It’s an ongoing process to make the facility more habitable balancing what little money there is left with creating a place where the prisoners can find a semblance of happiness. A newly staffed psychologist is helping me determine the needs of each prisoner and allowing me to create comforts that will help them serve their sentences without any incidents.Įverything is still going wrong, but through designing and redesigning, and knowing the prisoners inside and out it’s a complex that might even end up being a peaceful place to live rather than the cold, dead panopticon it looks like.Īt the moment, the floors are stained with blood, the medical ward is filled with patients, and the CEO isn’t too impressed by my handiwork. Within the walls of my prison, the bars were still rattling as I struggle to keep up with demand. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. “Do we want them to punish people? Do we want to rehabilitate them? Do we want them to have training in something that will allow them to get a job when they leave? We’ve never known the answer to this question and the result is our penitentiaries and prisons in general are very schizophrenic in what they intend to do.” “Canadians have a real problem with what do we want our prisons to do,” Mr. This is something real architectural design in the Canada system have supposedly evolved to counteract. My first prison in Prison Architect that enabled maximum and minimum security prisoners to inter mingle wound up causing a lot of bloodshed and loss of life. But in maximum security institutions, inmates will often have to go through several locked doors and pat downs in order to simply get food. Delay.Įducational reform is a tricky topic when it comes to prison purpose and design. One room available in the video game is a workshop that allows inmates to learn new skills is the workshop.
There was something inherently interesting in the world of prison building where the balance between economical design and human nature meet, according to Mr. It was then that it occurred to me that building a prison was quite good fun, and that it shouldn’t be, but it is.” Introversion SoftwareĪfter Subversion was canceled in 2008, the team decided to take this idea of building prisons and make it the studio’s next project.
“I started working on how to simulate a prison and how it was going to work. “Part of the research I did for that game is I went around to Alcatraz in San Francisco because I wanted to have a level where you break into a prison,” Chris Delay, one of Introversion’s co-founders said in an interview.
One level tasked players with sneaking into the most famous of all prisons, Alcatraz. Prison Architect began life as a level within another Introversion game, Subversion, that was about breaking into high-security buildings and making a getaway with your teammates.