life of an Iranian Kapo is safer and visibly better than the rest of his peers. He will stop at nothing to keep it this way.

Their position stands in contrast to that of many of their fellow inmates. The judiciary's general, hostile policy toward political prisoners in particular – including those jailed after January 2018 and November 2018, teachers, activists, writers and social media critics – is to brand them “security prisoners” and use this pretext to isolate them from others, subjecting them to solitary confinement, cramming them into separate “security wards” or exiling them to smaller jails in distant cities. This helps to stop them from mixing with “ordinary” criminals, talking to them or giving them books.

The Islamic Kapos also control the political prisoners’ quarters. In this capacity, they are expected to make the detainees’ experiences even darker than before. If protest flares up, it is the Islamic Kapo who reports and works with the guards and other prison officials to silence a given political prisoner. It rarely makes headlines, and costs the security agencies less.

We remember those days when Gholam Ali Haj Mohammadi was interim head of the Prisons Organization, and political prisoners of the 2nd Brigade were attacked by the Kapos. “Prison is not an intellectuals’ circle,” Mohammadi wrote on Twitter at the time. These acts of violence, he suggested, were part of the nature of imprisonment.

Amir had been held on Ward 350 since 2014, and was moved to the 2nd Brigade shortly before the violence broke out. “A person there was introduced as a lawyer," he sayas. "From the very beginning, he and his team bickered with the November 2019 detainees, and covered the walls of the corridor with pictures of Ali Khamenei. He openly encouraged inmates to write letters of repentance and didn’t give up give up the harassment until finally, he and his team attacked us, and broke the prisoners' heads and hands."

The murder of Shahin Naseri, a witness to the torture of Navid Afkari, took place last September in the 5th Brigade of Greater Tehran Penitentiary. The “ward lawyer” there is one of the better-known Islamic Kapos and was released from jail just a few weeks after the murder, though inmates say he still owed the prison five billion tomans.

Morteza, also a financial convict, is still serving time on the 5th Brigade and new this particular “lawyer” intimately. “He was a dedicated Islamic Kapo who who reported on inmates every day. There was an old man here who we called Mr. Shirzad. He got into a fight once and cursed the leader of Islamic Republic and Islam in the middle of the fray. The Kapo reported him that same night and followed up the next day. A new case was filed against the old man and he was newly sentenced for blasphemy. He caught Covid-19 in prison and died. They transferred the same Kapo to our ward and made him the head of solitary confinement.”

Even if the whole sorry system were dismantled tomorrow, it would take years at a minimum for the truth of the Islamic Republic’s prisoners to be revealed – let alone for their tormenters and their accomplices to face justice. The damage they have done to ex-prisoners’ bodies and minds is irreparable, and there for all to see.

Related coverage:

Hell in South Tehran: Juvenile Prisoners Speak Out

Financial Criminals and Prison Guards Set Up Factories Behind Bars

Tales of Rape and Sex Slaves in an Iranian Prison

Tales from Hell: Prison Guards or Pushers?

Drugs Fed to Jailed Protesters to Control Them

Rich and Well-Connected Prisoners Enjoy Extended Furloughs in Their Luxury Villas

IranWire Exclusive: Sex Workers in Tehran Jails

comments

Economy

How Much Does an Omelet Cost in Iran?

January 4, 2022
Bahram Khodabandeh
4 min read
How Much Does an Omelet Cost in Iran?