My wife and I are writing a short story set in a cyberpunk setting which draws off Shadowrun/CP2020s concept of people in prison being wired up to Virtual Reality for the length of their term. I know there are some very brief mentions of this fact in Canon, but not a lot of in-depth explorations of it (that I'm aware of).

I'm going on the assumptions that:
People are tied into a VR system via their datajack or a trodenet, and spend their entire sentence (or very nearly so) interacting with an artificial world.
They lie physically in a secure facility, where they're watched over by a minimal group of guards, some nurses and a medical team, along with remote surveillance and drones in support
Basically everything is corporate-run and -owned, under contract to the UCAS (and therefore they must conform to UCAS laws and public opinion. They can't organ-harvest on living prisoners because the voters would object, and politicians would kill the contract.)

I don't know if, by canon, they'd be tied into a single-user simsense feed, or if they'd all be tied into a shared simsense environment. For story reasons I'm assuming the latter, however. This wouldn't be like following the matrix-rules (Matrix rules apply to deckers using a specialized tools to navigate a utility-oriented system, not to users plugged into a specialized simsense system). If this system is more intense than normal simsense, it is also an added a security measure because trying to bust out a person's body from prison without logging him out of the system could result in some very wicked dumpshock, perhaps even deadly levels of biofeedback.

Presumably, officially, the system is designed to teach valuable life-skills. It would be an idealized copy of the real world, with "real" jobs, and in exchange they get nicer rewards in the system, plus points towards parole. People who don't play by the rules just don't profit (you can't steal parole time, and you can't kill people virtually - in theory, anyway). The added benefits of this system is that it allows for the social component, which people have argued is a basic human need, and therefore is popular with the voters, it allows inmates to actually do productive work such as watch remote security cameras or perform basic electronic work for profit, and it may also allow the entire system to do something dark and nefarious like use all that otherwise untapped brainpower to make a giant organic computer. Does this sound reasonable?

In reality of course, the system means people spend a long time in prison (prisons get paid based on how many people are currently in the system, so paroling people or letting them die is lost profit), so the system is just a drab place that keeps people busy while the company rakes in the cash, perhaps cutting a profit from getting prisoners to do useful work they can then contract out. The system would boast all sorts of nice things to make the voters happy (psychological help available 24/7, automated legal assistance, full libraries, etc., but all of them are just cheap bots with canned responses).

Of course, if someone knows how to code well enough, he could probably find vulnerabilities in the system, making very simple hacking tools (a virtual shiv, for instance). So it's not like crime in prison would be completely eliminated.

Some questions I'm considering;
How do they prevent deckers with deltaware cranial decks from causing problems? Deltaware means it's unlikely to come up on bioscans, but having a deck in prison basically means they have free reign to wreak havoc.

What do they do with the bodies to keep them healthy? Does anything special have to be done to reduce infection and bed sores?

What would the resulting culture be like? What's the male/female ratio? Would they have something to cause pain to men when they feel sexually aroused (intentional or not, think catheter), therefore reducing sexual abuse and rape, or would it not be a concern?

In regards to the processing work, should I assume that all the hard processing is done by the server, and the individual is only getting simsense data? What could an enterprising inmate do before or after conviction to take advantage of that system?

I've had some thoughts of my own, but I'd like to see what other people think before I embarrass myself.

This is the easiest to answer... nanites. They inject nanites that search out cyber/bioware and remove it since 99% of the time it's illegal for that person to own it. Cyberware (and non-cultured bio) is removed and sold as second hand to some lucky slot.



Just because VR normally prevents you from moving and hurting yourself, doesn't mean the VR system can't be programmed to have the prisoners do Tai Chi 3 times a day for 1 hour. Gets the patient moving and exercising without turning them into muscle bound morons.



Actually, I don't see them caring if consensual sex occurs (unless the Warden is anal), but rape and sexual abuse will get you blackout slap upside the head. With Agents running around being virtual guards, you don't have to worry about them taking bribes or being lazy.



