Super Prisons without Super Tech

[Big Willy]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

What happens if you do manage to incarcerate a top-notch superhuman? The Marvel Boy miniseries from a few years back ended with Lieutenant Noh-Varr being sent to the Cube, a state-of-the-art superprison in the desert somewhere. His reaction? (I paraphrase from memory) Something like:

 

"I'll be running this place inside a month. Welcome to the new capital of the Kree Empire."

 

On the other hand, in Elliot S! Maggin's novel Superman, Last Son of Krypton there's a description of how Lex Luthor spends his time in prison doodling escape plans, then chewing them up and swallowing them. He's escaped so often using technology improvised from the contents of his cell that the only personal possessions he's still allowed are his notepad and pen - and he once devised an escape using only the components thereof; but he knows that if he ever puts it into practice, the next time he's caught they just won't give him his notepad and pen.

 

BTW: I don't know whether Wanted was originally a rejected pitch to update the Secret Society of Super-Villains, but it sure read like it at the time.

[Mentor]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

Passing a law won't do it. You need a Constitutional Amendment if you want to trump the Bill of Rights.

Wouldn't want to. It would be unheroic. Of course in a Dark Cahmpions game, it might be an appropriate plot hook.

[Tiree]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

I would probably set up an island prison to drop the more hardened criminals who would not conform to a prison society ala No Escape. 24/7 sattalite tracking of inhabitants - food and medicine supplies dropped off every once in a while. And have a military force picketing the island.

 

Anyone who tries to escape will be killed. It should be run by the UN or UEG or some international agency. If that is not available then it would probably be run by the US or NATO

[OddHat]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

Congrats, Mr "Tough On Super-Crime" Politician. You have just managed to turn the vast majority of criminal superhumans, who were previously relatively peaceful jewel thieves and ATM-rippers, into a huge horde of mass-murderous, highly-motivated, rapidly-organizing, hyper-violent terrorists hell-bent to smashing any extant law enforcement structure and utterly destroying your government because it's their only hope of survival. When superheroes that weren't alienated by your genocidal stance and your armed forces get crushed by sheer numbers and motivation, and your severed head gets picked on the White House fence, you will have ample time to contemplate the depths of your foolishness in the Metahuman Dominion that is to follow.

 

Only if you as a story-teller set up a situation where the villains are significantly more numerous and powerful than government controlled / pro government Supers and conventional forces. All of this depends on the world setting, Supers' power levels, etc.

Brutal dictatorships hang on for generations in the real world, generally propped up by true believers. A semi-Democracy that uses high power "patriotic" supers to enforce severe anti-Super Crime laws is no stretch at all.

[megaplayboy]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

Use a modified Bank vault/airlock kind of thing. To feed the prisoner, door A unlocks so the heavily armed guard can bring in the tray, then door A closes and door B opens so the prisoner can get the food. The vault is filled with basic amenities(basic cable plus other stuff as a reward for good behavior), and also can vent in anesthetic and lethal gas in the event of a breakout attempt--and electrical current through the cell is used if the gas is ineffective. Mentalists are given medication which tends to slightly impair concentration, are scanned for signs of activity and monitored by a psychic sensitive in a secure area of the prison.

 

the facility is in Alaska, deep underground, or Death Valley. the guards are given the heaviest possible body armor and armament(but the guns are "locked" to outside users--i.e. smart guns), and the facility has concealed heavy weaponry at various strategic points, to prevent escape.

 

Life sentences for first time supercriminals are avoided if possible, because it likely makes the criminal more likely to be uninhibited/reckless at all stages of the process.

 

All of this is possible using existing real world tech, and assuming superpowers exist in the setting.

[Supreme]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

Few super-humans, even ones with Desolidification, are unkillable by many real-world ordnances. Have such an ordnance (or more than one for safety's sake) hooked up in their cell. The ordnances are triggered by weight sensors in the floor or the breaking of circuits in the walls and bars. That takes care of almost everyone except the teleporters. For them you'll need some real-tech way of blocking their teleportation.

[TaxiMan]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

It's extreme, but here's a real-tech solution to teleporters:

 

An ankle bracelet (near-unremoveable) with death / incapacitation inside (drugs, explosives, etc.). It is kept deactivated by a transmitter in the prison. Leave the prison, leave the range of deactivation, and the bracelet activates.

