This article investigates the experience of incarceration and some aspects of its implementation in the early Ptolemaic period as evidenced by letters from and about prisoners written to Zenon and his associates. After a brief methodological excursus, I analyze aspects of prisoner letters that appear across the archive: petitions for release, including those which appeal directly to Zenon’s personal stake in the case and those which describe incarceration as a form of punishment; pleas for care during incarceration; and requests that Zenon personally step in as arbitrator. Together these papyri reveal Zenon to be well-situated to grant prisoner wishes, and that his position was hardly unique: he is one well-attested power broker out of many who held the capacity to open the prison’s doors, or to close them, and who benefitted from an economic system in which the prison was an important constitutive element.