How to run a prison using simlogical objects

Overview

The simlogical prison theme is a set of hacked objects that work together to control your Sims as if they were inmates of a prison.

The core of the set comprises the Prison Controller,   Prisoner Tokens,  and a choice of two styles of cell door.    There is a barred door for old fashioned jails, and a plain door with a peephole for more modern prisons and Young Offender Institutions.

Also available are staff-only doors and timed doors for communal areas.

The helper objects include specially hacked in-cell furnishings and equipment that understands the Prisoner Tokens and can automatically allocate exclusive ownership to the prisoners whose tokens are in the same room. Also there are a classroom chair  and controller  which help you give courses in things like Anger Management which improve a prisoner's skills, personality and relationships.

Getting started tutorial

I recommend that you follow this tutorial so you can see the prison working properly so you will be able to recognise if something is not going right when you make your more complex prison as part of your main game.

1. Obtaining your objects.

Start off by downloading the following objects, all available from simlogical Downloads in either the Prison section or the Objects with Restrictions section:

Prison main controller	Cell door	Prisoner token	Staff recruiter	Clothes store
Classroom chair	Class scheduler	Canteen with timer	In-cell table	In-cell chair
In-cell bed	In-cell locker (contains snacks and books)	In-cell toilet (doubles as trashcan)	In-cell basin	In-cell shower
Reservable bed	Staff-only toilet	Staff-only basin	Staff-only shower	Staff-only door

On top of these objects, you will need a sink and counter or dishwasher for washing dishes, and possibly a trash compacter. Prisoners may also dispose of refuse down their toilets.

I advise you not to include any other objects on your prison lot until you are familiar with how the prison works when everything is going smoothly, so in future you will be able to recognise the difference if you add something incompatible and things start to go wrong.

2. Creating your officer.

Go to a neighbourhood that you keep for testing, or one that doesn't have your most important Sims or houses.

Create a new family of just one Sim, with a high "Nice" score for his personality, and move him into an empty lot.  Don't make him get a job yet.  The reason I advised giving the warder a high Nice was to stop him becoming a supplier of contraband (see later).

When you're ready to make a bigger prison you can have as many officers as you can have Sims in a family, or you can recruit them from the neighbourhood and teleport them in to work.  I recommend the simlogical teleplant for that as it can be set to fetch the same Sim at the same time every day, for a shift pattern.

3. Building the prison.

Make the prison that you can see in the pictures below.  It doesn't matter which floors, roof, wallpaper, or windows you use, but you must use the right doors and other objects.  I suggest you arrange the furniture exactly as I have it, as you will then be able to follow the tutorial better.

The little dot you can see against the plain grey floor is the main controller, mounted on the inside of the wall.	Here you can see that the cell doors must open outwards from the cells.

This prison has two cells, each equipped for one prisoner.  So they have one token in each cell.  If you wanted shared cells, you would need an extra bed and prisoner token in each, but they could share the other things in the cell.

You can use the in-cell bathroom and other objects in the communal rooms too.  The objects know that if there are tokens in the room, only the tokens' owners should use them, but if there isn't a token in the room at all, then they let any prisoner use them.  Take care when planning your cells - you can't put the in-cell shower and toilet in separate enclosed en-suite washrooms or the other Sims will think they are supposed to be communal and will be wondering why they can't get into the cell to use them!  But you can put a wall almost all the way round them as long as there is a break in the wall to get through instead of a door.

You can see I have made an enclosed en-suite for the staff bedroom.  That's because the staff objects test who can use them in a different way.

The layout pictures don't show it very clearly but there is a Staff Recruiter on the wall of the warder's bedroom, a Class Scheduler in the classroom that also contains two Prison Classroom chairs, and the main Prison Controller on the wall of the communal dining/recreation room, where all the prisoners can get to it when their cell doors are open.

That's a staff-only door leading to the warder's bedroom, and I have used a staff-only door as the main entrance to the prison.  During this tutorial the prisoners won't need to get out of the building.  The door to the classroom and warder's en-suite bathroom are original Maxis doors.

Finally, add a Maxis original counter, sink and trashcan, or you could use a dishwasher and trash compactor.

4. Putting the warder on the Law Enforcement career path

Oh dear, the poor warder can't get into the prison because he doesn't have the right credentials to get through the staff-only door!	Here's the Staff recruiter on his bedroom wall	Click it (you might need the wall down so the game doesn't think you are trying to click the window) and recruit him	Well he's in ok now, but sorry Tiffany, no visiting today!

Sims who are already on the Law Enforcement path do not need to go through the recruitment process.

This might be a good time to save your game if you haven't already done so.

