Prison Architect

Prison Architect

GC13'S EASY GUIDE TO A SUCCESSFUL PRISON

Last updated: August 23, 2015
Most current for: Alpha 35

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Prison Architect can be quite a daunting game to someone just picking the game
up: you must design facilities for people who would really rather be just about
anywhere else, you must meet their needs, and do it all on a tight budget.

Later in the game you'll be bringing in plenty of money, or after you've run
one prison for a while you can sell if and start your next prison off with a
large sum of money, but when starting your first prison you have a limited
budget; once it's gone, you're going to have to hope you got the essentials in
to start your prison off right. Foundations are expensive, so you're going to
want to make sure you only build the space for the rooms you'll need
immediately to meet your first few grants and start taking in prisoners who
bring with them a substantial bonus for accepting them.

There's also the matter of time constraint. You can turn off prisoner intake
and spend ten days working on your prison if you have to, and if you're
starting with a lot of money from selling a prison you'll probably have to, but
you can easily get the basics of your prison started in the day before your
prisoners arrive.

You need to prioritize your building. Some things are nice to have, but don't
do anything for you immediately. This guide will give you a good road map for
what you need now, and what to save for later. If you want to work faster, you
can (and probably should) hire a few additional workmen. Don't hire too
many—you can only spend so much on wages before you have an Accountant on
staff, and if you hire too many people before you hire your Accountant you'll
be stuck being under-staffed until your prisoners arrive; sticking with ten-to-
twelve workmen will be plenty at first, so there's no need to chance it.

Accept the Administration Center and Basic Detention Center grants then get to
work. In order, you will be making sure you have the following facilities:

Basic Items
   Administration
   Utilities and Storage
   Holding Cell
   Kitchen and Canteen
   Yard and Common Room
   Cells
   Showers
   Staff Room

That will take care of all of your basic needs. Still, your prison can benefit
from a lot more. Every room has its use, and you should add everything to your
prison eventually:

Secondary Items
   Deliveries and Reception
   Cleaning Cupboard and Laundry
   Parole and Visitation
   Kennel
   Classroom and Library
   Chapel
   Infirmary
   Solitary
   Workshop
   Mail Room and Shop
   Protective Custody
   Expansion

BASIC ITEMS
These are your first priorities--you essentially cannot have a prison without
them. There is some wiggle room (the holding cell is really only here to finish
a grant), but everything in this section is required very early for your prison
and should be finished before your prisoners arrive on day two. If this is your
first prison then quickly setting an Exports zone down near Deliveries and
Garbage will make your workmen will automatically take any logs from trees you
cut down to be sold which can add up to a helpful amount of money, and it costs
you nothing.

ADMINISTRATION
First to go in are the administrative offices. You will need six offices for
your administrators, and there are a few ways you can place them. You will
definitely want your Psychologist to have easy access to a common room, and
probably for prisoners to be able to access his office; you will also want your
Chief to be able to reach a classroom to train guards in how to use tazers;
finally, your Foreman will need to go to a workshop to train prisoners if you
choose to use workshops. The Warden, Accountant, and Lawyer have no reason to
leave their offices except to use a staff room, so can be tucked back wherever
you wish.

You must hire your Warden first: he unlocks the Regime report, a crucial tool,
and the other staff who will help you so much. Adjust your Regime report, but
keep in mind that you'll be changing it later: once you have work for your
prisoners you'll want your prisoners working eight- or ten-hour days, but right
now you won't have much for them to do.

Once he has an office with the necessary desk, chair, and filing cabinet, have
him research your Accountant and have her research Extra Grant. Once you hire
her you may hire additional workmen if you wish, but don't hire too many: ten
to twelve workmen should be enough to start you off, though if you've started
with a lot of money from selling a prison you can benefit from having dozens of
workmen.

Next get a Chief after your warden researches Security, and have him research
Deployment (as soon as this is done, you might wish to set all offices except
for your Psychologist's to Staff Only so prisoners can't clean them and get
contraband from them). While the Chief is researching, have your Warden
research for a Foreman, who will then research Prison Labor.

