How do you become a prisoner in your own prison?

Since Alpha 20, Prison Architect includes a lose condition in which you are sentenced to serve jail time in your own jail. In this mode you lose control over your prison and instead gain direct control of a single inmate.

How is this event triggered, and what's an easy strategy to trigger it intentionally, preferably in a way which keeps the prison functional so you can experience prison-life authentically?

Solution 1:

The Introversion video blog says a warning will be issued if "...you have 20 deaths occur..." but they don't say how many escapes will trigger it.

You then get a number of hours to rectify the situation, if you have more deaths/escapes in that warning time then you are fired and put in your own prison.

Triggering the failure condition is going to be harder than it sounds. If your guards have tasers then tend to stop escapes quite quickly, if you try just leaving the front door open. An alternative would be to have your Yard next to an outer wall and then, during yard time, have a workman install a normal door in the outside wall. Lock open the door and see how many make a break for it. At least by using a door you can then lock it shut again.

Another suggestion would be to start a riot and then let armed guards go "weapons free", that should cause the body count to rise.

Solution 2:

You can edit your savefile to start the prisoner mode:

Open the save file you want to be a prison in (.prison) press ctrl+f for search and type in "conditions" go two down find the line just underneath:

BEGIN TooManyDeaths END

and add the following within it:

BEGIN TooManyDeaths Value 5 State Warning END

Next time you load you join as a prisoner.

Solution 3:

Now with v1.0, you can play escape mode, which is exactly this, with the exception of being able to escape, fight, and build up your stats. You have to go into the menu and then choose which prison you want to escape from, you can escape from your own built prison, or you can go onto the steam workshop and choose a prison from there.

Also, if you want to become a criminal due to being charged with "Criminal Negligence", you'd have to obtain 20 deaths in your prison, then the warden calls you and gives you a warning, if you obtain 5 more deaths that day, you're done, you lose control of the prison and you're now a prisoner.

If you want an easy way to do this, you can setup a yard surrounded by fences, have ONE opening and leave it insecure (so they'll try to run out), but when they do, have an armed guard there and have free fire enabled, that'll get you fired fairly easily.

Solution 4:

With the 1.0 release you now can play the game in Escape Mode which is exactly this - you play as a prisoner in your own prison (or one from the Steam community).