I don't buy that this game encourages the institution of prison. If anything, it brings the very serious realities of prison, and of crime, into your home in a way which on the surface feels accessible and soft; but underneath is dark and real.
On the contrary, turning the prison system into a form of entertainment is doing everything BUT showing people who gruesome and horrible it really is.
It's the same thing as turning "Teen Moms" and "Toddlers for Tiaras" into forms of entertainment. Teen pregnancy and the sexualization of young children is not something to be scoffed at, but it actually becomes much more acceptable once it becomes a form of entertainment. Some of the most horrible things ever have, classically, been accepted as forms of entertainment, maybe one of the best examples being the Roman Colisseums, where slaves fighting brutal fights to the death was seen as the ultimate spectator sport.
Maybe the horrors of prison is something YOU take away from it, but I think you're joking yourself if you think that's what everybody is playing it for: To discover the horrors of prison. If they wanted to put the real horrors of prison into the game, they would have to include cuddly hug , gang violence, guard violence, drug trade, and the emotional and physical abuse that goes along with your typical federal penitentary.
Especially if you deem to run the most humane operation you can, with the highest chance of rehabilitation.
I could almost agree with this point, except for the fact that prisons aren't about rehabilitation; they have NEVER been about rehabiliation. It's about punishment, it's about getting perceived "bad guys" off the street and into what is basically an adult "time out".
Why do you think they're called "Penal Insitutions"? Penal means punishment. Punishment and rehabilition are two COMPLETELY different things.
In fact renown Prison Psychologist James Gilligan has found through his own studies that Punishment is one of the number 1 CAUSES of violence, a topic which he wrote his book "Violence" on, and which he tries help make people understand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gilliganhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSsi4Krd5Q&feature=relmfuDr. Gilligan was brought in as Director of Mental Health for the Massachusetts prison system because of the high suicide and murder rates within their prisons. When he left ten years later the rates of both had dropped to nearly zero.[2]
Our entire American Culture's obsession with punishment in general is extremely unhealthy and has a much more negative effect than does mercy and forgiveness. A good example of this is something I heard about recently, while listening to one of my University's History Professors give a lecture about America's Drug Wars. Since about the early 1900s this country has fought a massive war on drugs, both foreign and domestically, which has cost us trillions of dollars total, and costs us hundreds of billions of dollars annually - and that's taxpayer money by the way. Yet ironically, the rate of drug use (based on percentage of population) has stayed about the same since 1914 to the present. We've attacked and forced countries like Colombia and Vietnam to stop producing drugs, and yet for every 1 drug lord we kill, 2 pop up in their place; it doesn't fix the problem at all.
So countries like The Netherlands try something new and completely LEGALIZE drugs, and what happens? Drug use goes down. Less people go to jail. There's less cases of AIDS, drug-related crimes, and shared needle infections. Hell, the government can even make a small profit off it because they can tax some of the drug trade.
Would something like that ever happen in America? Hell no, because we are obsessed with PUNISHING the drug users, because they are "
such bad people" who "
deserve to be in jail". We have to "
get them off our streets". Our religiously-fueled, high and mighty, morally judgmental attitude is what causes the problem to be so bad in the first place, and I'm convinced that the same analogy can be applied to prisons (drug-related crimes are one of the number one jail-sentencing offenses after all).
So don't tell me this game accurately represents the horrors of prison, at best it trivializes it, and worst it condones it.
By your logic, how come we don't make a game called "cuddly hug Simulator" or "Child Abuse Simulator"? Making these games wouldn't CONDONE these things! We're playing the good guys here, the Police Officer stopping the rapes or the CPS Agent stopping the bad family from hurting the children! It doesn't condone it right? Right?
No, it does condone it. It turns it into a form of entertainment. It glorifies it. And since cuddly hug and abuse routinely happen in prisons, I see absolutely no difference.
