Getting busted and the justice system.. Options

[kzt]

You can do a dystopia as a setting. It isn't that hard to come up with them. I'd just rather that people actually did the world building to produce a dystopia instead of mixing tropes from a dozen movies and claiming that you have a well though out setting, when what you have is a bunch of jury rigged plot devices.

[Critias]

[kzt]

It's like potato chips. Mmm, salty greasy evilness.

[nezumi]

Go-gangs aren't so unreasonable when you consider a few things...

Firstly, they live on the borders. If things get too hot, they hop the border and Lone Star can't pursue. Some of Seattle's neighbors aren't too friendly with Seattle, but really don't have much to loose by having some go-gangs drive through a few miles of their wilderness.

Secondly, the SINless just about make the majority of the population in the metroplex. Being in a go-gang is basically being on top of the world. So I can certainly believe that Lone Star initially made surgical strikes against go-gangs, but then the next lower go-gang raised itself up a notch to fill the vacuum, the go-gang below that went up a notch and so on, until you get down to the street gangs where one realized it could jump up into go-gangs, who have more power and get more women, so they did so, and gangs filled in THAT gap, until at the very bottom some dirt suckers have the chance to employ a few more members. Nature abhors a vacuum, and until Lone Star is willing to replace go-gangs with a concrete, non-violent governing body, they will continue to arise to fill that niche.

Thirdly, it's the same problem the US is having in Iraq right now. It's guerilla fighters. When they come out in force, the go-gangs disappear. When they bomb a building, it pisses off twice as many new people who join go-gangs. When they plan a bait and surprise attack, another corporate manager within Lone Star who wants to make sure the baiting manager fails sells the information so the mission dies before it starts. Keep in mind also, the go-gangs have military grade gear. Lone Star sends in a bait truck with a bunch of gangs and a bunch of strato-9s, they get hit by a bunch of RPGs and sticky bombs. Then the go-gangs share that LS is getting uppity and nothing brings a lot of competing groups together like outside competition, so go-gangs across the city start bombing Lone Star depots and destroying Lone Star cars. LS loses out big.

Finally, the big corporations do NOT want the go-gangs to disappear. Aztechnology doesn't send a truck through NAN into Seattle. It sends a huge super tanker, or a giant, heavily armed truck convoy. You don't mess with the Aztechnology trucks because they have the money to make sure their products make it to the shelves. However JoeCo. doesn't have that money, so they DO get hit painfully by the go-gangs. Aztechnology then benefits because the 'little guy' competition, which honestly is probably their most significant threat, since they have a detente with the other AAAs, is severely curtailed, allowing only megacorps like Aztechnology to reliably engage in international trade. A plus!


The whole idea DOES make sense (with a certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief), it just doesn't occur to us naturally because few of us have ever had experience with anything like having large tracts of roads which are considered unsafe. That is basically the case in many countries however, so it's not unheard of, just not quite as crazy as Shadowrun has it.

[Snow_Fox]

It's been a while since I read through my LS book but I seem to recall that they want you in the system and alive because of profit. You get sent to a corp run facility and they get to charge the government per head. You get shot in a back alley by to LS goons, they's spent money on the ammo. Put you inside for 5 years, and collect those :nuyen: for tax money.

And since most criminals are repeat offenders you'll probably get arrested again, helped by the fact you're now in the system with a SIN and they get to make money off you all over again the next time you go through the system.

[Ravor]

Sure, but the real question is, do they make more money with you on ice then they would by selling your organs at blackmarket prices?

[ShadowDragon8685]

And your used 'ware prices, too. Remember kids, it helps to have cyber and bio that they can't extract without killing you - but not by much.

[martindv]

[martindv]

[Snow_Fox]

Guys, you're getting too gory. Just think of the bottom line. For example you're paid :nuyen: 50 /day/inmate. But it only costs you :nuyen: 10/day/inmate to feed them.

So it's in your best interest to keep them healthy-medical adds to costs- so no fights or riots. If they happened, put 'em down fast.

And if that runner who just got sent in for 5-8years happens to have cutting edge cyber, well, lets run a few tests on it and sell the feed back to the highest bidder. Sure Ares might not like it if we're willing to sell the specs of the flaws we found on the market but they can bid too.

[kzt]

[Kagetenshi]

[kzt]

I think the prison at the start of "Batman Begins" is an average to above average 3rd world prison camp. I remember seeing people referring to it as death camp, whihc shows they just don't have a good idea that the wealthy West lives different than the 3rd world.

[BookWyrm]

Which is why my character has a legal SIN & a shyst---oops, excuse me, a retained duly authorised legal advisor/representative on speed-dial.

[Fortune]

[martindv]

[kzt]

They may think that, but that's not they act. It scares the hell out of them, as they see the medical costs exploding and the total budget static. I'm peripherally involved with the telemedicine program to deal with hepatitis in state prisons. But the issue of huge numbers of old prisoners is the likely budget buster.

