Panopticon Prison

If you commit a crime in Freedom City, and get caught, brutalized and killed by the police, you will be sent here. Serve your time, find the appropriate terminal and pay your fine to get out immediately. Prison might be harsh, but it has its benefits; it's a good place to grind craft and locksmith for example.

Upon getting in prison, you will notice a new implant - Panopticon Cortex Bomb. You should be able to guess what it might do if it sets off, and you will get it regardless of spawning in the clone vats or walking in. If you decide to turn yourself in, you can do that by walking into the prison while being wanted; but you can't carry any weapons, armor, or containers with you. But you might get a skilled friend to hand you something from the outside...

Beware, though. Other prisoners may be hostile, or in desperate need of sex - and they won't ask nicely. Rumors say that Panopticorp has been experimenting with what they think they could be a solution to the criminal problem. Also, it is said that some prisoners have set up a fighting ring.

You wont starve in here, as you can get food from the only slightly outdated prison labour program.

Panopticon is located in Gangland: to reach it, exit Freedom City from the road just north of the Helliday Inn, go west and north at the first intersection, and voila - there you are.

Benefits in Prison

Not the gay kind. Unless that's what you want. That's not what you want. Right?

What to do if you find yourself in prison

So you decided to butt rape Janet while wandering around Freedom City and you find yourself in prison. You are more than likely going to be stuck there for at least 20 minutes and maybe much longer unless you decide to pay the fine. So you have a few options of things to occupy your time:

• You can up your crafting skill by using the license plate press downstairs.
• You can find schematics for lock picks upstairs in one of the cells. Cells are usually locked but they will open periodically.
• You can use license plates in conjunction with the schematics to create lock picks, and then grind out your picking skill on the locked cells upstairs.
• There is a weight set on the second floor that you can use to increase your brawn skill. For further information on working out, check out the Working Out entry, by LochLain
• Some prisoners have useful knowledge, and may be willing to teach you a thing or two for a fee. Try to find them.

Grinding Craft

"Prison ain't so bad, yeh can make Sangria in the turlet. O' course, it's shank or be shanked." - Scruffy

For crafters, violating the law in some menial way (or spectacular and hilarious way, depending on your style) can create a great opportunity to grind your first few raw in craft, and pick up some easy XP early on. This is thanks to the magic of the license plate press, your best friend and worst enemy for the next 20 minutes to 24 hours, depending on how resistant to soul destroying boredom you are. The press can be found on the lower floor of the prison, marked as 'Wk'. It's 1 tile west of the gruel dispenser, your second best friend.

To minimize the amount of work you have to do, thereby freeing up time to watch midgets do awful, awful things to other midgets, put the command make 1 on press on your paste, queue it up 25 times (that's the limit), and enjoy your dark, twisted fetishes (seriously, seek help) until it's time to queue those actions up again. Repeat until you've maximized your IP for the day. Now, that probably took you about 20 minutes, give or take. Great, you think, time to go enjoy the world and come back some other time. This is the sane person's approach, and thereby very, very wrong. It's time to take all those plates you made and turn 'em into XP (and a couple of bowls of sweet, sweet gruel).

This is accomplished one of two ways, depending on your circumstances:

• The Hopeless Slackass Method - Find a shiv or potmetal lockpick diagram, either is fine (Grumbard-Sanders sells shiv diagrams for a dollar if you plan on walking yourself in) and use follow diag to make picks/shivs until your sissy fingers bleed. Then, drop them all, head back to the press, and get more plates. This has the advantage of being easy, and allowing you to queue 25 actions at a time just like with the press. You'll get anywhere from 1-5XP (it'll decrease the more you do it) for making these each time, sounds miniscule but it takes a couple of seconds for each one and if you have the inclination you can make literal thousands before your craft is up to 3 or 4 raw.

• The MacGyver Method - Unsurprisingly, this involves the 'improvise' function, which allows you to make stuff without a diagram or schematic. 'Why the hell would I do that when I have a schematic, jackass?' Well, first of all I'm trying to help you, there's no need for that kind of language. Secondly, it's because you get more XP from improvising (up to about 10XP for each successful attempt), meaning a higher rate of efficiency on all those plates you just half-assed the production of. To improvise a shiv or pick, use the command improv <shiv/pick> with license. As a bonus, if you've never successfully improvised an item before, you'll get a free clone update and a journal entry (you'll never guess what it's called) for your efforts . This can be either extremely useful or midly amusing, depending on how much fatal sodomy you're being forced to endure. The downside of the improvisation method is that when you're too functionally retarded to make a sharp implement out of two already fairly sharp pieces of metal, your character will scream something hilarious like 'JEW CUNT BONANZA' (good) and gain a bunch of stress (bad). Given your presumably low crafting skill and tendency towards anti-semitism, this is pretty much guaranteed to happen a lot if you decide to go MacGyver on that shit. It can be counteracted somewhat by sitting in the shower and hugging your knees while you improvise, which de-stresses you fairly quickly, but make absolutely sure there aren't any other players around if you're planning on that. The store on the north side of the work area contains a 'FINAL SOLUTION' button that gasses the showers, which will probably make you scream obscene things in real life once you realise all your mindless button-stabbing was wasted by some other guy's singular mindless button stab. Another unfortunate facet of using improvise is that you can't queue a series of similar improvise actions: your character will get confused about where that license plate you were planning to use has gone (apparently none of the other hundred or so is fit to take its place). This means that you'll have to babysit your character through the frustrating process a lot more actively, leaving a lot less free time for your obsessive depravity (it's a disease).

Don't forget to fill your pockets, armpits and less... sanitary orifices with license plates for Avram when you just can't take the crushing disappointment that this is what your life has become anymore. Or, if you're like me (indifferent to the fact you're virtually doing a task that you wouldn't stoop to in the real world) leave once your craft hits 4 raw. Past that point you'll have to grind away on bigger and better and deadlier things.

Grinding Locksmith

Pretty simple, get a hold of a potmetal lockpick (by crafting it, or one of the thousands dropped by the poor souls following the advice above), head up the stairs, over to the eastern cells, and pick <direction>. You'll probably fail, a lot, but with sufficient perseverance you too can gain easy skillups from your violation of the law. If the brutal anal rape and frequent beatings aren't your cup of tea (protip: they are, but whatever, you can live in denial) you can always go to the northern basement door of the Sharpton Projects to grind your lockpicking (from outside Sharpton head NE, NE, S). There will probably be a couple of Chobos, which may or may not be a problem for you, and you'll want to bring a bunch of spare picks for when yours break, as they inevitably will.