This paper examines the emergence of Iranian social scientific and Pahlavi state discourses on the prison in the post World War II era, with a focus on the literature of little-studied state-run institutions such as the Institute for the Cooperation and Industry of Prisoners (ICIP) [Bungāh-i Ta‘āvun va Ṣanā‘ī’-i Zindāniān], as well as early academic texts on criminology. I argue that just as reformists and political adversaries of the Pahlavi state were defining their politics against the prison cell and Pahlavi punishment practices, the state was claiming the prison as a success story in its modernizing efforts. By extolling the social virtues of its penal factories and literacy classes, these state discourses mark the prison-factory as a space of rehabilitation in which the Bad Criminal would be reformed through a productive economy of the body into the Good Citizen. In this paper, I also examine several unpublished Iranian PhD dissertations and early academic texts on criminology and criminal psychology, charting the rise of social scientific debates on the relative merits of certain punishment techniques, and argue that the findings of these new academic disciplines mapped onto the state’s modernizing sentiments regarding productivity, discipline, and citizenship. Influenced by — and often working in concert with — scholars writing in these emergent social scientific and psycho-medical discourses, the Pahlavi state emphasized the need to view the modern “penitentiary” [nedāmatgāh] as a place where criminals were sent “as punishment, not for punishment.” Indeed, by mid-century, state discourses professed a sense of responsibility towards the moral, psychological, and physical cultivation of each prisoner in service of society, building factories, gym facilities, and classrooms in its prisons. According to the increasingly therapeutic logic of these academic and state prison discourses, without these facilities, the “social illness” of crime could never be cured. In uncovering these histories, this paper charts the effects of a Pahlavi state increasingly focused on the cultivation [tarbiyat] of normative citizens through its prison policies.