Dear Ziggursky correctional officers: You're doing it wrong

[Bastille Boy]

Dear Correctional Officers:

 

Many of you have been working at the Zig long enough to remember me. I'm the 5'5" guy who did seven years for providing the getaway teleportation and the resistance shields for a bank robbery. I certainly remember many of you. I can't count the number of times a CO in the Zig stopped another inmate from beating me up.

 

This week I started my sixth year as warden of the Port Oakes Penitentiary, somewhat inaccurately labeled "the world's largest prison for superheroes." (Half of our prisoners are low-level rogues the RIPD picked up for non-payment of bribes, but journalists don’t want to hear about it.) Since I owe you big time, as a group, and since I have a bit of relevant experience, I thought I would offer you some advice. Unsolicited advice isn't usually welcome, I know, but this could be life-saving.

 

Let's look at some statistics.

 

Life expectancy at age 30

Population group	Male1	Female1
Residents of Paragon City, Rhode Island	78	82
Residents of the Rogue Isles	73	79
Correctional officers at Ziggursky Penitentiary	59	67
Corruptional officers at Port Oakes Pen (self-healers excluded)2	82	85
Prisoners at Ziggursky Penitentiary	56	59
Prisoners at Port Oakes Pen (self-healers excluded)2	86	89

 

¹Statistics on non-binary people are not available.

²Figures would be substantially higher with self-healers included.

 

All of you are making a big sacrifice by working at the Zig. It takes well over a decade off your life. Nearly two decades, for male COs. I don't need to tell you why. You all know that physical violence isn’t the main thing that kills correctional officers young. The top three killers of the COs at the Zig are heart attacks, strokes, and liver disease.

 

Why do so many COs at the Zig drink themselves to death? Alcohol is a way of dealing with the anxiety that comes from having hundreds of eyes stare at you every day with fear, anger, and hatred. Why do so many COs get heart attacks? It’s the damage you do to your own hearts when you restrain an inmate for his first injection of power-suppressing drugs, and then the next day you do it again even though you can see that he has a black eye, and you do it again and again until he breaks and lets you give him his power-suppressing drugs by mouth.

 

What you do to your prisoners is killing you. And it’s totally unnecessary.

 

At the Port Oakes Penitentiary, corruptional officers live longer than most people. Why? It’s partly because we have so many healers on staff. But the big reason is that the job is a joy.

 

You like putting people and things in little boxes. So do I. So here is another chart.

 

	The Zig	The Port Oakes Pen
Incidence of PTSD among COs	High	High
Cause of PTSD among COs	Working in the Zig	Doing time in the Zig
Health care for COs	High-deductible insurance	Free; provided by convict labor
Meals on the job	Sack lunches	Free; provided by convict labor
Do COs eat with prisoners?	Of course not.	Why wouldn't we?
Knives in inmate kitchen	Strictly prohibited	Pre-war French steel
Training required for COs	Four months	Fourteen months
Longest training module	Use of force	Taming a wolf
K9 corps	German shepherds	Wolves
OK to pet K9 "officers"?	No	Yes, and it's not optional
Main source of revenue	Federal taxes	Sale of prison-made goods
Prison-made goods sold to public	None	Fruit, vegetables, sorbet, patent licenses
Other prison-made goods	Pruno, shivs	Uniforms, ale, AI robot janitors
Most popular hobby for COs	Drinking alone	Shenanigans in officers' barracks
Most popular hobby for prisoners	Chess	Chess (it's a thing; I don't get it)

 

You’re probably thinking, “Of course you have an easier job. Your prisoners are heroes. Your job would be as dangerous as ours if you had to deal with dozens of serial killers.” But we have dozens of prisoners who were once serial killers. They are known as “vigilantes.” When they arrived in the Pen, they hated us every bit as much as your prisoners hate you.

 

So, how do we do it?

Edited June 26, 2020 by Bastille Boy

[Bastille Boy]

Here's how we do it.

 

We never suppress prisoners’ superpowers. Especially not with drugs.

Supers with suppressed powers feel defenseless and terrified. They are desperate to get their powers back. Desperate people are dangerous, with or without superpowers. Drugs are the cruelest way of suppressing supers’ powers, since power-suppressing drugs have have brutal side effects. Some ex-cons never recover completely. (In case you are wondering about me, I’ve regained my strength, thanks to my thermal self-healing. The nocturnal eneuresis is down to once a month.) Furthermore, prisoners with chemically suppressed powers cannot help if the facility comes under attack. If the Rikti show up, doors can be unlocked in an instant, but there is not enough time to give everyone superadine.

 

Good construction is the most important form of security.