Then research your Psychologist. You want to have him by the time prisoners
arrive at your prison, as prisoners now have high and critical unmet needs when
they arrive. You should be aiming to be able to meet them all by the time your
prisoners show up, but you might need to be able to prioritize. You'll still
refer to the Needs report even with a fully mature prison: if all of the Need
bars are yellow, your prisoners can keep working; if too many are orange or any
are red, it's probably time to schedule a break with some Free time.

Researching your Lawyer can be pushed back as late as you want. He can do
research that allows you to put prisoners in smaller cells, confine them to
solitary or their cells indefinitely, and open up the possibility to accept
death row inmates. Depending on how much you want any of these, you may wish to
get a Lawyer quickly or wait a while.

Remember, nothing gets researched unless the administrator in question is in a
fully furnished office (though it doesn't need electricity).

UTILITIES AND STORAGE
While you're taking care of your staff, you should also be taking care of your
utilities. Pick a spot for your power generator (making sure to leave all
squares adjacent to it empty so they can hold capacitors later) and your water
pump. You can put this in its own building, or you can simply fence the area
in. There's also nothing stopping you from including it indoors if you have
space; this might be the most secure location for your water pump if you don't
want to worry so much about tunnels. No matter where you place it, remember
that this area is also off-limits to prisoners so should marked as Staff Only
once your Chief researches Deployment.

You should also pick an area and mark it as a Storage room: workmen will take
any dismantled objects here rather than leave them where they dismantled them,
and will also spend a lot of their free time there (or at Deliveries). Storage
does not need to be indoors, but it's best if you try to keep it at least
relatively close to the center of your prison so workmen don't need to travel
too far to a job.

HOLDING CELL
You only really need this on the first day, if you need it at all. Put in one
bench and a toilet, and make sure it's big enough to hold however many visitor
tables you want: you can turn this into a visitation or parole room once you
have enough normal cells ready, or you can keep it. Keeping it will allow you
to temporarily go over your maximum safe capacity, though since you have fine
control over how many prisoners you receive it isn't a very useful room.

Be careful if you do decide to keep your holding cell and actually make use of
it. Your prisoners will need beds in the holding cell to satisfy their Sleep
need, and not having a cell of their own increases a prisoner's Privacy need.
Do not keep prisoners in the holding cell for long if you can help it.

KITCHEN AND CANTEEN
Canteen placement is important. Prisoners take time to get from place to place
and won't preemptively head to the canteen in anticipation of meal time. Large
canteens in the center of the prison will allow your prisoners to get to them
quickly after Work or Free time, while smaller canteens on the periphery will
work better if prisoners will have had Lockup or Yard time (at a yard near the
canteen) right before meal time.

At its most basic a canteen is a large room with tables and benches, with one
serving table for every eighty units of food your prisoners will be eating (one
unit for low quantity, two for medium, and three for high). The canteen is also
a common area, however. Prisoners will often come to it during Free time to sit
on the benches to satisfy their Comfort need, and if there are other amenities
available they will make use of them during Free and Eat time.

You will need enough kitchens to keep your canteens stocked with food. The
further away a kitchen is from a canteen it's serving the more cooks (or
prisoner workers) you will need to bring food from the kitchen to the canteen.

To start your prison you can get away with having one cook and one cooker for
every sixteen prisoners on medium food quantity, assuming your kitchen is right
by your canteen, but you may as well hire two cooks after midnight to clear
that part of the grant. Also hire two guards at the same time. Hiring them
after midnight saves $400 in salaries, but makes sure you're ready to receive
prisoners.

Prisoners who have been fed the night before only need two meals a day: morning
and evening. Putting in a lunch is only recommended in the early days of your
prison for the same reason as the early bedtimes: there won't be enough happy,
well-fed prisoners to drown out the complaints of new prisoners who come in
very hungry.

Meals are set on the Regime report, and start out at Medium for both Quantity
and Variety. The more food and the higher variety they get, the more likely
your prisoners are to get the Well Fed status effect, which benefits your
prisoners' behavior and your grading upon their release.