A technomancer of course could NEVER be held in this kind of system. They would have to go to a regular max security prison, but for everyone else (including mages) there is nothing they can do because they don't have the tools. They don't even have permission to run programs. I can see the Agents looking for anyone trying to hack the system and doing a blackout stomp on their dumb ass.

Well, I was doing the math the other day, trying to build a prison from a profit stand point, and it comes out to states paying around 35,000 dollars per year, per inmate. Now, building prisons and maintaining them is a huge drain on states, which is why they talk about privatizing them even now with some note of seriousness. When you have budget shortfalls, often the first thing discussed is relaxing parole laws to ease the cost of incarceration. Now, consider a prison as a factory that takes raw material (aka criminals) and makes a product (aka wageslaves). The government pays corporations to house, clothe and care for inmates, but also to rehabilitate them. You want the prisoner to spend as little time behind bars as possible (cost reduction), and you also want them to stay out of the justice system (cost effective).

Therefore, when you make a contract with a corporation you start by paying, say 45,000 a year, per inmate, and then decrease that amount periodically over the sentence. If the corporation paroles an individual, the state pays them a portion of the remaining sentence, sort of like a bonus for saving the government money. However, if the individual becomes a repeat offender the state demands a refund. There will never be a lack of people to lock-up, so the supply of raw material is not really an issue. A corporation will do everything it can to produce upright citizens, and make as much money as possible doing so.

Datajack 500¥
Skillwires (2) 4,000¥

Instead of putting the inmate into a shared ARE, you dump them into a simulation where they interact with fake personas learning social skills, how to manage anger, and how to behave like an upright. The sim would work like a video game, granting levels, offering bonuses, hidden material, holiday gags, etc. There might be a shared area, perhaps called the Yard, where users can go and socialize with other prisoners (some of whom might even be in the same prison), but it would be a sandbox. For most of the day, the inmate works in a factory gluing glitter to crylon hair clips or what have you, unaware of this activity.

After five years, the inmate is paroled into the company's work release program. The prison operators collect a fat bonus, and they put the person into a two year internship at the sister factory. The individual now pays for his own rent and is given a stipend for entertainment, but still lives in a bubble of control. A halfway house, of sorts. After those two years, the person is offered a full time position at a company factory, or other job suitable to his or her abilities. As they are still on parole, finding work elsewhere will be difficult, and they must still report to their parole officer 24 hours a day via live update.

Just some ideas.

Don't forget that it's very simple to install a Bunraku-Parlor style data-shunt, and simply turn off their personality. These brain-drained peons can be forced into servitude, made to work long hours for no pay for the corporation that is housing them, and even do all the maintenance for the system.

Also please remember that Cultured Bioware and Delta-Cyberware CANNOT be resold. It's made for the guy using it, and will be pretty violently rejected by anyone not genetically identical.

You're looking at cut-rate, likely second hand shunts and skillwires and datajacks, the kind they don't even bother to cover up. A whole facility full of orange jumpsuits, shaven heads, and visible data-ports that mark you as an Inmate, and the ability to wirelessly turn off your brain if you are not behaving according to proper prison protocols. The Prison likely contracts out menial labor and /makes/ money on the inmates, while promising speedy rehabilitation, and shortening jail sentences by raising the time-ratio to 3x for the inmates in house. Hot-simmed into their own cheesy virtual hell, these people end up laboring for three and a half years on a nine year sentence, serving the maximum amount of time, and still getting out of the way before their government contract has time to cost the facility money. One year terms won't be served with Cyberware, but will be sent to a standard facility with all the rules of a standard facility.

That means mages don't want to get booked for murder. Talk about costly essence-wise.

You're also unlikely to see anyone doing the risky surgery to take head-ware out of someone for resale. They'll just put a head-scrambler on them and dump them in full hot-sim VR. Installing the shunt makes certain they can't /activate/ that 'ware without permission anyhow.

