Despite the centrality of practices of punishment and imprisonment, and their global dimensions in the birth of modern nation-states in social theory, they remain largely understudied in the literature on Iraq and the broader Middle East. In this paper, I analyze Iraqi police reports, British mandate archives and memoirs of former political prisoners, and use penal history to look at the emergence of authoritarian violence under the Iraqi nation-state from 1920-1958. The British Mandate (1920-1932) heavily transformed the Iraqi penal systems, including expansion of prisons, mass incarceration, industrial scale prison labor as well as more strict punishments, such as corporal and capital punishment. While some forms of punishment, such as banishment and forced political exile, reflected the global nature of the empire, for most Iraqi detainees however, prison meant being stuck in confinement. Contentious politics and the threat posed by the growing leftist movements under the monarchy (1932-1958) effectively made activists and their opponents geographically and figuratively ‘stuck’ together. In this, the modern Iraqi state effectively created the ‘modern Iraqi political prisoner’, whom, despite their immobility inside designated political prisons, transformed confinement into productive spaces for revolutionary political thought and political mobilization. Conceptually drawing on literature on the state and punishment, I ask: what role does the penal system play in Iraqi state formation? How do developments in Iraqi penal practices help explain the making of authoritarian political systems in Iraq and other post-colonial regimes? In what ways do Iraqi experiences reflect broader global developments in this period? Looking at punishment and state violence from the perspective of imperial mobility and nation-state immobility and ‘stuckness’ not only suggests a close relation between punishment and contentious politics, but also, as I would argue, helps us understand the emergence of authoritarian violence and revolutionary politics in Iraq, and perhaps other post-colonial contexts.