Prison Architect – How to Deal with Legendary Prisoners

How to handle legendary prisoners in a way that reduces the risk of death to both them, other prisoners, and staff.

Dealing with Legendary Prisoners

All credit goes to Pedalwerk!

Introduction

Legendary prisoners are the bane of many prison creator’s existence. They may arrive at any security level (although more common among maximum security and supermax security intakes, and when “Gangs” is turned on). Legendary prisoners always have multiple reputations that make them dangerous when violent, and may make them more resistant to usual suppression tactics. This guide provides the best way to handle them.

Preparing Administration for Legendary Prisoners

To ensure that your prison is prepared for legendary prisoners, you will need the necessary bureaucracy tools enabled in advance, and your regular guards trained and protected as necessary.

Unlock the necessary bureaucracy as soon as you can. Under “Security”, this should include include almost everything, but in particular:

• “Intelligence” (so that you can identify legendary inmates as soon as they arrive).
• “Deployment” and/or “Patrols” (so that you will be able to assign guards to patrol near to any cell where a legendary inmate may be kept).
• “Armoury” (so that you can have armed guards), with “Tazers” and “Tazer Rollout” (to ensure that you are able to train regular guards in tazer use), and “Body Armour” (so that your guards are more likely to survive taking damage from legendary inmates).

You may also choose to unlock “Surveillance” and “CCTV Improvement” in “Security”, which will allow you to set up a CCTV system. Such as system is useful for alerting you to violence immediately during gameplay so that you can aid staff in their response (such as by using “Guard Response”, manually directing guards, and opening and closing doors).

You may also choose to unlock “Legal” and “Permanent Punishment”, although I do not recommend using permanent punishment on legendary inmates as, with this, they are kept in their cells unshackled and so are able to initiate violence.

Train all guards with “Tazer Certification” – this will allow them to respond to legendary inmates without having to directly confront them, which is far more likely to result in personal injury.

Preparing Buildings for Legendary Prisoners

Although it is possible to deliberately accept legendary inmates with the slider in the “Intake” tab, legendary prisoners may arrive at any time in normal intake. This means that your prison should be prepared to handle them before they arrive. It would be a bad idea to not have an individual cell available for them (for example, if your prison mainly uses dormitories, or is over-capacity and excess intake is kept in holding cells).

• Ensure that your prison has at least some separate cells, particularly for maximum security, supermax security, and protective custody.
• Ensure that cells where legendary prisoners may be placed are well-equipped in case inmates need to be locked down substantially or permanently. The minimum on top of the minimum requirements should be a shower, a sink and mirror, a bookcase, and windows.
• Build a separate part of the prison for dangerous inmates. This is best done with a supermax facility, but can also be achieved in some circumstances with a protective custody suite.

Preparing Staff for Legendary Prisoners

Your prison needs to be well-staffed to be able to handle legendary prisoners.

Employ some armed guards. Have more guards available than you assign to patrols so that armed guards are rarely off-shift. If you assign them to outside an area where legendary inmates are kept, mark any deployment as “Prioritise Area (Guard)” and any patrol as “Prioritise Patrol” (to further reduce the time that this is unstaffed). Consider permanently turning on “Freefire” for any area where legendary prisoners may be so that armed guards will respond immediately to these inmates rather than waiting for a member of staff to be injured before responding (which will reduce injury and death rates).

Ensure that you have regular guards unassigned to tasks such as monitoring and patrols – as it is likely that legendary prisoners will spend most or all of their time in lockdown, it is important to have enough staff to bring them meals and deal with incidents. A good way to tell if you do is if unassigned guards can be found walking around reception, yards, and canteens.

Ensure that you have sufficient staff of all categories, and that your prison is otherwise well-run. Legendary prisoners are likely to be less violent if their basic needs are met.

You may also choose to have dog handlers available. Dogs cause significant injury very quickly, and can chase down inmates of all speeds, so are a good back-up if a legendary prisoner escapes the purview of other types of guard.

When Legendary Prisoners Arrive

It is important to respond to legendary inmates as soon as they arrive and to put in place plans to handle them.

For each new intake of prisoners, turn on “Intelligence” to see if the prisoners are legendary. Some legendary inmates may not have a known reputation, and this may be marked as “???”, so it is important to periodically check the reputations of inmates using “Intelligence” (this is also good practice in general to screen inmates for those who may need admission to a protective custody suite).