I don't know what game you play, but my Shadowrun is dystopic. If the contract in question seems too well-thought out for our modern, sort-of-okay government, it's definitely too-well thought out for Shadowrun!

(Good thinking though!)




What's the advantage of doing it one-on-one rather than in a shared ARE? In a shared ARE, it costs less (since that data processing has to come from somewhere, so pooling data processing should be easier).



I'm hoping to avoid this both because it's contrary to what's in canon, and because it wouldn't work at all with my plot. I'm mostly just trying to determine what would go on in braindance precisely, and the logistics around it.

I also have to imagine that installing poorly-crafted skillwires in chop-shops won't be popular with the voters. Datajacks you can get away with, since we're lead to believe you can get a datajack put in at the jack pagoda on layaway, but skillwires are a more intense operation.

I don't think you need skillwires to install a personafix. It just means that inmates won't have skills you can hotswap.

That being said, I don't think the voting public would be all that happy about correctional facilities imposing brain scrambling levels of hotsim upon inmates. If you're going to have Joe Public caring at all, or corps caring what Joe Public thinks, which you seem to desire, then you're going to have to keep away from what amounts to a drug regimen.

By canon several Syndicates enjoy great influence within the prison system, which they wouldn't if everything was tightly controlled to the extent that people were held in ASSIST comas. However, there will be a lot of variation between prisons maintained by different corps and in different countries.

It's my interpretation that the UCAS remains mired in its past, so personally I'd leave the prisons in the hands of the State, rather than the Corps, and being run in a similar manner as today. But then, maybe I'm just too lazy to put a lot of effort into designing a setting I hope not to use.

My dystopia converts justice into a factory, people into products, and prisons into profit. There's no punishment, no retribution, no vengeance... because there's no profit in them. Imagine how the victims feel: your rapist is behind bars making barbies for five years (tops), then he's got an apartment, a job, and perceived freedom.


The users datajack is powerful enough to run the simulation, actually. And since they all need datajacks, you've got a built in processing center. Hell, the jack is powerful enough to run the simulation and have spare left over to run crunching as a background task - add in the skillwire processing, and your inmate population is now a pretty large super computer.

Shared environments make a better fiction, though. There's an Outerlimits episode you should watch, too, called The Tempest.

On skillwires, I imagine most inmates would opt-in for them, if the prison offered. Free cyberware? That gives them an edge in the job market? And a chance at early parole?

I'm questioning why people with implanted computers, and technos, would be more problematic than any other inmate. You can easily set up datajacks that are hardwired to only connect with your sensory and muscular-control cortices. Their tech doesn't touch your tech at all.

Sure, the basic assumption in SR is that you wouldn't get it wired up this way, but prison corps are going to have special orders with their support systems.

No... this is Shadowrun...

They'd be doing this.

Sorry, overly massive Japanese cultural influence is canonical.

And it would be the number one, all-time most popular exercise simfeed in the entire universe.

Too smart for the governments, maybe. Too smart for the Corp's to come up with the idea, definitely not.

Oh, and here's the promotional video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAjItY7X0Yc

Here's the prison system I use...
...Make of it what you will [inspired by Richard Morgan's books, WH40K, several manga, CP2020, Escape from New York, Neuromancer, Known Space books]

All crimes rated from 1-10, more criminal the act = higher grade.
Sentence based on cumulative rating [3x rating 1 crime = sentence as rating 3 crime].

Low rating sentences [1-3] = fine, indentured servitude.
Mid rating sentence [4-6] = big fine, indentured servitude, penal army, hazard duty, running man, tubed.
High rating sentence [6-9] = indentured servitude, penal army, hazard duty, running man, tubed, experiments.
Rating 10 = Tubed, execution, extreme hazard duty, spares.

So what do they mean ??

