It considers the importance of the tension between security and rehabilitation as an unsolvable reality at the centre of western, late modern, neoliberal and post-industrial mass imprisonment, specifically in the US and England and Wales. However, having considered this aspect of the prison video game, the chapter broadens its focus to consider how ‘gaming’ in prison aptly illustrates these tensions in praxis. The primary intent and purpose of this piece then is to consider how this extant prison-themed video game reflects dominant (and often quite binary) norms and ideas concerning imprisonments competing function (juxtaposing security and rehabilitation as binaries that can never be fully reconciled). It considers the case of the leading prison simulation game, Prison Architect ( Paradox Interactive, 2019), and considers how that game's portrayal of prison, specifically both its function and management, polarises and contrasts between themes of punishment and rehabilitation, in turn reflecting what are often broader societal debates about incarceration. This chapter aims to explore how a prison-themed video game may have come to shape some understandings of the nature, character and function of the carceral realm.
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