 

And as far as "it won't happen" arguments go, in the 'real world' if supervillians start destroying us we'll act first and worry about rights and ethics later. It's happened so many times before that the only question is - how bad do they have to act before we retaliate?

[Metaphysician]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

The "ankle bracelet" trick only works if they automatically teleport everything they touch with them. Not bad for at least some uses, though I'd favor something less lethal and more incapacitating, barring a global scale teleporter.

[JohnTaber]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

The ACLU' date=' and any other human rights organization would have a field day with most of those suggestions.[/quote']

 

Hi Dominique: I actually did the suspended animations tube idea in my Champs game as normals distrusted supers. It also allowed the government to cut costs as not as many guards are needed and they take up a lot less space. It was a really fun campaign with a neat twist...

[sinanju]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

The "ankle bracelet" trick only works if they automatically teleport everything they touch with them. Not bad for at least some uses' date=' though I'd favor something less lethal and more incapacitating, barring a global scale teleporter.[/quote']

 

That's why I prefer keeping the teleporting prisoners in a decompression chamber set to very high pressure. Sure, they can teleport out--but they'll keel over with a bad case of the Bends, a bad way to die.

[tinman]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

That's why I prefer keeping the teleporting prisoners in a decompression chamber set to very high pressure. Sure' date=' they can teleport out--but they'll keel over with a bad case of the Bends, a bad way to die.[/quote']

 

That is positively diabolical, I love it

[Wanderer]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

Only if you as a story-teller set up a situation where the villains are significantly more numerous and powerful than government controlled / pro government Supers and conventional forces. All of this depends on the world setting, Supers' power levels, etc.

Brutal dictatorships hang on for generations in the real world, generally propped up by true believers. A semi-Democracy that uses high power "patriotic" supers to enforce severe anti-Super Crime laws is no stretch at all.

 

Apart from the sarcastic tone, my analysis keeps validity under circumstances that are typical in most superhuman settings, such as: superhuman powers mostly arising through spontaneous processes, superhumans having realistic psychologies and motivations, a significant subfaction of superhumans having power levels that allow them to effectively overcome conventional armed forces, the rate of criminal to law abiding superhumans being in the favor of the former, without significant power level disaparities among the two groups, and governments having not a reliable way of inducing superpowers, or having access to significantly more powerful superhumans or super-tech than the one in the availability of supercriminals(conditions which stands in the CU, BTW, even they have access to power suppressing technologies, and the Bronze Age politicians wisely steer away from applying brutality to supercriminals).

 

If these are no longer valid, of course things may change. In particular, a scanario like the one you suggest, where a government brutally violates the human rights of supercriminals and is able to stand for a long time, may work if the government has reliable means of inducing superpowers in as many subjects as it wishes (e.g. bioengineering, super-science cybernetics), and especially if the supers it creates may be significantly more powerful than the ones that spontaneously arise in the population, and/or the government has ways of reliably inducing fanatical loyalty in its superhuman soldiers and agents (e.g. self-destruct implants, brainwashing, super robots, supervillains conditioned to be super-soldiers).

 

A dictatorial government that can be assured of access to very large numbers of fanatically loyal and very powerful supers can certainly endure for a very long time against any opposition, human and superhuman. I have most exceeding doubts that the ordinarily patriotic/civic-minded superheroes that spontaneously arise in the population would have both the numbers and the fanatical "right or wrong, my country" conviction to sustain the governement in appllying a policiy of brutal human rights violations for superhuman criminals in a democracy (indirect proof be, in such a setting most players IMO would ask to play rebel supers).

[OddHat]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

A dictatorial government that can be assured of access to very large numbers of fanatically loyal and very powerful supers can certainly endure for a very long time against any opposition, human and superhuman. I have most exceeding doubts that the ordinarily patriotic/civic-minded superheroes that spontaneously arise in the population would have both the numbers and the fanatical "right or wrong, my country" conviction to sustain the governement in appllying a policiy of brutal human rights violations for superhuman criminals in a democracy (indirect proof be, in such a setting most players IMO would ask to play rebel supers).

 

I agree with most of this.

 

My own concern with the Super-America-is-Our-America story-telling style comes from a few areas (and note that I do not say it's a "bad" style, just that I see some problems with it).