Fine = Pays money to the victim, selling worldly good if necessary
Indentured Servitude = Forced to work, sleeping in a dorm, eating basic food, etc [good for building roads, working in mines, etc]
Penal Army = Forcibly serving as shock troops
Hazard Duty = Do dangerous things, cleanup chemicals, etc
Running Man = Gets freedom if survives long enough on TV
Tubed = Chemically induced coma, with electricals to stimulate muscles to stop them wasting away and drip fed [typical for long sentences, named for the rooms where they are kept racked and stacked]
Experiments = Used in experiments requiring live subjects
Execution = Death [I have no Death Row]
Extreme Hazard Duty = 1 off mission with freedom at the end
Spares - Forcibly used for spare organs for medical emergencies [compulsory donor card enrolment].

In all cases, crims lose all rights.
In all cases crims are fitted with subdermal trackers, which will do something nasty if taken off or stop receiving a signal.

The way I figure it, crims become non-citizens and suffer for it - especially in times when resources need to be spent on citizens and not spent on people who have proved they no longer consider themselves part of society.
Their ID is tagged with crime/sentence, they lose rights, they repay society, their ID will be refused in some places, prisons are places for them to be away from society [but then my IDs are the not the poncy dime-a-dozen IDs that seems to be the norm, meaning they can't be changed at whim]

Prisons that have mobile inmates [low rating crimes] grow their own food, do forced labour and menial packaging.
In all instances they cost society as little as possible - irrespective if run by a government or a company.
Tubed crims take up little space and are kept healthy, and usually have sentences for 10+ years.
They don't get rehabilitated, as that doesn't really work - especially for repeat offenders - so they are just taken out of society.
Typically, prisons are situated away from people - remote island, reconditioned oil rig, orbital, desert, polar area.
Almost all of the options can provide plot hooks and/or campaigns.
Appeals have to be done within a limited time, or else forfeited.

Another thing to consider is that stock holders will want more than just x profit from a prison, they'll want x profit with y% growth. Quarterly earnings reports. Inventory audits. The warden will be under terrific pressure to increase revenue every four months, not only for promotions, but just to keep his job. The temptation to cut corners is only curbed by the few corners to cut. The well oiled machine of justice will quickly degrade as the wardens choose the quick gain of adding prisoners.

Imagine how many more people a prison could hold if you ran the cells in shifts: Group A sleeps eight hours while Group B is in the Yard those eight hours and Group C is working Production. The bell rings, and the shift changes. B sleeps, C unwinds in the Yard, and A begins their work shift. Now, why give them eight hours sleep, thinks the warden. If we cut them down only two hours, we could run four shifts: A sleeps six, B and C get six in the Yard, and D gets six at work. Then A works, B sleeps, C and D are in the Yard for six. I've just increased my profits by 33%.

It's also important to look better than your fellow wardens. You want more profit, less repeat offenders, quicker parole, and the highest inmate to cell ratio achievable, with the lowest cost per product possible. That means getting rid of problem criminals: transferring the worst to other prisons, hiding their in house offenses until you can claim overcrowding, or having your pet inmates remove them. That cyber shiv... warden provided, perhaps? Also, you might want to send agents of yours (pet inmates or runners) into other prisons to spy on your inter-corporate competition and their initiatives.

Let's not talk about the poor souls who sign up for Rehabilitation R&R.

Oh, I have an idea.

One possibility is an AR supplemented halfway house. It'd be very experimental, but I could see some corp trying it out in a social control experiment or some such. Ares would be a good candidate (IMO). Outside the prison, it's billed as a the first steps in a massive Ares initiative to "solve the SINless problem" and make the barrens "obsolete". They claim it is the ultimate in rehabilitation technology, prisoners in the Ares prison system (which is about 70% of the prisons in the UCAS) who are approaching their release dates and have good records are provided with an opportunity to become productive members of society and be given a support system that they can rely on for when they are released. Ares is sparing no expense, they've built a brand new state of the art prison, several equally high tech apartment blocks to serve as halfway houses on Ares land in major sprawls, and are using the 'latest in AR and skillwires technology' to produce model citizens out of the poor souls that society has rejected. Basically all the advertising stuff that Ares is good at.

