Cell-ibrating Prison Architect's Finest Jails
Panopticanned
*Gavel thumps* "Silence! Bring the prisoner forward. Craig 'Thomas' Pearson, you have been found guilty of being a rubbish Prison Architect. A most serious offense that resulted in a record number of convicted felons escape your shoddily designed hole. As punishment, you are to spend the morning looking at the Steam Workshop, finding lovely prisons that you can compare your weedy efforts to. Then we'll shoot you or drown you or something. Be off with you, and may Gabe have mercy on your soul."
It's true. I am no good at designing prisons. My attempts to create criminal corrals have been more poorridge than porridge, more clunk than clink, all fail and no jail. To be honest, I've no idea why they even asked me to build one. But I don't need to be good, as other people are aiding and abetting me with their work on the Steam Workshop. A fairly recent update allows players to share their own gaols, and as I suspected there have been piles of interesting lock-ups uploaded. I've had a quick scour of the Workshop, and found some dramatically designed and detailed detainers. Some of these are only possible with a few funds embezzled, but I've not punished the creators for that. I just loved looking at what people can do with the tools at hand.
The circular walls of of Kumpla shouldn't exist, because the game is built on straight lines. Nevertheless, the designer teased circles out of the otherwise unwieldly building blocks. It's not based on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, which is a shame, but instead there's a fictional backstory of scientists using prisoners as slaves to help build an anti-gravity device. It seems like it should be oppressive, but there's weight benches in the cells and a common room, so it's not a total hellhole.
Another circular layout. This prison is designed as a tribute to Tesla's AC motor, mirroring the wrapped coils of the wires with the pathways. Aside from celebrating one of the greatest people ever to have been portrayed by David Bowie, the layout is apparently mostly efficient, and only the workshops need some streamlining to get it up to speed.
This isn't flashy and it isn't based on anything in particular, despite the name suggesting it should have green grass (it does) and pretty girls (it does not). It is a big and well-balanced prison that's fun to fiddle with. If you're not very good at the game, poke around this one and see what makes it tick along.
I love the backstory of this: the USS Enterprise has been decommissioned and sent to the surface of a planet to be used as a prison. It's in a bare state with minimal prisoners and plenty of empty beds awaiting intergalactic evildoers, and it's up to you to turn it into a working prison. My favorite detail is the electric chair: from the view we have, I think it's been placed in the same position as the Captain's Chair. Make it so.
Wow. This is a giant and surprisingly faithful recreation of the Tower of London. The medieval design allows the prisoners plenty of space to roam when they're not all tucked up in their freshly laundered prison sheets. This isn't just a taxing prison on the population's lungs: the size of the map will make weaker PCs wheeze like they've just been shivved in the shower. Despite the size, it's actually a tad overstaffed. If you need a few extra FPS, you can sack a few guards without too much trouble.
This feels like it's part of a thought experiment: what would happen if you gave prisoners a place to live and work in, and not just a prison? The result is Cathnicle, an almost impossible to maintain town with a town hall, a hospital, a police station, a park, a church, a graveyard, a morgue, restaurants, laundromats, factories, as well as apartments for the prisoners. The money it costs to keep the prisoners living as free men should will almost always prove too much for you to win.
There are many design principles that architects apply to their work, but I don't imagine 'making it look like a reptile as viewed from above' is likely to win many awards. That's what The Turtle does, and while it's a cute little prison design, it's also apparently prone to riots. That seems like a challenge to your despotic abilities, if you ask me.
This is just showing off. It's a small prison that can house up to 128 prisoners at a time. It's the internal structure that makes it worth downloading: there are ten different cell designs here, but even as it's showing off all the different ways you can house tattooed hard-men, it's an efficiently designed prison as well.
After the horrors of fleeing from the rebels, FTL's Kestral has been recomissioned as a prison transport ship. You'd think this would throw up a bunch of design challenges, but it's not as cramped as the original game's ship. There's room here for a decent number of cells, should you have the skill to shape the left over space into an efficient criminal catcher.
Green Park Forced Retirement Community
Just another well-designed lock-up, but one with a murky description that pitches the place as a "retirement community". It sounds like a great place to live in practice, and it actually works pretty smoothly as a prison, but really this is here so you can click the link and enjoy the lengthy reworking of prison life as a gentile community endeavor.
