‘The Legacy of Evin Prison: Reflections on What I Learned About Prison in Iran’
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
Church House, London, Monday 11th November, 2024
Lecture transcript
What I Learned in Iran about Prison
By Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
Good evening, everyone. It is an honour to be standing here tonight, which frankly, feels so unreal. Never in a million years when I was despairing in prison, I dared to think about seeing such a day. But here I am, honoured to be invited by the Longford Trust, which does a lot to provide second chances to prisoners to bring them back to life once free.
Throughout one of my therapy sessions my therapist told me; people are often curious about prison and its stories but no one wishes to spend one day in prison.
I, however, spent nearly 1800 days in the notorious Evin prison in Iran, on trumped up charges that I always denied.
On April 3rd 2016, when I was traveling back with my then 22-months old baby to London after spending the Persian new year with my family in Tehran, I was abducted at the airport, taken to some unknown places for a night, then flown into Kerman, a city in the south east part of Iran, where I disappeared for a couple of weeks without anyone knowing where I was, except that I was alive.
There is very little I know about those early days, as I never had the guts to ask my family how they felt when I went missing. My memory of those early days is nothing but a blur. For a very long time, I was carrying all those horrific memories in details and I thought I was going mad.
And that is how my six-year ordeal began; within five months I was interrogated, put on a sham trial which took less than two hours, convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.
I spent the first 45 days of my incarceration in solitary confinement in Kerman Prison. The cell had tall walls and cold floor. There was no bed but only thin blanket. I didn’t shower for days as I wasn’t allowed to leave the cell. The walls were towering and the constant light in the cell was blinding. I was terrified, lost and emotionally traumatised.
No-one ever explained why they took me to that place which was estranged and alienating. I didn’t eat proper food for weeks and survived on cheese and bread. I missed my baby and could not believe they have separated us from each other. I was mainly on my own but sometimes they’d send other prisoners into the cell for a day or two. There was very little conversation between us as they were mainly drowsy and intoxicated, incapable of making any form of communication.
Before I was transferred to Tehran, I was briefly let out of the cell into the general ward where the majority of inmates were on death row on drug-related charges; either smuggling or consuming. We did not have anything in common except lacking freedom. They were kind to me, especially when they found out I had a young child. And I had so much sympathy for them; they were the obvious victims of social injustice. In a country soaring with natural wealth, they were some of the poorest citizens to whom life had been unkind; they had turned into trading drugs in order to make ends meet which was a recipe to make them frequent visitors in prison.
There, I was one of the 420 inmates in the sea of prisoners swimming in narrow and overcrowded corridors. There were young and under-aged girls, pregnant women, mothers, infants, babies, daughters and elderly women. And there was me, a lost mother separated from her child not knowing exactly what a dreadful future was ahead of us.
At least there, unlike the solitary, I was surrounded by people. There was life, and there were arguments. I was able to use the phone but only allowed to call my parents. I could shower every day but the disproportionate number of showers for inmates, an equivalent of 3 to 120 prisoners, meant you had to queue to use the shower and it could not last more than 5 minutes. Otherwise, they’d kick the door open and pull you out. I cared less about my shirt or trousers disappearing from the washing line than my only precious thing I had with me; my wedding ring.
Prison was overcrowded; the number of prisoners living there was almost three times more than its actual capacity. Many women had been there before, pardoned, released, reoffended and sent back to prison; and that felt so normal to them.
After over two months there, I was relocated to the security ward of the Revolutionary Guards within Evin Prison where I spent the following seven months in solitary and under tight security conditions. On Christmas Day of 2016, they moved me to the one and only female political ward in Iran in Evin Prison to serve the rest of my sentence.
These two prisons – Kerman and Evin – had many things in common, from fights to food ration and complex friendships. Yet they differed from each other in one specific way; the majority of women in Kerman Prison had given up. They had very little to hold on or look forward to. Many of them had their husbands in prison at the same time and their children taken into the custody of their relatives or government. Many of them knew they’d end up in prison, yet had very little option to change that.
In Evin, however, inmates had come up with ways to bring more meaning to their lives. For them, prison life was something more significant than simply walls, bars, locks and clang of gates. They had found threads to connect them to their life outside the walls. They had found hope.