Inside the prison there is an equally massive advertising program explaining the benefits of the program. They show off the benefits of the new prison, lots of shots of larger cells, better food, and all that sort of stuff. They also show off the end result. A clean apartment of your own, a steady paycheque, AR toys, cars, women, all the nice middle class crap that the SINless barrens rats never even dreamed of.

At some point during an inmates stay, generally about halfway through their sentence, they are given an opportunity to join the program. This generally happens to moderate sized groups of reasonably well behaved prisoners. Initially members of legitimate support groups were approached but gradually the program began to work its way into some of the prison gangs, and now there's a major recruiting drive going on.

As for the program itself, it's a simple contract that will take several years off their sentence. They are transferred to the new prison prison, given little beanies, stuff like that. They also receive a set of 'skillwires' and pair of cybereyes for 'free'. There's a lot of fine print in the contracts, and the inmates aren't given a lot of time to look at them. Any inmates who either have, or learn any legal stuff are just quietly transferred to a different prison and oddly enough there is no one convicted of a cybercrime among the population either.

In the new wing of the prison things are genuinely better. The food is better, they have entertainment, more cell space, and generally the whole atmosphere seems a lot more peaceful. Months go by without a violent incident, and on the rare occasions when one does occur the prisoner is quickly removed from the population and transferred back to the general population. Each day they are given VR training for several hours, it runs the gambit from basic social skills, to work skills.

At any rate, when their release date approaches they are provided with a legitimate SIN, "provisional citizenship" with Ares, to become permanent citizenship in X years, given corp supplemented housing, provided with skillwires and VR training, and provided with employment.

The housing they are given is in one of the halfway houses that Ares constructed. Like the prison, it is a pretty nice place too. The apartment has all the amenities of a low lifestyle with much better security, the other tenants (also former prisoners) generally keep to themselves, and any time there is a crime the tenant will have his provisional citizenship revoked, gets charged with breaching the contract, and sent back to square one in the general population of the prison.

Their work is low end wageslave stuff, they are paid in corp scrip, it's not much, but really it's just an entertainment and food allowance since everything else is 'paid for' by Ares.

Behind the scenes, everything hinges on the 'skillwires' that Ares implanted in every candidate. P-Fixing was already a fairly common solution to particularly violent inmates but it has never been popular among citizens. Because most of the prisoners were technically protected under UCAS law, various citizens watch groups brought court cases against the prisons claiming it was 'brainwashing' or 'cruel and unusual' and although the courts had upheld their rights to use it in extreme cases it was generally seen as bad PR. Their solution was a heavily modified suite of skillwires that allowed an inmate to maintain a portion of their personality, enough to make them able to function normally, but relied on relatively simple brainwashing techniques to 'rehabilitate' individuals. It's actually an experimental version of a normal P-Fix chip, designed to work over time and adjust an individuals personality by regulating hormone production and VR hypnosis.

The process begins in the special prison. The whole prison has an AR overlay piped through the cybereyes designed to make it look brighter, more cheerful and generally better. In the mean time the inmates hormones are adjusted and various chemicals (even nanites) are administered in their food designed to encourage passivity and instill a sense of obedience to authority. The P-fix portion of the skillwires is also designed to provide positive feedback whenever the inmate does something 'good' and negative feedback when he does something bad. At this point it is only effective in the VR training scenarios, but R&D is working on the program so it can provide feedback in the meat world as well.

This process simply continues in the half way house. The individual is gradually weened off the hormone adjustments, but the VR system of beanies and penalties continues. The skillwires can dump him into VR at any time and they are linked into the halfway house's network so the halfway house supervisors can dump all sorts of programs into them when the inmate is sleeping designed to keep him passive and loyal. If their performance deteriorates they are given programs that poke at the tenants fear centers, forcing him to worry about what will happen if he misses his chance. If they perform well though they are given programs that play around with the happy centers of the brain giving him a sense of satisfaction and security.