[Critias]

[ShadowDragon8685]

50 :nuyen: a day to house a prisoner? Let's see...

That's 18,212.5 (I multiplied by 364.25, to account for leap years) nuyen per year per prisoner.

The very minimum you can pay each Lone Star officer is :nuyen: 24,000 a month. This is the bare minimum, because with anything less, he won't even be able to make a Low lifestyle. And like hell anybody's going to work for so little money he has to resort to squatting part of the year. Especially in such a dangerous occupation of prison guard. So let's double it to 48,000 :nuyen:.

Now, assuming Lone Star simply relies on their own High-Threat Response Teams to put down riots, the prisons could maybe sneak by with one guard per twenty inmates, but that's only if you like letting the prisoners basically run the place, just being unable to leave. This is just straight muscle guards, not specialists like mages (you're gonna need 'em, and they cost big nuyen - like hell any wage-mage is going to risk his life daily with prisoners for less than he could make doing research with a megacorp, or as a Shadowrunner) or security hackers and spiders rigging the building.

Now, that's a constant cost, and remember, you need someone on shift at all times. So even if you take an enormous risk and run twelve hour shifts, that's two guards for every 20 prisoners, and round up to 2.5 because you'll need swing guards available to fill shifts, weekends, and if someone just comes down sick.

So, twenty prisoners earn you, as a baseline, 364,000 :nuyen:, and the guards alone cost :nuyen: 120,000 of that. That's about a third, on guard salary alone.

Now, you have to provide for maintenance - of the facilities, of the security units (drones, cameras, and the like), guards' equipment (their riot gear, equipment, etcetera). Bear in mind, the less guards, the more the prisoners get away with, in terms of trashing the place. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is a really good example of what a Lone Star prison is like.

At the very least, the facilities must be livable. If they get too bad, the prisoners will riot, and that will mean an HTR team will be called, and that not only means extra costs (HTR teams don't swat prisoner riots for their regular pay, bubba), and it also means the UCAS inspectors are coming down to see what happened, perform headcounts so they can downrate your pay, and so forth. So, riots are costly, you want to avoid them.

So, we'll assume each prisoner is living a 'squatter' lifestyle. 500 :nuyen: a month, they cost 6K a year to house. That's another 120,000 a year off of those twenty prisoners, and that's going to have the inmates really pissed off. Youch.

And then we get to the fun part - medical care! Maintaining a prison at the minimum lifestyle conditions livable without the prisoners cannibalizing one another and waging internal prison warfare daily, the prisoners will still be angry. Gangs will form along any lines imaginable, and they will do battle for whatever luxury can be found, from (most likely) smuggled drugs and beetles to (very unlikely) a couple of bunraku tossed into their cells by the guards to placate them. (though not entirely unbelievable...)


Hospitalizations cost :nuyen: 500 per day, and if they somehow get really, really tore up but still are breathing they cost a whole grand a day. Okay, let's suppose that over the course of a year, those hypothetical twenty prisoners are going to spend forty days recieving hospitalized care - an average of two days in the hospital per year per crook -, and ten days recieving ICU care. That's another :nuyen: 30,000 - not as much as most of the rest, but still noticable.

So, let's see.
Profit (yearly) per 20 crooks: :nuyen: 364,000
Expenses (yearly, basic) per 20 crooks: 270,000
Total profit (before catastropic costs): :nuyen: 94,000!

Good grief! You're making only 94K profit per twenty crooks, and that's before catastrophies?

And there will be catastrophies. Major fights will happen, inmates will be killed, HTR will be called. You will lose the money for the inmates who die, you will be fined per dead head by the UCAS, who will come in and do a body count, you will have to dole out combat pay to all the guards and HTR teams who participate, you will have to replace drones, cameras, prison equipment, etcetera, that got trashed on the way. Oh, and speaking of dead heads, you'll have to pay out compensation to next-of-kin for dead guards - and there will be dead guards, and you'll have to hire and train a replacement. One good riot, and you very swiftly run into the red. And this is barring a real catastrophie, such as a Shadowrunner somehow being incarcerated with most of her abilities intact and effecting his own escape over the dead bodies of most of your onsite guards, or a Shadowrun team effecting a break-out of a colleauge or a target. Nor does it take into account that mages and security riggers are definately not going to work for less than a middle lifestyle.

All in all, it's very easy to see the Star quietly organlegging (and secondhand cyberwaring) any Shadowrunners who come in, as well as organlegging the majority of the trolls (I guess despite the image, the metatype isen't really given to crime), and especially physically fit specimens who come in. Not only are they an instant cash injection (prime organs means prime price, and 'ware is very, very lucrative, especially since there's always the chance you might get to secondhand the same piece of 'ware more than once), but it cuts down on the violence and general mayhem inside the prisons.

Oh, and Shadowrunners can't exactly bust out a colleauge who's been carved up and apportioned out for a profit, can they?

[Fortune]

There are a hell of a lot of assumptions, and numbers being pulled out of asses in that post.

