Suggestion: Cell Blocks

[AgentPaper]

While the segregation of regimes and the prison by security level is nice, ultimately it's too restrictive. Rather than having "Low Sec" "Mid Sec", and "High Sec", what if instead we had "Cell Block A", "Cell Block B", "Cell Block C", and so on? Basically, you would paint parts of the prison as being accessible to one or more Cell Blocks, and any prisoners in that cell block would only be allowed to use those facilities.

Then, you could set Cell Block A to be low-security prisoners only, Cell Block B is mid-sec and low-sec prisoners, Cell Block C is mid-sec prisoners, and Cell Block D is high-sec prisoners. Or, you could have 6 Cell Blocks, all of which are High Sec prisoners, or four mid-sec and 2 low/mid sec, or whatever you wish.

As a way to expand upon the system, you could also say that certain Cell Blocks only allow prisoners with specific skills, for example Cell Block D might be only for kitchen-trained prisoners, and would have a seperate schedule to wake them up to help cook breakfast for the rest of the prison, while everyone else sleeps in. Or maybe a special cell block with "manual" control, where nobody is assigned there automatically, but you can throw troublemakers in there to keep them away from the main prison population.

[wardenspector]

This is exactly what I came to the forum to suggest. Personally, I'd like to see cell blocks with individual schedules. I don't want all all 100 prisoners in east wing showering at the same time, I want them to take turns, to reduce the amount of stabbing. I don't want my cooks to have to struggle to feed every prisoner at the same time, I want meals staggered so some prisoners can be showering while others eat, while others are in the yard, while others are in lockup. I know you can set schedules for each security level, but this feature becomes pointless if I'm running a maxsec only prison.

The way I like to play the game is to keep no more than ten prisoners to a "block" and keep them completely isolated from other blocks at all times. What that currently means for me is that the only shared facilities I can have are the ones that don't see daily use, like infirmary, parole, and visitation. I would like to be able to have shared showers, canteen, common room, and yard without having literally every single prisoner using them at the same time.

To take it to an extreme, it'd be nice to be able to set individual schedules per prisoner and have a list of already made schedules to apply to new intakes as the player sees fit.

Ultimately what I want to see most in this game is a way to segregate prisoners of the same security level using the scheduling system, however the devs see fit.

edit: it would also be really nice if "Free time" could only be spent within a prisoner's own block or in shared facilities like visitation and the infirmary.

[chess123mate]

I was thinking about this too! I definitely support this idea.

[uplayuserid1979]

If we made it possible to assign prisoners to cell blocks, then I and my fellow micro-managing architects could make more efficient use of our prison space.
E.G. Consider a prison with 250 prisoners in 5 cell blocks of 50 prisoners each. 4 cell blocks designated Max Sec A,B,C,D and 1 cell block designated SuperMax (darn you Alex Whiteman, you've killed 30 people in my prison so far! You have a luxury suite and your own chef, what more do you want??!!)
Consider also a 10x10 yard and 8x8 canteen. In the current build, the only segregation I could do without decreasing my per capita income, is 200 of one and 50 of the other, which will quickly overwhelm my current yard and canteen setups. I could change the sec status of 3 of my prison blocks, but about 1 in 3 of these guys have named traits and all of them have been up to no good since their arrival days.
If I break my Max Sec down into A,B,C, and D cell blocks, then I can set up my regime so that at no time is there more than 50 prisoners in either the canteen or the yard. Now my yard and canteen are not sitting empty for most of the day while I'm trying to scrape the money together to build more structures. In addition, I could keep my reform programs going more frequently and reach more of my population per day.

[Threehorns]

thumbs up

[yimbee]

Love this idea