Power suppression is not necessary to keep a super from escaping a building with heavy walls. Sure, it's possible for supers to bend a metal door out of shape if they hit it hard enough times. But have you ever heard of a hero or a villain tunneling their way to the end of a cave mission? I haven't. And it's not as if there isn't an incentive; navigating caves is really annoying. Powers have limits. Supers can’t tunnel their way through caves, and they can't tunnel their way out of prison, either. Nor can they punch through a properly constructed prison wall.

 

We install Conductive Aura devices throughout the Pen.

This is our emergency security system. We’ve only used it twice, but it’s important to know that it’s there. If a major fight or riot breaks out, we can flip a switch, and in seconds, all the prisoners in the affected area will be out of stamina. The COs will be out of stamina, too, but in a fight between prisoners with no stamina and COs with no stamina, locked doors always win.

 

We hire COs with healing, regeneration, and resistance-boosting powers.

Thermals make the best corruptional officers. (I admit I’m prejudiced.) Corruptors and defenders with Empathy, Pain Domination, or Electrical Affinity make great COs, too. A few COs with defensive buff powers can easily stop an attack by a single prisoner, even one with active superpowers. A potential tragedy turns into comedy when the aggressive prisoner realizes that their attacks aren’t doing anything,

 

We use buffs on prisoners to influence their behavior.

Healing, regeneration, and resistance buffs feel wonderful. We give out some of these buffs all the time to prisoners who are generally behaving. We save the most powerful buffs for moments when a prisoner does something we want to encourage. Ask any animal behaviorist: positive reinforcement is more effective than punishment. When prisoners obey orders, they get buffs. A new prisoner gets powerful buffs when they put on their uniform for the first time and when they first enter their cell. I can see their thoughts on their faces. “Buffs are for allies, not enemies. Why are they treating me as an ally?” It doesn’t take them long to figure out that we see well-behaved prisoners as allies.

 

We use only physical or magical restraint.

If a prisoner needs to be restrained for just a moment, “stacked mez” is the way to go. Whenever possible, we accompany “mez” with healing, to avoid creating feelings of resentment. Total Domination combined with Heal Other is the ideal combination. (Mind Control and Empathy is a lousy pair of powersets for defeating supers, but it’s a great combination for keeping captured supers caught.) If a prisoner needs to be restrained for more than a moment, e.g., for transport to court (or what passes for court in the Rogue Isles), physical restraints are best. Super strong prisoners can break standard handcuffs, but they cannot break out of 10kg of titanium alloy.

 

We never use restraint or lockdown as punishment.

There are no isolation cells in the Pen. We lock prisoners in their cells only at night, so that we can limit the number of COs with night shifts. We want prisoners to feel safe and comfortable in their cells, and we can’t do that if we lock them in punitively. When discipline is necessary, our first step is to withdraw buffs. The next step is to have some COs with Sonic Attack powers shout at them. There is a leather strap in a display case in my office. It is old but in good condition. Our oldest prisoners have seen it in use. If anyone asks if the strap is on display as a relic or if it could still be used, I change the subject.

 

Cells look spartan but are comfortable.

The cells in the Pen hold one prisoner each. (Bunk beds are a luxury reserved for officers.) The back half of each long, narrow cell has brick walls, providing a measure of privacy when the prisoner is at their desk. There is also a privacy divider concealing the toilet. The front half of the cell, containing the prisoner’s bed, has heavy steel bars instead of walls. Many defender-type supers have regeneration auras that are active even when they are asleep. A row of steel bars does not block auras. All of our prisoners sleep in at least one regeneration aura; many sleep in two or three. This is the main reason our prisoners live so long. (In the officers’ barracks, each of us sleeps in at least three auras. The prisoners nevertheless outlive us, on average, because many of us have spent years on power-suppressing drugs.)

 

Instead of suppressing prisoners’ superpowers, we enhance them.

This is the key. Some supers may think they want power over other people, through influence, infamy, honor, political office, or an underground cabal. What we all really want is individual, physical power. We’ll do just about anything to get it. We’ll take wild risks. We’ll happily sacrifice our influence or our infamy. We’ll go through long, tedious grinds, spending endless hours fighting identical holograms at Architect Entertainment. Give superpowered prisoners an enhancement that comes in a pill—a pill they can’t get anywhere else—and they’ll start thinking maybe it’s okay to postpone the great escape. I can’t tell you which drugs we use for this. If you guessed superadine, you guessed wrong.

 

We give some chemically-induced powers to prisoners with no superpowers.

