Although often in current affairs, AKP prison policy is rarely analysed. In order to understand what makes possible the massive and unprecedented crackdown on the scale following the attempted coup in July 2016, it is necessary to analyse the reconfigurations of the methods of repression of organised protest and the transformations of the government techniques of prisoners put in place by AKP since 2002. This article shows that the infrastructure that allowed the extensive crackdown that followed July 2016 had been built step by step since the early 2000s. In addition, the deterioration in the conditions of detention of political prisoners since 2016 has been part of a policy of repression, the novelty of which is that it also affects actors previously spared by large-scale imprisonment. The article focuses initially on restructuring of the prison system during the AKP’s power period. He then focused on what the crackdown that followed the attempted coup in 2016 had done to prisons and prisoners.