 

Mainly, I don't think that most people care that much about the civil rights of those that they see as threats. I don't hear that concern when dealing with most other Americans, and I don't see it in most of the American media. I also don't agree with the idea that violations of basic human rights would automatically lead to outrage and rebellion; I've worked with Mainland Chinese, Russians, South Koreans, and others from countries that regularly ignore human rights, to the point of imprisonment without charges, legal theft of property, torture and murder of civilians. Even those I've worked with in America have justified human rights violations against perceived-as-dangerous groups (Falun Dong, Chechens).

 

When I picture a world with Supers, I just don't see the public getting particularly worked up about what happens to violent Super Criminals once they're in prison, so long as they stay in prison. I also don't see most Heroes as emotionally identifying themselves as "Metahumans" rather than Citizens. Given a choice between seeing metahuman criminals allowed to escape and continue murderous attacks against the public or seeing them imprisoned, most Heroes (and players) would opt for imprisonment, even if the powers of the criminals in question made it necessary for that imprisonment to take an inhumane or brutal form.

 

You have used the example of relatively non-violent Super criminals that might turn to violence if faced with overly harsh treatment, and there's something to be said for that. Myself, I can't imagine that any economy would survive in a society that failed to imprison super-thieves; I expect that people would quickly come to accept whatever means were necessary to accomplish that task.

 

As to the CU, I don't use it, and I don't see it as anything other than one example of a Bronze Age comic book world.

[freakboy6117]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

teleporters without blind teleporting can be kept contained by sensory deprivation. delivering them to their cell blindfolded and then allowing them to only move via a pitch black maze of corridors with illumination dots (like cinema stairs) that take them to nondescript exercise and medical rooms (varying the routes each time).

[Iuz the Evil]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

The precedent has been established in our real-world society regarding the impact certain types of punishment have on crimes (note someone's post on kidnapping & rape - Mentor's?... victims' survival rate goes down). I'd be a whole lot more concerned with the metahuman community's reaction to a separate and much harsher system of justice than the 'regular joe's'. You're talking a hair's breadth away from dark future warfare between metas and normals (tantamount to declaring a 'war against Islam' rather than a 'war on terror'). The government had better be real careful about how this is portrayed, or it's going to explode into open conflict.

 

If the tech level is 'normal' and we're talking CU levels of superhuman power then the normals don't have a chance. Think about a world where the equivalent of Gravitar, Eurostar, King Cobra, et al. are united against the common foe of humanity at large. Throw in all the vigilante-hero types the government is also trying to incarcerate... they would quickly have little alternative if they're facing lobotomization, surgical implantation, and/or death by the authorities. What're you going to do? Nuke major population centers to get the one or two 750+ point supers that are decimating your military at that location alone? What percentage of all superhumans have 'superpatriot' as a psych lim anyway?

 

Now if the power level is substantially lower, sure the government can bring it's jack-booted heel down on the neck of the minority group. Torture, mutilate, and implant away! Get ready for terrorism and resistance movements though.

 

There are good reasons to exercise a modicum of restraint in designing containment for superhuman beings. I like the 'coercion + hire you once you're reformed' angle a lot. Gets your fascist state a massive quantity of super-soldiers to police the rest, just in case things do get out of hand. Plus you know China (or some other high-population nation) is going to be stockpiling the 'new WMDs' of superhumanity left and right... gotta have a response to that, can't 'waste' your superhuman assets. I also like the high pressure cell idea a lot. Every superhuman lacking LS: High-Pressure/Low-Pressure/Vacuum is going to be effectively contained by that, I'd think. And it's not inhumane (at least no more so than guard towers with armed guards).

[Whitewings]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

Gotta say, if things go this way (a la 'forced lobotomization & surgical maiming') in an Iron Age style campaign, I'm pretty much lining up with the 'bad guys' lickety split. Then again, at that point I'm pretty clear the authorities ARE the 'bad guys' from a storyline PoV. And then it's going to depend a lot on what the campaign power level is.

 

EDIT: God help the authorities if they try this type of stuff in 'Seeds of Change'. /shudder

I'll agree there. The first time the authorities in *any* country try it is pretty well certain to be the last.