The solidarity amongst women in Evin prison was bigger and stronger than anything I had ever witnessed in my life. Women, regardless of their religion, political views or social class, would come together for one specific reason; to defy oppression, fighting for their rights and standing up against the authoritarian regime that had unjustly incarcerated them.
One of our main challenges in prison was time. We were relentlessly struggling to find ways to improve the quality of the time we spent in prison. The authorities were exceptionally reluctant to provide us with options, but we found ways to overcome that. I have spent time with women in Evin who had 10 or more years of sentence, served graciously and with dignity. They were strong pillars in the ward, helping others, including myself, to go through those hard times of desperation. By sticking together, we each increased our chances of surviving. We read together, entertained each other, cooked and ate together, exercised together and fought together. We were stronger together. And that, helped us tremendously to find ways to pass the time.
The unwavering tenacity of these women kept all of us battling the obvious discriminatory rules between male and female wards. Prison, as a totalitarian misogynistic state of its own, used every chance to discipline us on every level. We, as women, had less access to phone calls, health treatments and even goods on the shelf in our tiny shop on-site. We could each use the phone for 10 minutes 3 times a week.
They knew very well that in a traditional society like Iran where women are largely in charge of home, reducing family contact would be the most painful yet efficient form of punishment which came at little cost to them. They were reluctant to give us our basic rights, but we were determined to fight for them. We fought for everything, from convincing them to give us a weekly mother-and-baby visit to raising money to buy an oven for the ward so we could bake our own bread which was not drugged with sedatives. Our power against them sometimes surprised ourselves as much as them.
While inmates in Kerman disproportionately had low literacy levels and disrupted family and educational histories, the political ward in Evin consisted predominantly of educated, professional and politically active women who had certain knowledge, skills and expertise that gave them a lot more power. That, paradoxically, also made them more vulnerable as the authorities did not like to be challenged by some authoritative and confident women who knew more about their rights than their captors.
The government’s main use of prison was punishment. But there was also rehabilitation. They underestimated the individual agency and power of each prisoner. We had access to books and knowledge gave us power. We read about different topics including history, politics, philosophy and feminism. I discovered a lot more about punishment by reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment in prison or Arendt’s On Revolution. We had a long waiting list for Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale, which was sent to one of the inmates through post. We found Prison Break on state TV, which we all agreed was an innocent mistake. It was extremely popular amongst everyone and we were looking for routes in the on-site clinic in prison afterwards!
Some women were arbitrarily detained through mass street arrests or group social punishment schemes and then pardoned as a result of prison overcrowding. Mass pardons would happen a couple of times a year in order to reduce the number of prisoners. Sometime later people would return to prison, this time for standing up for their rights.
I believe a growing prison population is an indication of failure by the government. It is a lazy policy to lock people up when you don’t know what to do with them, or for politicians to equate security with more imprisonments. It was followed by a lazy politics of mass arrests followed by mass releases. The prison services knew that prison not only did not have a deterrent or rehabilitating effect, but a counter-productive one. The government authorities avoided seeing this.
Prison in all places is used to control those who harm society. However, states like Iran also use prison as a form of punishment to control the whole of society and its criticisms. The soaring increase in political prisoners in Iran over the past two decades is an indication of weakness of a state which is willing to inflict substantial pain on individuals and communities to discourage dissent.
The life of a prisoner like me in Iran was hugely uncertain. As a hostage, whether I had good or bad behaviour in prison had no impact on my freedom. To them, I was simply an object with a constantly changing value.
The open-endedness of the imprisonment was all-consuming, not knowing when your ordeal was going to end. No one took responsibility for explaining what was happening and why. I was continually kept in the dark, not knowing what would happen next. I had endless unfulfilling dreams about freedom: that all my friends got released and my name wasn’t on the list; or I couldn’t find my shoes to leave prison; or even coming back to London but I couldn’t find my home. I have dreamt and thought for years about what freedom would look like. Sometimes I’d lose the line between imagination and reality. Even in my dreams there was no escape from the uncertainty of when this would end.
Just before finishing my initial five-year sentence (and leaving prison), they conveniently opened a new case against me and sentenced me to more years in prison. For months, I lived under the terror of being sent back to prison, which luckily never happened, but the ambiguity was always there. The uncertainty of my imprisonment could sometimes push me to the brink, something I sincerely believe will resonate very well with the IPP prisoners in Britain. And it didn’t leave me alone in freedom either; for months whilst free, I’d still wake up in the morning pondering whether I was still in Evin. With the news of every one of my former inmates being released, my nightmares would come back. Yet again they were being released and I was still waiting for freedom.