For any legendary inmate, no matter the entry security level, change their security level to either “Maximum Security”, “SuperMax”, or “Protective Custody” as appropriate. If they arrive at a lower security level than this, then this will separate them from other less dangerous inmates and towards your prepared resources for them. It will also increase the amount of money that the government will pay per day for their imprisonment, which will help to pay for their additional security.

When any legendary inmate arrives, wait until they have been searched on arrival (such as in reception). If they arrive with contraband and are assigned to solitary confinement, click “End punishment”, as you don’t want any legendary inmate to be moved back and forth between solitary confinement and their cell unshackled.

Do not assign “Lockdown (Permanent)” or “Solitary (Permanent)”. This will make the legendary inmate very angry. Additionally, prisoners are default unshackled when these punishments are used, leaving your inmates free to destroy property, or attack staff or prisoners.

DO assign “Lockdown (24hrs)”. Click this button hundreds of times until the legendary inmate has a collective tally of at least 3 months in lockdown. The benefit of this over “Lockdown (Permanent) is that the legendary inmate is shackled in their cell, which means that they are not able to be physically violent no matter how high their needs get. The main disadvantage of this is that it is tedious to assign this manually. Another disadvantage is that your legendary inmate will be so non-violent and so safe that they will never be killed in violence.

Handling Prisoner Violence

If the above steps have been unsuccessful (particularly if they remain unshackled for any amount of time), your legendary prisoners may become violent. In this instance, a number of steps can be taken to ensure that violence is handled well.

• If “Freefire” is not turned on and you have armed guards in the prison, immediately turn it on.
• Use “Guard Response” to move guards to near the area of violence, remembering to anticipate prisoner movement along corridors.
• If there are any non-guard staff anywhere near the legendary prisoner, pause the game, click on the staff member, then right click at a point far away from the cell to ensure that they are out of range of the violence. If possible, direct them via a route that does not take them closer to the legendary prisoner (such as past a cell).

If there are not at least 2 armed guards present near the legendary prisoner’s area of violence, pause the game and find the closest armed guards in your prison, click on them, then right click where you want them to be stationed – if when they move there they witness the violence, they will stay and fight, which will boost your numbers. Be aware that legendary prisoners may be able to disarm armed guards and capture their weapons, putting your staff at high risk.

• Hope for the best! The prisoner may be killed by gunfire. You may have guard deaths, potentially multiple deaths.
• Have a “Morgue” prepared with at least 2 morgue slabs, as a bad incident with a legendary inmate may lead to multiple fatalities.
• Be aware if the legendary prisoner is a gang leader. If they are killed by armed guards during violence, this may spark a prison-wide riot that may result in further injury and death and will classify as an “Incident” that will lead to the government restarting your “Days Without Incident” financial bonus.

Palliative Options

If all else fails and you need your legendary prisoner to die as soon as possible to reduce further violence, a number of options are available to kill the prisoner outside of standard procedures.

You may create a single room for an electric generator, add a bed and toilet to this, and assign it as a cell. Then, you may move the specific legendary inmate here using “Cell Status” in the “Logistics” tab. Whilst they are asleep, use the “Emergencies” tab to recruit firefighters, who you can position next to the generator.

Using the “H” button to direct their water, you can deliberately point it at the generator, which will electrocute the inmate and also start a fire that you will need to control. You will also need to replace the generator (at great cost), and you may wish to build a separate generator from the rest of your power grid so that you don’t take out the electrical supply to any other part of your prison.

Once a legendary prisoner is in a large enough cell, you may wall them into the cell permanently. This is best done by building wall inside the cell (which will require a large enough cell for this to be done so that wall can be placed all around the door. This can also be achieved by replacing the door with wall, although be careful that the prisoner is not moved during this time – ensure that there are no other available cells for the prisoner, and that there is no holding cell (you may do this simply by removing the room designation).

Eventually, the prisoner may or may not starve to death, but in the meantime they should not be able to get out and harm any staff. A potential complication is that staff will wait outside trying to perform jobs, such as cleaning, delivering laundry, repairs, guard searches, and delivering good – this may add up to a substantial number of staff.