This includes prisoners whose powers came from hand-held weapons. Our policies on contraband are lax, but we don’t let prisoners walk around with beam rifles. Since we’re disarming them, we have to give them something just as good to make up for it. Super Strength is a popular choice, and there are many drugs that can produce it. Strength-enhancing drugs are not dangerous when the user is surrounded by magical healers at all times.

 

We mostly let prisoners do what they want.

They want to brew beer? We let them, as long as they limit their drinking to three pints at a sitting. They want to hang sheets over the bars of their cells for a bit of privacy in the hours between dinner and lockdown? That’s fine, as long as we can see everybody at count. They want to start a reading group on arcane magic? We won’t stand in their way, and we just might steal some books for them from the Circle of Thorns.

 

We don’t force prisoners to work, but we let them work if they want to.

Most of them do want to, if given good options. Plant controllers want to grow things. We have a farm. Healers want to heal people. Under careful supervision, some of our prisoners run a health clinic for the indigent (the closest thing the Rogue Isles have to Medicaid). Folks who can summon ice want to summon ice. If you’ve eaten sorbet in a Family restaurant, you’ve consumed prison-made goods. The robot janitors our masterminds created aren’t ready for sale to the public; sometimes they try to whack people with mops. This is harmless as long as the robots stay in the Pen (thanks to all those damage-resistance auras).

 

Work release is available after a year.

To earn work release, prisoners have to have near-perfect behavior, they have to work within the prison, and they have to take a three-month course of obedience training. (Yes, that’s what we call it. We don’t sugar-coat it.) Do prisoners escape once we give them work release? Yes, many of them do. This is by design. By far the easiest way to get out of the Pen is to volunteer for “obedience training” run by self-described “villains.” If a captured hero goes through our training and then flees to be with their loved ones in the United States or wherever, that’s all right. The program saps a hero’s will to fight crime and destroys their credibility as a crime-fighter. As for the prisoners who are Rogue Isles natives, if they escape and stay in the Isles, the RIPD will have them over a barrel. They will pay their protection money on time.

 

A lot of our prisoners don’t escape. There are dozens of prisoners who leave the grounds of the Pen five mornings a week and dutifully return at night. In their gray work release uniforms, they are easily mistaken for mechanics. Why don’t they run when they have the opportunity? They all have two powerful reasons to stay. They all get superpowers they didn’t have on the outside, and they all get the health benefits of living in all those protection and regeneration auras, which is the closest thing available to a fountain of youth.

 

Many prisoners have further reasons to stay. A lot of the captured vigilantes need protection from old enemies. Some of our prisoners were rejected by their families and want a home that will never throw them out. We have one prisoner with poorly-controlled radiation powers who chooses to stay in the Pen because it’s the only place he can safely be around other people without wearing a lead suit.

 

The end result? The prisoners who escape rarely re-offend, and the prisoners who stay are thoroughly pleasant to be around. When I go into the cellblock in the morning, it’s like going into a kennel full of loyal golden retrievers.

 

Of course you can’t do everything we do. Work release at the Zig would be politically untenable. But you could easily install some Conductive Aura devices and hire some COs with protective buffs. That alone would make everybody safer. If you could get enough COs with protective buffs, you could get rid of the power-suppressing drugs. That would make the prisoners a lot less desperate to escape. And it would make you a lot safer.

 

If you really want to enjoy your jobs, or if you want to live to see your grandchildren graduate from high school, stop trying to punish the prisoners in your care. Think instead about what you could do to make your prisoners want to stay where they are. Don’t your lives matter more than retribution?

 

Sincerely yours,

Jacob Hobbes (a.k.a. "Herocatcher Jake")

 

p.s. If you find any of this useful, please put in a good word for my brother at his parole hearing later this year.

Edited June 26, 2020 by Bastille Boy

[Bastille Boy]

(( Advice on how to improve this story's consistency with the game canon would be welcome. The Paragonwiki article on the Rogue Island Police is barely more than a stub, so I figured there was some room for creativity here. No doubt Officer Hobbes would welcome suggestions about how to improve his corruptional programs. ))

Edited June 26, 2020 by Bastille Boy

[Bastille Boy]

I notice that the Virtueverse Wiki now has an article on the Port Oakes Pen. It's mostly accurate. It could give the impression that there's some kind of tension between me and Officer Pavlovich, head of the K9 corps. That's not true. We occasionally see things differently, but we're good friends.

 

A lot of the corruptional officers call themselves corruptors but are actually defenders. As you know from these forums, it's a subtle difference.