You should probably eventually put metal detectors in at your canteen, as you
will catch a lot of prisoners with contraband as they go to meals. If you plan
to have prisoners worker in your kitchen then definitely make sure you
eventually put in a metal detector to stop them from smuggling weapons and
tools out. This is a concern for later in your prison, though; right now you
just don't have the money to worry about metal detectors.

YARD AND COMMON ROOM
So far you've taken care of most of the prisoners' basic needs (showers will go
in with the cell block), but they have more needs: Exercise, Recreation, and
Family. The yard and common room are both excellent places to satisfy these
needs, as is the canteen.

Your prisoners will all have an Exercise need, and since every prison should
have a yard it's the perfect place for your prisoners to satisfy it. Choose an
outdoor area, secure it, and designate it as a Yard. Put in some weight benches
for your prisoners to work out on, and some benches for them to sit on. You
will probably not designate much time as Yard time in your regime, but more
than two hours of Free time per day will hurt your Punishment grading and Yard
time can help prisoners satisfy their needs without Free time.

Phone booths will meet a prisoner's Family need. These can go in the canteen,
the yard, or common room. Ideally, all three. You really only need two or three
to start with, so if you start out with a common room put them there. A guard
working a phone tap connected to a phone booth can make you aware of any
contraband the prisoner arranges to be thrown into the yard, as well as any
traits the prisoner has you don't know, but at the start you only need to know
traits to know who needs to be in protective custody and without special effort
to station guards in places where prisoners cluster a snitch might not live
long enough to use the phone.

Televisions are best for a prisoner's Recreation need, and also help meet the
Comfort need. These are a natural fit for the common room, but nothing is
stopping you from putting them in the yard or the canteen. Like the phone
booths, start with two or three of these and add more as you get more
prisoners; just watch to see how often all are in use at once and add more when
that happens often. When placed outside, televisions need an electrical cable
running on top of them to be powered, so keep in mind that outdoor televisions
will be slightly more expensive than their $200 price tag indicates.

Pool tables also meet the prisoners' Recreation need, but they're larger and
more expensive than televisions.

Prepare one small common room near your Psychologist's office and make sure you
put several chairs in it so he can host Alcoholic Group Therapy reform program
sessions there, scheduled on the Programs report. It's a small expense, but
having fewer addictions to worry about will help your prison run more smoothly.

CELLS
Now that your prisoners' immediate needs are taken care of, you can worry about
where they're going to sleep. After you complete the Administration Center
grant, accept the grant to build Cell Block A.

Pick a location for the cells that places each cell's toilet far enough away
from an unsecure area; prisoners can dig quite quickly once they merge their
tunnels or if they find a large water pipe to tunnel along. Aim to have at
least six squares of concrete between them and freedom, but if it's less than
ten you should strongly consider fencing in part of the outside. Perimeter
walls will make tunneling out of the prison even more difficult, but they're
expensive. Certainly don't start out building perimeter walls.

Build enough indoor space for at least fifteen 2x3 cells and make sure eight of
them each have a bed and a toilet. The cost of a complete jail cell a bit over
$700 once the foundation has been built.

Adding other amenities to a cell will help your prisoners, but your common room
and yard should be good enough for now; still, certain items (TV, radio, chair,
office desk, shower head, bookshelf) will increase the cell's quality (as will
making the cell larger), making a prisoner inside it less likely to make
trouble so long as the increased quality puts it above your prison's average
cell grade.

Once you have the first eight cells done, go ahead and do seven more to finish
the grant. You'll add to this cell block, or build new cell blocks, as needed
while you increase your prison capacity and fulfill the later cell block
grants.

Once you have prisoners, you will need to decide how you want to combat
tunnels. Searching the toilet specifically will reveal a tunnel from that cell,
but searching the toilet as part of a broad cell or cell block search probably
will not detect a tunnel. The easiest way to catch tunnels if you don't suspect
any particular prisoner is to order a cell block search after every prisoner
has gone to sleep. Your guards will then be able to catch the prisoner in the
act of tunneling.

