In Egypt, prisons did not house culprits alone. Provincial prisons doubled as processing stations for thousands of conscripts who passed through each year. To break the association between conscription and carcerality, the colonial state directed low-level officials to stop putting conscripts in chains and otherwise treating them like prisoners. However, the very repetitiveness of such instructions suggests their failure. Once drafted, many conscripts spent their terms of service living in Egypt’s large central prisons, as guards. If they tried to escape, they would be imprisoned. This chapter argues for a capacious understanding of colonial carcerality. It follows convicts and conscripts on their many intertwining journeys to identify the overlap between these forms of unfreedom. They labored on the same projects, lived in the same spaces, and suffered from the same regimes of bodily punishment. Anticolonial activists turned these intertwined forms of servitude into a potent critique of colonial governmentality, which they suggested depended on violent coercion more than the rule of law. However, these critiques also reveal the limits of nationalist visions of emancipation. Colonial officials deliberately divided unfree workers by race, privileging Sudanese over Egyptian conscripts and thus upending local racial hierarchies. In response, Egyptian nationalists demanded their compatriots be treated on par with Europeans, and better than Sudanese. Colonial carcerality requisitioned unfree labor to serve British interests and reified preexisting racial divisions.