Game forcefully restrains prisoners in unsecured cell blocks

[PeterF]

Over the last month or two I've very fequently seen inexperiencd players get completely stumped, confused and frustrated because their prisoners would not leave their cells to follow the regime or otherwise satisfy their needs. The culprit always ends up being that there's a clear path from the cell block to freedom, but the game doesn't communicate this properly so people just think the AI is bugged.

Why is the game preventing inmates from escaping when the player gives them the best opportunity to do so? Is this a fix for the old complaint of "omg guards are letting prisoners go"?
I believe the AI needs to be allowed to do their thing again so that the player can see what they've done wrong, rather than paralyse the game until they guess it or get help from steam or reddit.

Has someone put up a report for this in Mantis? If not, should I try to reproduce it?

[CumpyLustard]

This has popping up more and more on the forums here and on the Steam boards, and I agree that it is an issue, especially for newer players. I believe I posted this story in another similar thread, but a friend of mine just recently bought the game and it took him several hours to figure out why his prisoners wouldn't leave their cells. I hadn't played for a while and was trying to help him, not realizing that this restriction was in place (his prison looked fine from his screenshots).

I don't see why it needs to be this strict. I could've sworn that it used to work as such: if you didn't build your prison securely, prisoners might behave for a little bit, but they would almost always make a break for it eventually. This very quickly taught me that I wasn't building my prisons right when I first started, which makes more sense to me. As it is now, the player really isn't informed at all about it, and they probably haven't researched deployment yet to see the notification there, and even some things that seem reasonably secure are deemed otherwise by the game.

I think I have seen a few reports on Mantis with people saying their prisoners are stuck in their cells, so I would do a search quick before creating a new ticket.

[PeterF]

This behavior is still producing tons of "prisoners not going anywhere wtf do i do" posts . I'm surprised there's so little support being shown here.

[PeterF]

For a few months now we've had an error message that notifies players that there's no access to the canteen because of this behavior, but all that's done is change the thread titles from "prisoners to nothing" to "no access to canteen?!"

This is still a show stopper for many new players and there's still no real ingame explanation of what the AI is doing and how it's related to the error message. I'll put up a mantis post as soon as I have time, there are a few other logistics issues that I need to make sure are reported too.

[czar mohab]

The game needs a good, solid, "First 48 Hours" tutorial. Real simple plot - empty land, make a basic prison. Very simple "build a thing here, build another thing there, take out these grants and fulfill them, oh look your prisoners are arriving soon and you still need a wall/fence"... Basic. Make it smart enough that if the "build a wall" call hasn't happened by a certain time it directs the player to turn off intake until it is completed, then turn it back on.

This should help solve the issue as posted.

The Czar