There’s an inherent friction to the world’s prison systems. We lock people away, shut them off from the rest of the world until they serve the time that’s been handed to them for whatever crime they were convicted of, and then release them back out into the wild to go on with their lives. But what happens next?
Countless studies see that crime leads to prison, leads to crime, leads to prison, in a vicious cycle. Former convicts are, for all manner of reasons, pretty darn likely to re-offend, and so there’s a number of countries and prison systems that put rehabilitation first and foremost among their priorities. Prison is a punishment, certainly, but at the end of it, those people need to be able to reintegrate into society.
That’s the focus of Prison Architect: Second Chances, the fifth DLC expansion for the popular prison management sim.
It dramatically expands upon the game’s reform system, letting you give your prisoners the opportunity to improve their behaviour for reduced sentences, and to learn new skills and jobs that can set them up in the outside world.
The starting point here is being able to dive into the re-offender rate, or the chance of reoffending, to be more exact. You can look at any of your inmates and see how they are to find themselves back in the clink a few months later, with various factors, such as having few family members to rely on meaning you might have to work harder to lower that rate before they can be reintroduced into society.
One of the ways of doing that is to improve their work experience. There’s a bunch of new jobs that are possible for prisoners to engage in, with the facility to create a bakery or restaurant in the prison. These actually serve members of the public, with customer satisfaction dependent on the quality of the service, and the prisoners gaining valuable experience. The higher the work experience level, the more likely they are to gain the stability they need for the outside world.
You can also dangle the carrot of reduced sentence times. Where you previously only had the option to punish prisoners by dropping them into solitary for a while to cool off, now you can reduce sentences on a weekly basis if they meet certain criteria.
There are other ways to improve attitudes though, through animal therapy that introduces prisoners to dogs to help them create loving bonds, improve their mental state and lower their chance of misconduct while in prison. Then there’s the conflict resolution rooms, where former prisoners will come back to the prison to lead sessions and teach inmates how to handle certain situations on the outside.
It’s all based on real prison systems and initiatives from around the world, and coming from some of the overly caricatured elements of the base game and Psych Ward DLC, it’s positively refreshing to see more progressive and realistic elements being featured in the game.