Your other option is to use dog handlers. When they are outdoors dogs will
occasionally dig at the ground: if they dig at the same area frequently it's
probably because there's a tunnel under there (though they will sometimes dig
for no reason). Also, if they pass over a prisoner who is in the process of
tunneling, they will immediately dig him up. If you plan your dog handlers'
patrol routes properly, you can make sure they pass directly over the routes
the prisoners will be taking (likely following your pipes since they can dig
along them more quickly, but always looking for the quickest way out of the
prison). Be warned: prisoners dig very quickly in dirt unless they are trying
to get past a perimter wall. It's much safer to simply force them to dig
through foundation. If they dig in a line which the dog patrol passes over,
however, you'll have a fair chance of being warned.

If you want to target your searches carefully, you have a couple of options.
The first option is to search the toilet of any prisoner who starts the day
tired, since they were probably up all night tunneling. This is very
micromanagement-heavy, however. Once you start to get confidential informants
(from solitary confinement) with high coverage, you can simply search the
toilets in any prisoners' cells who have tools.

SHOWERS
By now you probably have prisoners showing up and being assigned to individual
cells by the guards you should have hired. The next step is making a shower
area for the prisoners. This can be outside if you wish, though as always the
area must be secured. Only put drains at the exit; the water propagates
strangely, so it's a waste of effort trying to deal with it directly. Just keep
it from leaving the shower and call it a day.

Put in enough shower heads for many prisoners to bathe at once, evenly spaced.
This will complete your Basic Detention Center grant.

Your morning regime should probably include an hour of Shower and an hour of
Lockup before meal time. Either one will wake your prisoners up from Sleep, and
after the two hours they will have taken care of their Hygiene, Bladder, and
Bowel needs which all start the day quite high.

STAFF ROOM
It might be a bit early to accept the Staff Well-Being Initiative grant, since
it requires you to have five guards hired to complete (but at just $1,500 in
extra hiring to complete it may be worth it), but you should give your staff a
place to rest. Tired employees will move more sluggishly, and they can recover
much more quickly if you give them a staff room to rest in.

You only need one staff room to start with, but as you expand your prison you
should continue to build more staff rooms so that your employees don't have to
walk the length of your prison while tired so they can rest.

SECONDARY ITEMS
Once you have all of the basics taken care of, it's time to get to the rest.
There are no useless rooms in Prison Architect, but the following rooms either
don't provide essential services or can be safely delayed a day or two. When
getting your basics taken care of certainly plan for the addition of these, but
only actually spend the money and set your workmen to building these once
you're sure your prison will be ready to accept inmates.

DELIVERIES AND RECEPTION
You're always getting deliveries to your prison. While there's no problem with
leaving your Deliveries zone outside and having things dropped off at the side
of the road, placing Deliveries indoors (but still near the road) has a huge
advantage: you can place a metal detector at the entrance, so every incoming
shipment is checked. Combine that with a dog patrol through the middle of
Deliveries and almost all contraband through deliveries can be stopped.

While your guards are happy to bring prisoners directly from the road to their
cells, dedicating a room to reception is a great investment. Like most rooms
it's quite cheap, and processing the prisoners in reception means your guards
will automatically search each prisoner for contraband. If you can get your
reception room finished before prisoners arrive (it only takes a few cheap
objects to complete it) then you can save yourself the small amount of trouble
from contraband your first inmates might give you. It's embarrassing to have a
prisoner die of an overdose on drugs he smuggled in because you don't have an
infirmary yet and didn't search him.

Later in the game, once everything else is covered, you should secure the
frontage of your prison with fences and road gates so even prisoners who get
outside have a barrier in their way. Use door servos and a door control so your
guards don't have to constantly run outside to let trucks in and out. Make sure
to place the teeth of the servo on the door, put direct power to it with
electric cables, and run the connection from the door control to the door servo
(going from the door servo to the door control does nothing).

