What do Hebrew- and Arabic-script personal letters, court deeds, petitions and rescripts from the Cairo Geniza reveal about the ways everyday people experienced spaces of state violence in medieval Syria and Egypt? Chronicles that discuss incarceration privilege the experiences of courtiers and other state elites. Cairo Geniza documents, on the other hand, speak to the lives of incarcerated people outside the court: merchants, bankers, scholars, dyers, glassmakers and other working classes. While courtiers were held in palace dungeons, everyday people experienced police quarters, funduqs, private homes and brick-and-mortar prisons as sites of confinement, interrogation and torture. Spaces of state violence in Geniza sources vary from a city square where police brutally beat a man who failed to pay the jizyah (capitation tax), to a private Cairene travel lodge in which constables engage in a clandestine interrogation of a wealthy merchant suspected of underhanded dealings. Moreover, the practice of house arrest turned hundreds of debtors’ residences into personal prisons where the poor were compelled to pay the salaries of their own guards. Finally, state-sanctioned, formal prisons appear in documents as both prominent urban landmarks and heralds of starvation and terror. This presentation contends that the spatialization of state violence in medieval Egypt and Syria allowed Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk leaders to punish in the public and private spheres and thus effectively assert their power over both arenas.