Istanbul, Turkey—Last week, the Turkish journalist Oray Eğin returned to Turkey to attend his father’s funeral. It was the first time he’d been home in months, and when he arrived at Istanbul Ataturk Airport, he was detained. The news immediately spread, making headlines: Yet another Turkish journalist arrested!

It turned out, however, that Eğin was being questioned for an entirely different reason—a benign legal matter unrelated to his profession. “The point is that people are so used to this at this point that they assumed that’s what was happening,” Eğin said, speaking on his American cellphone because he was afraid his Turkish phone might be tapped. “It’s routine.”

Last year, Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey 148th in the world on its press freedom index, just a couple spots above Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. Almost 100 journalists are currently in jail. (Here is a list of their names.) This past week brought some rare good news: Four long-imprisoned journalists were let go. As one Turkish journalist posted on Facebook, “Four journalists released, only 96 more to go.” Most are anti-government secularists and dissident Kurds, and have been in prison for years, without actually being convicted of a crime. All are victims of a surreally dysfunctional justice system that is more directly controlled by political forces than ever before.

Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government defends the policemen and prosecutors behind these arrests, usually claiming that the journalists support some terrorism organization or another, whether it’s an ultranationalist group or a Kurdish one. The AKP hardly seems moved by international criticism. When the American novelist Paul Auster, in an interview last month with a Turkish newspaper, declared that he wouldn’t come to Turkey to promote his book because of the severe limitations placed on the press, Erdoğan, in his signature Istanbul-by-way-of-South-Boston manner, replied, “Who cares if you come or not?”

More insidious has been Erdoğan’s quieter method of censoring critical journalists. Recently, the Turkish journalist Can Dündar explained in a newspaper column what it’s like to work in Erdoğan’s Turkey. Dündar, then a TV show host, had been preparing a segment about the prime minister’s controversial statement that he might deport 100,000 Armenians illegally working in Turkey. A superior called Dündar at the last minute to inform him that they would not be running the segment. Dündar challenged the hasty withdrawal, but soon received another call.