CLEANING CUPBOARD AND LAUNDRY
Your prison and your prisoners' clothes both need to be washed, and prisoners
are the best people for the job (though Janitors are plenty useful for both
jobs as well and you'll want to make sure your Foreman researches Cleaning so
you can employ them).

Put in both a cleaning cupboard and a laundry. The rooms need to contain at
least four squares per job slot, up to a maximum of twenty slots.

The laundry for each cell block really only needs three or four prisoners
working: workers in the laundry tend not to have a lot to do. Start out with
just one laundry machine and one ironing board until you expand to thirty or
forty prisoners. Put in some tables for clean uniforms to be placed onto. Two
laundry baskets should be enough at the start. For the most part you want one
prisoner on laundry detail per cell block (unless your cell blocks are quite
large: mine are sixteen prisoners usually).

Make the cleaning cupboard as large as you want. The prison can get quite
dirty, and more prisoners on cleaning detail will obviously keep it cleaner.
Once you have a kennel station a dog patrol outside of each cleaning cupboard,
as prisoners will steal poison from it.

While you're putting prisoners to work in these rooms, accept the Prisoner
Acclimatization grant and schedule some prisoners for the Kitchen Safety and
Hygiene program. You may wish to put in some additional cookers early so that
you can fit more prisoners into each class and complete the grant sooner.

After Prison Labor and Cleaning have both been researched, research Gardening.
Your Gardeners may not have as obvious a job as your Janitors and your prisoner
labor force, but your outdoor areas still get quite overgrown without Gardeners
around. They're also quite important for running your forestry zones should you
decide to put some in.

VISITATION AND PAROLE
These are two areas that you should ideally keep near the front of your prison,
where it is mose secure. Though a riot is extremely unlikely to happen,
requiring you to mismanage your prison, having defenseless visitors in the
heart of your prison surrounded by inmates would be very likely to end up with
a lot of dead visitors should the inmates ever turn hostile.

Both rooms require visitor tables, but while many visitors can share a room
each parole hearing uses the entire room no matter how many tables are in it.

Depending on how large you want to grow your prison to, six visitor tables in
the visitation room will probably be sufficient. Two parole rooms will be
enough up to a few hundred prisoners, as you can schedule several parole
hearings during the day in the Programs report, but as your population climbs
you may need more. The lower (i.e. more strict) you set the required re-offense
chance on the Policy report, the more prisoners will need to schedule a second
parole hearing after they've served more of their sentence.

Station a guard outside (or even in) the parole rooms, as prisoners who are
denied parole may attack. Station a dog patrol outside visitation, as it is a
constant source of contraband and you cannot search the visitors themselves.

KENNEL
With another room going in that could use a dog patrol, you may as well make a
kennel. It doesn't need to be that large (the minimum 5x5 can contain ten
crates which is enough for at least twenty dogs), and you might want to make
additional kennels later so that dogs can rest closer to their patrol spots,
but early on a few dog crates in one kennel will be all you need.

Place dog patrols outside any rooms that prisoners have access to that gives
any smelly contraband, any outdoor place where you're worried about tunnels,
and anywhere you're worried about prisoners trying to run away; dogs are quick,
and can chase down a fleeing prisoner.

CHAPEL
Chapels are the most obvious place for your prisoners to go to meet their
Spirituality needs. Not all prisoners have a Spirituality need, but those that
do like to pray on prayer mats or in pews, and to participate in the Spiritual
Guidance reform program (a program that will be very popular in your prison).
Prisoners who attend this program will get the Calming status effect, which
makes outbursts around them less likely.

Prayer mats and pews can be placed and used in common rooms, and even
individual cells, just as well as they can in chapels though. The only reason
you need a chapel specifically is if you want to run a Spiritual Guidance
program in it.

CLASSROOM AND LIBRARY
The library is something you should definitely plan for very early in your
prison, but actually placing the room and the objects inside it can wait a
while; for a prisoner to work in your library he needs to have finished the
Foundation Education program in a classroom, and the program takes ten days to
complete. By the time you have any prisoners eligible to run the library you
should see many of your prisoners with high Literacy needs, so make sure you
have your library ready to go when the first program finishes.

