Developing INCarceration
A collaborative competition board game designed by Clara Louise Kelley, Kally Zheng, and Vincent Nicandro.
Artists’ statement
Given the reins to build your own private prison, would you build an institution focused on rehabilitation? Or would you monetize prison labor for your own gain? Turns out, there might not be a choice at all.
INCarceration is a game for 3–4 players that attempts to demonstrate the high-level factors that private prisons contribute in lowering standards for rehabilitation. It’s really easy to forget about the people at the center of the prison system, especially when we mistake its purpose as profit rather than rehabilitation. By having each game player act as architects of private prisons trying to drive the profits of their prison up, we force players to be complicit in the system and to look at the results of their planning.
Population counts, amenities, manufacturing, and more are all key considerations for playing architects as they collaborate to make their prisons. Players always have the choice to increase the amenities they provide to prisoners and decrease the amount of prisoners they build into the prison, but doing so runs counter to winning the real game: making the most money.
By game end, we hope to motivate people to care more about the inherent inequities proliferated by the private prison system and the prison industrial complex in the United States.
Background
Note: All sources used as background research can be found at the end of this article.
The prison system has been turned into a for-profit business. Although only 5% of the world’s population lives in the U.S., the country houses 25% of the world’s incarcerated population. The government now spends about 80 billion dollars of taxpayer money on correctional facilities, exceeding educational spending by 12 billion dollars.
Around 800 million dollars goes to private prisons, which turn these contracts into a 7.4 billion dollar enterprise that forces prisoners into unjust labor conditions, maximizing the spread between what the government pays to house a prisoner and the actual cost of living and salary it provides to prisoners.
Though 5% of the world’s population lives in the U.S., the country houses 25% of the world’s incarcerated population.
Although the prison system was built for reform, it fails to. All of the ways in which the system profits depend on the labor of prisoners to profit from. As a result, prisons don’t have any incentive to decrease their prisoners. In order to stay in business, they rely on a steady stream of inmates. As a result, prisons have a huge influence on law making. They spend millions on lobbying in order to drive stricter laws, longer prison sentences and more profitable contracts.
This isn’t rehabilitation at all; this is INCarceration.
Concept map
The causal loop diagram below describes the main high-level mechanics we wanted to demonstrate in the game:
To add context to this, we simplified our research into two interconnected loops related to how private prisons monetize prisoners into labor, where private prisons push for increased revenue both by maximizing the amount of manufacturing done by a prison as well as minimizing the amount they spend on prisoner amenities.
Design, iteration, & playtesting
When we first explored this concept, we looked to other games which modeled capitalism and related systems before settling on a mod that fit our intended model and scope.
Version 1: Monopoly
We found that the game Monopoly had many of the systemic elements that we wanted to highlight in the private prison system; as a result, for our first draft, we created a simple mod of Monopoly which utilized its economy system (barring a few changes to events and mechanics).
In changing the properties acquired to events that helped prisons maximize profits, we found that the board was unnecessary and cumbersome, so we turned our version of Monopoly into a card game. In this version of the game, we hoped to emphasize how private prisons turned 800 million dollars (the maximum amount of money allotted to players in the game) into a multi billion dollar industry. We moreover hoped to show how increasing recidivism was actually in the best interest of prisons by having the events that players put into action affect the number of prisoners that they could collect each round and thus the profit they could make each round.
After playtesting this version of the game, however, we found that the amount of card types and pieces made the game extremely cumbersome to manage for the average player. In addition, the balancing of profit, prisoners collected, and events played between players was extremely random and variable (owing to the fact that we’d yet to balance the numbers in the game). Both Nylah and Alyssa noted that the way recidivism was modeled in the game (by dice roll) made it such that they could easily end a round without having any prisoners. Yikes.
Clearly, there was a great amount of confusion and no obvious correlation between the number of prisoners and the size of profit; as a result, we pivoted.
Version 2: Between Two Cities
As luck would have it, our team played the game Between Two Cities in class and realized that it would actually be effective in showing the elements that go into making a prison profitable, all without having to play with pieces that represent prisoners and money. More intriguingly, pulling aspects of this game would also pull the collaborative nature of the original Between Two Cities game as well, creating tension through the bond over building awfully equipped prisons.
To re-contextualize the game, we pulled elements and behaviors from the game (taverns became manufacturing programs, parks became cell blocks, factories became lobbying, and offices became amenities) and changed the purpose from building a town to building a conceptual prison industry. The behaviors of each tile correlate with the missions we wanted to promote:
- Program tiles require making diverse sets of industries in order to get the most points from them, to encourage players to build them intentionally;
- Cell tiles require being adjacent to other cell tiles in order to get the most points, to encourage stuffing prisons with prisoners;
- Lobbying tiles award those who put the most of them in their prisons score multipliers related to the amount of Cell tiles they built, showing how lobbying drives stricter rules and longer prison sentences thus increasing prison occupancy;
- and Amenity tiles award only a point to prisons, to emphasize how devalued prisoner quality of life is in the effort to make profit.
We additionally added events and audits which impacted the scoring of the prison at the end as a final phase of gameplay.
When we playtested the game ourselves, we found that our balance still wasn’t quite there yet. There were too many Amenity tiles, making gameplay slow and repetitive (we would cut the amount in half for our next playtest). We also changed the game from 3 rounds to 4 so the rounds became less confusing, and moved Event cards as a score modifier at the end of the game.
Most excitingly, however, the winning player was skewed towards the person who had the most effective balance of cells/prisoners and lobbying, which was exactly what we wanted.
Confident that the mechanics and dynamics of the game were appropriate, we moved onto higher fidelity cards and playtested once more, introducing a game mat and the full Event/Inspection system. The final aesthetic of the game was intended to be bright with light and neutral illustrations, in a sort of opposition to the very serious and dark nature of the game’s premise.
Our third and last playtest confirmed a lot of our high-level concerns, particularly in balancing the point system and ratio of tile types. The resulting prison scores we had were between 54 and 58 points, which was especially exciting as it meant that our elements were more or less properly assigned point values to end up with such a close result. We had a strong game! As Sammy said:
The mechanics of the game are super interesting, and I definitely feel a bit of conflict knowing I’m not even satisfying the amenities in my contract but also winning because of it.
Nevertheless, we made a few last-minute changes to account for this playtest’s feedback in our in-class final prototype. We cut Inspection as a phase and absorbed audits into the Event cards, added more information of the Event cards to contextualize the information, and added more Contract cards for greater variation and to further encourage players to not fulfill their contracts.
Concluding thoughts
The process getting to where we are right now may have been very windy and twisty, but in the end, we’re really happy with how INCarceration turned out in communicating the dynamics and factors which lead to such horrible conditions for prisoners. Future work would hone in on the 4 round mechanic and simplifying that down further to increase interest in gameplay midway through, perhaps by reintroducing duplex tiles into the mix.
You can print your own copy of INCarceration here, including its rules and gameplay guide.
Sources
- “Yes, U.S. locks people up at a higher rate than any other country.” The Washington Post.
- “Crime Is Down, Yet U.S. Incarceration Rates Are Still Among the Highest in the World.” The New York Times.
- “Does the U.S. Spend $80 Billion a Year on Incarceration?” Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
- “$800 Million in Taxpayer Money Went to Private Prisons Where Migrants Work for Pennies.” The Daily Beast.
- “5 facts behind America’s high incarceration rate.” CNN.
- “The Economics of the American Prison System.” SmartAsset.
- “The federal government markets prison labor to businesses as the ‘best-kept secret’.” Vox.
Special thanks to Nylah, Alyssa, Anjali, Claire, Sedinam, and Samantha for playtesting!
