Prisons are key institutions of state power and yet they are often absent in discussions of the formation of the state. This paper uses interviews with prisoners and prison officers in Ghana as well as reflections on similar work undertaken in Nigeria. It explores how those within these institutions both inmates and staff conceptualise the state, simultaneously exploring how the Ghanaian state comes into being through the daily practices and physical infrastructure of the prison. The paper explores what is produced through disjunctures between discourses of the state and its daily production through what is present but also through what is perceived to be absent within the daily life of the prison. It highlights how the state can be both at once highly intimate and incredibly remote.