[Crusher Bob]

But they can organleg the family of the guy who approved the policy. Remember that the whole point of police forces is to de-escalate the problem. That's one of the reasons that you can see organized crime working hand in hand with Lone Star. All that running around and shooting is bad for business.

So, I can buy organlegging some guy if them make some trouble, and more importantly letting it be quietly known that trouble makers will get most of their organs cut out, but premptive organlegging is just asking for trouble.

[ShadowDragon8685]

This is the Sixth World. If everybody did what was good for bisuness, it would evolve back into what we have now, with elves and orks and trolls.

It's also the Sixth World, where we like it GRIMNDARK, so GRIMNDARK that Warhammer 40K looks upon us with pride. Hence, pre-empive organlegging is good.

And Fortune, the 50 nuyen figure was provided earlier by Snow Fox. I went from there, using the lifestyle numbers and hospitalization costs from SR4's BBB. And there may be assumptions, but we're probably not modeling a straight 20-inmate, three-guard prison, we're probably modeling a vast and evil Hollywood-style place where they may have a thousand inmates! Over that many inmates, the numbers I asspulled look pretty good. And we're going off some very basic assumptions that are sound:

1: Inmates are worth :nuyen: alive and healthy to Lone Star.
2: Lone Star, for whatever reason, prefers to collect the "incarceration" money rather than organlegging all the big and tough guys and saving space and energy for the weak and unfit criminals they may easily contain.
3: Lone Star, preferring to actually make money, uses the bare minimum of facilities and staff they can get away with using without the prisoners literally siezing the entire facility.

Therefor, these assumptions lead me to believe that the inside of the prisons are essentially the Barrens in miniature, with Lone Star on-hand to cruise on in and bust up the worst of it. The criminals own the inside of the prison, the staff mainly stay to bunkered, secure areas you coulden't crack without the benefit of a rocket launcher, and if they do have to go 'in there', they go in armed with shotguns, SMGs, and in force. And they probably ain't packing gel rounds.

Therefor, the prisoners' accomodations have to be at least Low in nature. Any less and they'd break into general disorder and chaos, or worse - organized disorder and chaos - and storm the gates, forcing a High Threat Response to deal with the situation. For reasons I explained above (HTR teams cost money, likely that some of the staff will be killed, possible that some of the HTR will be killed, and it's very likely you'll have to spend a LOT of money repairing the damage, as well as being fined per dead crook by the UCAS federal/local officials who have contracted with you to incarcerate their scum but keep them alive and healthy), you need to avoid a general riot at all costs; hence, giving them anything less than a Low lifestyle will probably incude them to riot and attempt a mass break-out.

[Sir_Psycho]

Iirc, any sign of rioting is taken care of swiftly and severely with painful aural bombardment, remote controlled RAS override systems and maybe even healthy doses of neuro-stun gas.

[nezumi]

Whatever happened to braindance? Braindance really does only cost 10 :nuyen: /day, after the initial 800 :nuyen: paid to Sloppy Joe the local brain surgeon.

Failing that, keep in mind that LS is not so limited as the real police are today. Let us assume they don't just stick everyone on ice, but rather keep them conscious in the real world and able to do things like punch each other in the face. It will very quickly become a hierarchy - LS makes up the biggest, toughest gang. If you threaten LS, they will grab you in the middle of the night with a mix of guards and drones, then they will grab all of your friends, your lunch buddies and your love troll. They will hang all of you by your testicles in the middle of the room and beat you with cattle prods until you either die or you are unable to walk under your own power. If you die, they harvest what they want and leave the remains for a few days as a pleasant reminder. If you live, they cut you down and let the rest of the population do whatever THEY want to do.

Under Lone Star gang comes whatever the dominate prison gangs are. They are smart enough to play buddy buddy with the keepers, because that's how they get their drugs, beetles and so on, plus a knife now and again or whatever. The top gangs like the status quo and will actively defend lone star, since as long as they defend lone star, they get the gear to piss on everyone else.

Under them no one cares, because those are either the loners who lock themselves in their cages, the joy boys, or the gangs that regularly get rolled over.

Sure now and again LS has to put down a whole gang. That's a lot of people to fall down steps! But it's the price of business, and the gang that takes its place won't make the same mistake.

Also keep in mind, a rigger with a dozen dalmations is going to be a lot cheaper and a lot safer than a dozen guards. Yeah, you got a knife? What are you going to do against 6 vehicle armor, a combat shotgun and a grenade launcher?

I imagine that mages are either recruited immediately to be supportive of Lone Star, or are kept in solitary confinement their entire stay. Trolls might be worth the risk, but mages definitely are not. Same with adepts. No mages or adepts means no mage guards required.

[Snow_Fox]

Guys you're over thinking the prison thing again. This Turkish or Sudnaese. Jamb a lot of people into a small space, feed them a gruel just enough to keep them alive but not to given them strength to act up. maybe keep them manacled to limit mobility etc. Ever seen the original Four Feathers?