These two numbers may seem correlated on the surface, suggesting that the higher incarceration rate has led to fewer violent crimes. Despite this drastic decrease, the prison population expanded from 909,000 in 1993 to 1,464,400 in 2019. dropped 49% between 19, according to the Pew Research Center. Whether intentional or not, there’s a critique of the prison industrial complex buried within this unviability. With what the developers have chosen to prioritize in the game, the rehabilitation programs in Second Chances simply aren’t viable for Prison Architect. Meanwhile these resources could instead be used to coerce your prisoners into labor in furniture workshops or agricultural fields, both of which provide your prison with some meaty profits. Having your prisoners in a rehabilitation program means allocating your limited amount of buildings, time, and money towards the effort. The game quickly becomes a budgeting simulator after establishing your prison. But the penalty for allowing these instances to happen are all monetary ones. Occasionally a prisoner will overdose, a riot will occur, or the rare prison break attempt will transpire. There’s never any real urgency in the game to motivate the player outside of the constant accrual of money. Like any private company, your private prison company has only one real goal: turning a profit. You’re not just tasked with building and maintaining a prison, but a private prison.

This is especially apparent when you consider the setting of the game. Rather, Second Chances seems like an attempt by Double Eleven to sprinkle some reform options into the game, without acknowledging how the existing design stymies their use. With the core game revolving around maximizing your prison’s profits at the expense of your prisoner’s wellbeing, this doesn’t seem likely. But Second Chances never really incentivizes the player to actually make use of its rehabilitation systems over existing punishment options. With the new Second Chances DLC, Double Eleven gives players new options that seem to allow a shift towards rehabilitation instead. This first mission highlights what the central theme of Prison Architect has been up to this point: punishment. “It’s not our place to decide if he deserves this,” the CEO of the prison company tells the player, “We’re just here to do a job.” After upgrading the prison’s electrical grid to accommodate the new load, your guards escort the marked prisoner to his final post. The game walks you through building a holding cell, an execution chamber, and finally an electric chair.

The first thing that Prison Architect has you do is execute a prisoner.

Prison architect design