Of course you need a classroom to run the program in. Make sure your classroom
has plenty of desks (at least ten), since you get charged the same amount for a
class for one prisoner as you do for a class for twenty. The classroom is also
used when your Chief gives Tazer Certification classes to your guards once you
get the tazer rollout.

SOLITARY
As you search prisoners and find contraband you'll probably find yourself
dealing with many prisoners with stints in solitary confinement. You can use
your Policy screen to make all punishments Lockdown until you can build some
solitary cells, but in addition to suppressing prisoners more effectively
solitary confinement has a wonderful use: it allows you to recruit confidential
informants by keeping them locked in long enough to be willing to turn, then
going to the Experience tab of their prisoner report. Check the Informants
section of the Intelligence screen (researched by the Chief) to see which of
your prisoners in solitary are ready to become an informant (they will have a
yellow circle around them). As they stay in your prison longer their Coverage
will gradually rise, letting you know more of what's going on when you activate
them. Always de-activate them before ordering searches though, as if other
prisoners' suspicion of them rises too high they can be in danger.

WORKSHOP
So long as you haven't put in too many amenities or built foundations on too
much extra space, you should still have a fair amount of money left. Accept the
Prison Manufacturing Facility grant to augment this cash and start a workshop.
Put in as many saws and presses as you can afford in a 1:1 ratio, but check
your power situation before you plug them in: each green bar of power can feed
five machines, and each capacitor adds another bar. Make sure they'll have
enough power, then plug them in.

Your workmen will have to constantly ferry sheet metal to the workshop and
license plates to Exports, so the closer your workshop is to the road the
easier it will be for your workmen to handle the load.

The workshop needs twelve square meters of floor space per worker, so make sure
it's at least 240 square meters to get a maximum-sized workshop (and don't
forget that walls don't count for floor space).

To actually start employing prisoners in your workshop you'll need to have your
Foreman run a Workshop Safety Induction program in a workshop. It takes two
sessions of two hours of Work time each, on two separate days, for your Foreman
to certify prisoners to work in the workshop, and if you have enough prisoners
interested in the program you can run several classes in a day to get prisoners
certified as quickly as possible. Not all prisoners will be interested,
however; as a general rule of thumb expect about a third of your prisoners to
express interest in the program.

You should definitely force your prisoners to walk through metal detectors as
they exit the workshop. You can't catch them with their makeshift pickaxes that
they'll use for tunneling, but you can stop them from smuggling shanks and
other metal items out.

Later, when you have more money, you may wish to put in a small workshop to use
exclusively for your Foreman to certify new prisoners to work in your larger
workshops. If you plan to do this then set aside a spot for it; remember that
the class is restricted to a maximum of ten prisoners, so the workshop doesn't
need to be full-sized, and each prisoner needs a saw or press to work at during
the training program. Even a training workshop of six machines will probably be
large enough for training.

INFIRMARY
Have your Warden research Health and accept the Health and Well Being grant. It
costs $3,000 plus the cost to put up or expand a building to make an Infirmary
if you have already hired your Psychologist, and you get $10,000 when you
complete the grant, so finishing this grant will be another influx of cash. A
well-run prison doesn't use its Infirmary to heal prisoners and staff often, as
the only source of injuries are escape attempts and fights that you will not
have to deal with too much. The beds are used for the Pharmacological Therapy
for Drug Addictions reform program, however, so having more beds means you will
be able to fit more prisoners into each session of the program.

MAIL ROOM AND SHOP
These are relatively low-priority rooms: Family needs are very easy for your
prisoners to take care of during Eat, Yard, and any Free time you choose to set
thanks to how easy phone booths are to place, and Shops bring in very small
sums of money. Every little bit helps though, and neither room is particularly
expensive. If you're trying to keep Free time down and are worried about
contraband drops in the yard, the mail room can reduce the phone booths your
phone taps need to monitor, if you choose to use any.