 

http://www.virtueverse.net/wiki/Port_Oakes_Penitentiary

 

--Herocatcher Jake

 

Edited August 8, 2020 by Bastille Boy

[Likara]

((A correction on the manner in which powers are suppressed in the Zig; the second SSA reveals that it's the presence of Pandora's Box in the facility. Just simply walking past a certain point drains all of a super's powers away. If drugs were ever mentioned before, I would assume the Pandora's Box SSA was an attempt at a retcon for that))

[Bastille Boy]

(( Thanks for the tip, @Ritikesh. The villain tutorial includes the following text, from Angel Lopez, one of two possible contacts in the mission. ))

 

https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Angel_Lopez#Talk_to_Mr._Verde

 

Quote

Ok, there is this designer drug called Superadine, see? And this drug, it can give even normal hombres super powers. If you have super powers already it can even increase their effectiveness. With the inhibitor drugs that the Zig guards make most of us take, we can't access our powers. But with Superadine we can once again feel mighty, at least until the guards make us take our inhibitor drug again. I have a friend, Mr. Verde, who can hook you (and me) up with a couple doses of Superadine. This will unlock the potential of your powers. Mr. Verde is up the stairs here on the second level. Just tell him I sent you and he'll set us both up.

 

Edited August 10, 2020 by Bastille Boy
link added

[Likara]

((Yeah, I'm guessing the original devs were trying to retcon that with the Pandora's Box SSA, my guess is because it doesn't account at all for heroes who are androids, or who's "powers" are from simple training, or who cast spells. So, they inserted Pandora's Box into a hidden basement as a catch-all McGuffin and made it so simply going past a certain point just insta-suppresses you, regardless of origin))

[Bastille Boy]

4 minutes ago, Ritikesh said:

((Yeah, I'm guessing the original devs were trying to retcon that with the Pandora's Box SSA, my guess is because it doesn't account at all for heroes who are androids, or who's "powers" are from simple training, or who cast spells. So, they inserted Pandora's Box into a hidden basement as a catch-all McGuffin and made it so simply going past a certain point just insta-suppresses you, regardless of origin))

OOC:

 

The original redside tutorial (which is still the redside tutorial on Homecoming) had two possible initial contacts. The other contact sends the player's character in search of the weapons or devices they need for their powers.

 

In writing the story above, I assumed that either taking away prisoners' devices or giving them drugs will in fact suppress their superpowers, without exception. That's what led me to think the drugs the Zig uses must be nasty. To undermine naturally gained super strength, drugs would have to be designed to cause weakness. To stop spellcasting or to undermine natural willpower, drugs would have to cause confusion or depression. (I wasn't thinking about androids. Androids who can't be partially disabled via removal of a part would be a tricky case.)

 

I wonder whether the two stories about the Zig are in fact consistent. Might prisoners and rank-and-file guards believe that prisoners' powers are being suppressed by drugs, though in fact Pandora's Box is responsible? Might the guards be giving prisoners a nocebo (the negative equivalent of a placebo)?

[Likara]

OOC: It's Established in the SSA that no one even knows that Pandora's Box is even there, until the player character discovers it, finds the secret hatch to the basement, and your NPC partner at that point opens it. If you're a villain running it, you purposely go into the Zig, knowing you'll be suppressed, because you have in your possession the one artifact that can divert Pandora's Box's power away from you. While there, a guard quips about how he never gets tired of watching a Circle mage wave his wand ineffectively before being jumped (and given that the Circle are ancient spirits possessing bodies, I doubt any drugs would affect them to begin with, as their stolen bodies are depicted as decaying).

 

However, the guards are portrayed as having knowledge that people who enter are insta-suppressed without anything extra needed, and it seems to be common knowledge. Just before the SSA, no one really knew -what- was suppressing them.

Edited August 10, 2020 by Ritikesh

[FoulVileTerror]

((  The short of it?   Inconsistent lore written by several different people over several years.  The onus is now on us, the players/audience, to determine the most agreeable and appropriate reading of that lore.    Personally?   I'm more on-board with the drugs being effective and brutal, but that Pandora's Box amplifies the effect they have.  ))

[_Kai_]

((I always interpreted it as 'need to know', like....the upper management of the Zig was told 'power suppression happens, just walk em past here' and they did so, and it worked, and then someone had the thought 'wait...if the prisoners ever figure out its just this spot we'll have trouble' and so did an employee shake up and told the new guards 'everyone gets one of these inhibitor pills/shots' and explained that's what makes everything not work. Pills/shots are total placebo, but have like trace amounts of drugs to cause nausea and taste awful to reinforce the belief that they are doing something, so until COs reach a certain level, they and the prisoners believe its all because of a horrible drug.   Also good to point out that by the time that SSA came out, Breakout was no longer the active tutorial, so there was no lore conflict for newer players))