5. Sentencing prisoners

Click on a Prisoner Token in one of the cells.  You will see a list of all the families in your neighbourhood (unless your latest Expansion Pack is SuperStar, in which case your Sims won't be grouped by family).  Menus in The Sims can only display 12 options at a time, so if you can't see all the families in your whole neighbourhood, press Tab, and then you will get another lot. If your menu shows families, clicking on one of those will open a sub-menu showing you the individual family members.  When you click on one of them, that is the prisoner you will sentence.  Children are deliberately excluded from the menu.

Pop!  The prisoner appears in his cell under the token.  If there are too many things under the token and he can't find a space to stand, sometimes a prisoner appears outside the wall instead.  That's a nuisance because you have to unlock doors to let him in. I put Eldon Hick in the other cell.  If you prefer, you could make a larger family in the first place, and some of those could be your prisoners.  The benefit of that is they can't "Pop" out of existence during a Maxis tidy-up and therefore will not be in a position to smuggle contraband in when the token brings them back into prison. After a token has a prisoner allocated, its menu changes to the options you can see here.

That silly outfit will have to go.  Let's buy the Prison Clothes Store I forgot to add before I took the layout screenshots.  Click its menu, and bring Mick over to change his clothes.  Maybe I should fix it so it doesn't list the strays too. That's better.  But oh dear, I think Mick brought contraband in with him.  He's all drowsy and off to bed, and it's not even 10am yet...

As it turns 10am, the Daily Inspection report comes up.  And it confirms the presence of contraband.  The prison has only earned 4 Simoleans today.

6. Searching the prison for contraband.

Select the Warder, and click on Mick's Prisoner Token.  Remember you might need the walls down to successfully click on a token.  Choose "Search cell"	The Warder checks in Mick's locker, examines the floor, and bed, and everything else, and then -
	It turns out we were right about the contraband! Repeat the search on any other cells you suspect.  The warder searches the whole cell each time, so you only have to use the search on one token in each cell. Beware, staff and visitors can bring in contraband for the prisoners too!  It largely depends on whether the Sim involved has the skills and personality to give him a sense of responsibility and self-worth.  Make your staff continue their skill-building, and prisoners can be helped by attending the classes we'll cover later. Close supervision by a well-trained officer of the places where prisoners get together can keep down the spread of contraband.

7. Using the main Prison Controller to lock and unlock the cells.

We can't have lazy prisoners sleeping all day.  There's a good way to get them up.

Click on the main controller.  Choose "Lock out now".  The controller communicates with the doors, which in turn communicate with the various tokens, and the Sims are forced to leave their cells and move towards the main controller.  That's why it needs to be somewhere they can get to when they come out of their cells.

This might be a good time to set up the daily lockup schedule.  There are enough settings so that you could let them out in the morning, lock them in again at lunch time, let them out again in the evening then lock them in again at bedtime.  I usually just let them out at 6am and lock them in at 9pm ready for bed.  So I just use Timed Unlock1 (which has the earliest time choices) and Timed Lockup2 (which has the latest time choices). The pictures show you how the doors slam shut when the controller's timer locks them, and they fling open when the controller opens them the next morning. You can also specify a time during which the prisoners may not access their cells, and that is done with the Timed Lock-out and Timed Let-in options.   If you have a lock-out in effect, and it becomes time for lock-in, then the doors will automatically end the lock-out so the prisoners may enter, and vice-versa.

8. Enrolling the prisoners in their classes

It's never too soon to look towards rehabilitation. You enrol a prisoner in classes by clicking on his token, then Courses, and then choosing one or more classes from the submenu.   For this tutorial, lets enrol both Mick and Eldon in the Life Skills class. Further on in this manual there are more details about the benefits of each type of course.
Click on the classroom controller, which should be in the same room as the chairs you are going to use. When you make a larger prison, you may want more than one class running at the same time.  If so, put one controller in each classroom, and enough chairs for the students who will be in each class at any one time. Each controller can only use and control the chairs that are in its own room.
For now, click on Morning schedule, and choose Life Skills for the morning lesson. And as the prisoners haven't got much to do at the moment, lets have a quick unscheduled lesson, again from the classroom controller's menu. Oh dear, Mick's off again.  Note: prisoners don't learn during the time they are asleep in class.

9. Setting the canteen servery.

They'll be hungry when the class is over.  Click on the canteen servery.  Open1 is the time the first meal of every day should start, Close1 is the end time of the first meal.  Open2 starts the second meal of the day and Close2 ends it.  Or you can open and close the servery manually, or just leave it open all the time.	Sims take so long to do anything, that they only really have time for two meals each day. Set breakfast to start at 6am (Open1) and end at 8am (Close1). Set supper to start at 6pm and end at 8pm.
As they are still locked out of their cells, they eat supper in the main hall.	I discovered these two usually choose to eat in their cells when they can get into them, but in my big prison, some Sims prefer to eat in company while others go to their cells.