The shop, just by existing, should encourage your prisoners to volunteer for
reform programs that can get them jobs, but right now as of Alpha 35 it has the
opposite effect. It does allow prisoners to spend some money to immediately
take care of a high need, which can be a very helpful safety valve if your
prisoners are having trouble getting enough food in the morning, so it might be
worth having in your prison anyway.

PROTECTIVE CUSTODY
Some prisoners you get in will have reputations. Most of these reputations make
them harder to deal with, either by improving their performance in a fight or
making them less vulnerable to your methods of controlling their behavior.
Every so often though, you'll get a prisoner with a reputation that's a danger
to him. Ex-law enforcement, ex-prison guards, and snitches are all in great
danger in a prison. If left in the general population they'll generally be dead
within a day, as any time prisoners cluster tightly together they'll be at
great risk for being suddenly mobbed. Stationing guards at these choke points
helps protect them, but you'll probably want to limit their exposure to harm by
changing their security level to Protective Custody. This will change their
uniform to yellow and allow you to place them in their own wing of the prison.

The safest way to make a protective custody wing is to put everything they need
inside it and use Deployment to forbid them from leaving it. Going so far isn't
strictly necessary, but it's not too expensive either once you've built your
prison up. If you allow them to leave their wing, make sure to set the various
security levels' regimes so that inmates in protective custody are only
wandering when other inmates are locked down or restricted to the yard, and
vice versa. Be careful of Work time, as that is when inmates attend reform
programs. Prisoners cluster together when attending, say, a Spiritual Guidance
program, and while it's mostly safe so long as a guard is stationed nearby to
dissuade attacks, the danger exists.

The problem is that you won't know about all of your incoming prisoners'
reputations. A snitch might come into your prison with a ??? reputation, but
the prisoners will still know and therefore plan to kill him. Until you can get
confidential informants with high coverage, you will have to watch your
prisoners carefully and use phone taps to learn their reputations.

EXPANSION
That takes care of almost everything. As you grow you can expand your workshops
into carpentry, feeding them from your private forests tended by your
gardeners. Just keep growing and keeping an eye on your income; the cell block
grants will help some, but adding in new cells is expensive and the grants
won't cover all of the costs. You should use your Accountant to do tax-reducing
research, and you will probably eventually want to unlock the ability to buy
adjacent plots of land.

You can also start accepting maximum security prisoners, maybe segregating them
to their own wing of the prison entirely. You really have no need of armed
guards before you start considering accepting maximum security prisoners, and
even then you will probably mostly need them in the supermax wing where you
keep your dangerous prisoners that come in via maximum security. Suppressing
your maximum security prisoners doesn't hurt though (you definitely don't want
a workshop in the maximum security wing), unless you're trying to get a high
Reform score from them.

Each armed guard requires a guard locker in an armory, and the armory should be
kept in a secure location so prisoners cannot arm themselves during a riot. If
you want your regular guards to use tazers you will need to construct an armory
for them to get their tazers from, and schedule the tazer certification program
on the Programs report.

Supermax is a natural consequence of maximum security: maximum security
prisoners frequently come with reputations that make them very dangerous: a
prisoner who is deadly, tough, and strong will be very hard for your guards to
deal with and will probably be able to kill anyone he attacks before he can be
stopped. Legendary prisoners are even worse, with many traits, often improved
(so "extremely deadly", "extremely tough", etc...). Send the prisoners you
don't want to deal with to supermax, where you can have them locked down at all
times (though schedule Sleep for them in the regime).

Be warned: you WILL want armed guards in your supermax wing, especially if it's
housing legendary prisoners. Even then, make sure it is located deep within
your prison with many doors you can lock down in the event of an escape
attempt.

If you decide to expand into death row inmates, just know you'll need cells
zones specifically for them before they can appear in intake and even then you
won't get them often. They'll need a parole room for their Death Row Appeal
program; while this can be any parole room, you might wish to put one in your
death row wing to keep your guards from having to take them far. Since they
live on permanent lockdown, death row inmates really only need three rooms:
their cell, a parole room, and an execution room.

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Good luck, and happy building!