[OddHat]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

I like the 'coercion + hire you once you're reformed' angle a lot. Gets your fascist state a massive quantity of super-soldiers to police the rest' date=' just in case things do get out of hand. Plus you know China (or some other high-population nation) is going to be stockpiling the 'new WMDs' of superhumanity left and right... gotta have a response to that, can't 'waste' your superhuman assets.[/quote']

 

That is the approach that I have advocated on this board for the last two years, and that I've used in my campaigns for the last twenty years (give or take). It makes a lot of sense.

 

Still, it's entirely possible to run campaigns where that is not the approach taken, and for governments to do their dirty work in secret and get away with it for generations.

[Tiree]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

To ensure loyalty you could always pull something from Cyberpunk and Shadowrun - Cortex Bombs.

 

On a similar note, you could always rig a collar around the Super. If the collar gets too far way from a sensor station it goes pop (or it passes by a sensor station) there goes the head of the super.

[Ura-Maru]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

That's why I prefer keeping the teleporting prisoners in a decompression chamber set to very high pressure. Sure, they can teleport out--but they'll keel over with a bad case of the Bends, a bad way to die.

 

That is brilliant. Just @#$!!ing brilliant.

 

Actually, that would work on a lot of other types as well. Bricks are probably resistant to pressure, but most energy projectors aren’t. Super martial artists, too. Or people who are known associates of teleporters.

 

Figuring out what works on who (and just as important, what will kill who, instead of restraining them) is going to be a huge problem. And what do you do when people have radiation accidents while their imprisoned?

 

---

“They’re breaking further into prison. That doesn’t seem wise.â€

[Metaphysician]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

Given their unpredictable nature, there's probably not much of anything you can do about radiation accidents, other than "lots of rapid reaction containment forces." That way, you can at least minimize the chances of a mass breakout ( anyone who suddenly overcomes their restraints will be more likely to just hightail it ).

[OddHat]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

And what do you do when people have radiation accidents while their imprisoned?

 

In the end, Radiation Accidents are the Writers/GM/Gods fracking with you. If you live in a Superhero universe where they can happen, then (as Meta posted), all you can do is keep enough of a strike force handy to try to keep one randomly upgraded criminal from freeing the rest.

 

However, if so-called "Radiation Accidents" have a scientific basis in your world, you have more wiggle room. Say all Meta-Powers come from identifiable changes in brain chemistry and structure, and a "Radiation Accident" involves a sudden, massive change in neurochemistry. Maybe such shifts are part of the natural life cycle of metahumans. In that kind of world, you might be able monitor criminals for signs that such a change may be approaching; if it is, you can do anything from increasing their meds to increasing security.

 

In the end, nothing can stop a writer/GM determined to let a character go free. Living in a world with an interventionist deity sux.

[Duke Bushido]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

That's why I prefer keeping the teleporting prisoners in a decompression chamber set to very high pressure. Sure' date=' they can teleport out--but they'll keel over with a bad case of the Bends, a bad way to die.[/quote']

 

How do you address a T-port villain with LS: extreme pressure / vacuum? I think he'd be immune by default.

 

But a great low-tech low-cost solution. Rep!

[Metaphysician]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

If he requires target site knowledge, just keep him from knowing where he is beyond the walls of his cell.

 

If there's a detectable biological signature that preceeds porting, rig something up to detect it, and automatically drug him or such.

 

If neither, than you might have another "hot sleep"/perpetually drugged/VR world candidate.

 

Though, to be honest, a smart teleporter with long range isn't very likely to be captured in the first place. . .

[Wanderer]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

A non-Hero resource that I've recently bought and found quite inspirative on the subject of super-prisons is Lockdown, from Green Ronin. It details a private maximum-security super-prison... with a twist. While the book is written for the Mutants and Masterminds system only, I've found a lot of interesting and useful ideas in it. Until Steve and Allen eventually grace us with the Stronghold sourcebook next year, it may well be the best treatment of the subject that it's available in the hobby (especially for those 5th Ed Hero novices like me, who don't have any access to old Hero renditions of Stronghold whatsoever).

 

RPGNow currently offers the PDF e-book.

[Metaphysician]

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech

 

This isn't quite directly related, but one thing i prefer is superprisons and such that *don't* rely on "magic power nullification tech." While supertech is fine, I've never been especially fond of generic power negaters.