10. Controlling individual prisoners.

Later that evening, Eldon feels a bit peckish and takes a snack from his locker.  I don't know why he's looking so guilty, it is his locker after all. Come on Eldon, it's late, settle down to sleep!  Click on his Prisoner Token, then choose "Medication..." then "Medicate now".   Now he's very happy to go to bed.   If you selected "Medicate nightly" he would automatically receive sleeping medication at 10pm every night.

Some time between 10-11pm daily, the prison controls make any adjustments to the prisoners' personality and skills that are due to the effects of being in prison, and make it so that their car pools don't come the next day.  Then a message pops up to remind you to save.  If any prisoner escapes, which they do more often at night time, they would lose all the hard work you put into them if you didn't save them to disk.  Clicking OK does NOT do the save, you have to go to the game's control panel and do it from there.

It's the morning now.  When Eldon went to bed last night, he left his snack wrappers all over his cell floor.  I think we'll keep him locked in his cell until he clears it all up.  Click on his cell door - you'll need the walls up to do that - and the door menu lets you lock up just one cell at a time.  If more than one prisoner is sharing a cell, they will be locked up together.  You don't need to have the prisoner actually in the cell before you lock up; his token will know about it and call him into the cell. You can see in the picture that there is an option to "Opt out of central control".  If you select that, the door will not be opened and closed by the main prison controller, you will have to do it manually.  But we are not going to select that at this time, so even if we left Eldon locked in his cell, he would be let out again next time the Prison Controller opened all the doors.

Eldon's locked in his cell now, and the morning lesson is starting!  He lets you know he can't attend.  You might get this message for various reasons, including another Sim standing in his way.  If that's all it was, you could have told him to keep trying.  But as you know he can't go to his class at all, you might as well tell him to give up. When it's time for a class to start, the Class Controller looks round all the tokens to see who is enrolled, and assigns one of the chairs in its room to each of them.  After that, it is the chair's job to call the student to come and sit down.  If you get a message like the above, you could choose "Give up" and then see why they can't get to the chair.  If you manage to remove the obstruction or unlock the locked door, you can then go and find the Sim's allocated chair (the chair's menu will tell you who it is assigned to) and you can use "Make Sim sit" on the chair's menu to bring the student to class a little late.

Mick has gone to class on his own.  Eldon got the idea and has cleaned his cell.  Then he found a book to read in his locker.  The warder is obviously a believer in informal institutions as he still has his pyjamas on. Later on, Mick cheers up Eldon with a puppet.  Don't worry, puppets do not count as contraband!

11. Quitting the game

If you quit the game or go back to the neighbourhood screen without doing anything special, when you come back to your prison, any prisoners you brought in from the neighbourhood will have escaped temporarily.  Their tokens will bring them back straight away, but they will have their moods etc reset and this could disrupt the continuity of any story that's developing.  To reduce the chance of them escaping, click on the main Prison Controller and select "Misc..." and "Shutdown mode".  This makes all the prisoners stand to attention, and when that happens you can quit the game.  So it's up to you if you want to use Shutdown mode, but if you do, don't forget to use "Startup mode" when you reload this lot. Other options under the Misc... menu are an emergency unlock for use in a fire, which unlocks not just the cell doors, but the special timed inter-wing doors too. "Current times" gives a quick report of what your lockup and unlock times are for the cells. Enable in-cell association means that the prisoners will be able to visit each other's cells to chat.  Both options appear on the menu at the same time, because if you buy or reset doors at different times they might be set differently from each other.  Using one of those options will bring them into line with each other again.

Reference Section

Daily effects of being in prison:

Personality

Skills

Effects of one authorised medication:

Same as above, on top of normal daily effect, as well as Energy motive set to -95

Contraband

Effects per single use.

Contraband selling traits

Contraband buying traits

Contraband rejection traits

Sims with contraband rejection traits will not participate at all, and may destroy contraband when they notice it.  In between these extremes, Sims will not trade in contraband, but might use an individual instance during a bad mood crisis.  This will of course alter their personality and skills values and make it increasingly likely they will trade in future.

Effects of classes

Anger Management

Group Therapy

Enhanced Thinking

Life Skills

On top of the above figures, during any type of class, the prisoner's comfort motive will go up by 25points per hour due to the chair, and their social motive will go up by the same due to the classroom situation and mental stimulation.