But we all find little rays of hope at times of darkness and despair, and for me that was humanity. For a prisoner, nothing is worse than feeling forgotten. There were times that I despaired, thinking no one knew where I was or how I felt, until the day I realised that, had it not been for the love, support and prayers of the people, known and unknown, I wouldn’t have been home then.
I always believed that our families who were fighting for us outside, suffered more than we did. They were the ones who had to deal with our absence, the ambiguity of where we were, and under what condition.
A couple of months after I came home to London, I went to see the ‘Freedom’ exhibition curated by Ai WeiWei for the Koestler Trust, who had designed 15 cells based on the size of a typical cell in a UK prison, each containing a collection of art-work done by prisoners across the UK. Whilst there, a volunteer came forward and told me that he had watched me being released, getting on the plane and coming home, whilst he was inside prison himself. When we met, he was out on probation. Once he showed me his ankle tag, all of a sudden we had a lot in common. We talked of our children and uncertainties and prison scars, but also hopes for a second chance at life. It felt bizarrely familiar. He then called his mates and we took a group photo, in freedom. If he is listening to me at this moment, I hope he is still free and back with his kids.
On the 17th March 2022 I came home to London after six long years of separation. The euphoric moment of freedom that I had spent years thinking about, was all of a sudden unfulfilling. There was something missing. I had left many people behind bars in Iran, and that made me rethink freedom.
I still find it therapeutic and redemptive to talk about them and tell their stories, to shine a light on their ordeal and for them to know that they are not alone. All those women in Iran who have been sentenced to prolonged periods of time, sometimes tortured for standing up for their rights, and for holding onto human dignity in the face of an oppressive system, their pain and suffering should not pass unnoticed.
The road to freedom was long and bendy with so many dead-ends along the way. We finally made it, but we couldn’t have achieved freedom on our own. So many people carried us along the way to whom we will feel forever indebted. And it only makes it fair for those who need our help, that we support them and be their voice. We will not stop fighting for them until they are free and safe.
No one ever promised that life would be easy, especially at time which we are witnessing today. As I often reminisce about life post-prison, we are born with pain and will carry that pain with us throughout our journey. I was born in the middle of a revolution and grew up in the Iran and Iraq war. I felt I had a unique experience, to have witnessed war, which allowed me to look at life differently. Considering what is happening around the world right now in Ukraine, Israel Palestine and Lebanon, that doesn’t seem such a novel experience anymore. In a world of conflict, holding onto our humanity matters. In dark storms, we should cherish the lighthouses.
Coming home, however, wasn’t easy. Being away for a long time made re-engaging with society much more complicated than expected. I came back feeling prison had wasted my life. I couldn’t change what was passed. I had to come to terms with it.
They often talk about the physical and mental implications post-prison but infrequently talk about the economic hardship imposed on families through imprisonment. Prisons are expensive to run but, in Iran, the government has all these ways to throw the cost of imprisonment on families – from paying for food to loo papers, plates and mugs.
The situation in Iran gets a lot worse when you come out of prison, with old jobs long gone, and new ones much harder to find for ex-prisoners, former homes and savings all spent. No doubt that is the same in the UK. Life is on hold while you are on the inside. You realise how much it has withered only when you come out. It is hard to nurture it again.
Building more prisons is not going to solve the problem of overcrowding, but investing in ways to help prisoners reintegrate is. Increasing resources for prisons, improving healthcare services, providing access to education and employability skills will advance the quality of life in prisons but also pave the way for life after.
At the end, I’d like to remind those in charge of prisons and prison reforms, that the governments have a duty of care for prisoners as its citizens. They have an obligation to provide them with a path back to the right way. A cycle of punishment benefits no one. No one in prison should ever feel society has given up on them.
For those of you who are listening to me from inside prisons: as someone who has been once in your shoes, it is devastating to be away from your family, friends or home, but I want you to know that it will eventually end.
Hold on to that thread and don’t despair. There is life there outside prison waiting for you. However hard sometimes, it is good to have a second chance.
Thank you.