Despite promises to the contrary, Jimmy Carter largely continues the same policy toward Iran and the authoritarian Shah as in years past. However, with the outbreak of large protests just weeks after his visit to Tehran at the end of 1977, US policymakers find themselves poorly informed and positioned to react to the changing situation in Iran. The documents in this chapter map the process of Washington’s initial misjudgment of the near future for its ally through the slow realization that the Shah is not going to see out the year, let alone the decade. In his place rises a new force, utterly unfamiliar to the White House, and led by an enigmatic figure, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose fiery rhetoric and anachronistic beliefs leave Carter and his advisors scrambling for a response. After the US agrees to take in the ailing Shah for medical treatment, students acting in Khomeini’s name storm the US Embassy in Tehran and forever alter the world's perception of the nascent Islamic Republic. The chapter ends by documenting the scramble in the White House to free the American hostages and Carter handing over the presidency to Ronald Reagan as the hostages finally return home.

In the late 1920s, at the same time as the centralization of Iran’s legal system, the nascent Pahlavi state inaugurated a carceral system and imaginary in which modern prisons were promoted as necessary and progressive solutions to myriad social crises. In this era, Pahlavi statesmen and law enforcement officials attended conferences on policing and prisons in Europe, drawing architectures and techniques of punishment from those sources and working to dramatically expand Iran’s carceral system. This chapter examines state discourses on the prison in the aftermath of legal centralization and argues the mid-century Iranian government claimed its new-look prison system as a success story in its modernizing efforts. By vastly expanding Iran’s prison system and extolling the social virtues of its penal factories and literacy classes, the Pahlavi government marked the prison as a space of rehabilitation in which the bad criminal could be reformed into the good citizen, normalizing the incarceration of increasing numbers of Iranians in the process. This chapter also examines the establishment of the academic field of criminology in Iran, which emerged at the same time as these state-led reform efforts. Charting the rise of social scientific debates on crime and punishment, this chapter argues that this new academic discipline mapped onto the state’s modernizing sentiments regarding productivity, citizenship, rehabilitation, and modern progress.