As for what to do with this, maybe the players get hired by a Johnson who wants them to figure out what's going on in the prisons, how they tick, what the nature of the rehabilitation is, and hand the information over to the Johnson. The Johnson himself could be a rival prison company who wants to copy Ares, a civil rights group, or even an investigative reporter (Horizon?) who wants to smear mud on Ares.

You're missing some of the greatest of the possible Johnsons; Ares managers trying to dig dirt, test the security of the operation, test their "guests" and the effects of the process, etc.

Good point. The whole experiment might be a first step in a larger program with the eventual goal of implementing portions of it in other Ares citizens. After all, if it can transform prisoners into model citizens, why can't it be used as a control mechanism for other wageslaves.

Horizon run a jail that relies on simsense reprogramming to keep the inmaes inline and rehabilitate them. This is mentioned in Corporate Enclaves. This is not that dissimilar from braindance technology in CP2020.

On a side note, I've been workining on an idea involved insect shamans and a jail. Do you think its possible for an insect shaman (latent awakening) to awaken inside a prison not intended for the magically gifted, create a queen and start investing the inmates with spirits?

Jails would be too focused on keeping stuff in the jail, not keeping things out....
- J.

The way I see it, simsense has two important uses other than cost savings.

1)Compressed sentences. In a UV VR enviroment, he passage of time might not correspond to the passage of time in the real world. Because VR functions at the speed to thought, you can compress a long sentence into a short period of time.
This would be most applicable to misdemeanors, since sentences of less than a year are served in jail, not prison. Instead of sitting in a cell taking up space that the local police could put to use, you spend a few days hooked up to a machine and get the equivalent experience of a full boring incarceration. This would save local police a great deal of money in the long run.

2)Very dangerous offenders. The kind of guys who you simply can't do anything else with. They'd have a simsense equivalent of solitary confinement.

For individuals between those two extremes, I imagine standard incarceration would still be more popular, not because it is easier or cheaper, but because these sorts of businesses don't need to be efficient.

Jake, the only problem with this is when you have a bad merge. Sorta hard to hide the fact that Jones, and Bill, and Bubba look like big roaches (or other insect) than meta-humans. Now if the Warden is the Shaman in question... that is when it can get nasty. He can hide all sorts of things...

There are a few logistic problems. I thought the Queen would be the hardest to hide. .

I presumed there would be a dedicated area within the prison they could hide the Queen and the bad merges would basically tend to that area, e.g. a hidden area under an outside yard or something. If the prison is based in an area where the inmates are actually doing hard labour (e.g. mining or something - I don't know), then hiding these spirits might be a whole lot easier....

Its well established that the background count in a prison is already tainted and can often affect magicians. What if it was slowly aspected to a specific Insect tradition? What if the shamans and magicians guarding the prison against intrusion were the first to be warped by the aspected environment? What if a select few inmates closest to the insect shaman willingly committed themselves to being possessed in order gain more power? I suspect a lot of inmates would be willing to sell their souls for more power or a chance to strike back at their opressors....

I admit, it's not a well thought out plan, but it just struck me as an interesting one and I was thinking about how I could make it viable...

- J.

Also, In runners companion, one of the stories is about a mid-level security prison for inmates. One of the characters was a face rousing up the crowd, the other runner that helped was the hacker. Lots of security drones in those places with non-lethal ammo (actually less than lethal is a more accurate description).

That was actually an intake facility, meant to hold criminals for 36 hours or less, until they got released or shuffled off into a more permanent detention facility... and was a level 1 facility, for low level criminals, unaugmented and unAwakened - basically your street scum, drug dealers, etc, etc. But I do like the description. The short story is on pg 173 of Runners Companion.

And I'm surprised no one has started wondering what Horizon is doing with "The Haven" in LA...

That's not like we don't wonder (at least not for me), it's just that we are waiting more informations about the penal system in general (along to military/mercenary world and Desert Wars^TM). Who knows maybe we'ra gonna learn more about it in the corp book (yet I have to admit I'm looking foreward for it more for the dirt on Yakashima than everything else put together, ILOVE to hate that corp).