Prison

Learn how prisons work in SimCity 2000! Discover their capacity, parole system, impact on land value, and optimal placement strategies to manage your city's criminal population.

Alright, let's talk about prisons in SimCity 2000. These buildings are where all those criminals your police stations nab end up. Think of them like hospitals – they have a set limit on how many people they can hold, rather than covering a certain area. Each prison can comfortably house up to 10,000 inmates. If you cram more in, though, they'll start making a break for it!

Now, people don't stay locked up forever. Every year, about 25% of the inmates get paroled to make room for the new arrivals. So, if you've got 5,000 inmates, roughly 1,250 will be released. If your police are bringing in more than that each year, your prison will start to fill up. And when that happens, you'll see crime start to creep back up.

Be warned, prisons aren't exactly neighborhood-friendly. They tend to drag down the value of nearby land, and your Sims definitely won't be happy if you plop one right next to their houses. Because of this, it's usually a smart move to keep prisons a bit isolated from your main city areas. Get creative with it – you could build an island prison like Alcatraz, or just find a big empty plot and surround it with a water moat. Whatever works for you!

Prisons don't have ongoing maintenance costs, but they do come with a pretty hefty price tag to build.

A Note on Filling Prisons:

Honestly, I've almost never managed to fill a prison completely, even with a huge city population. You'll likely find you only ever need one prison per city, but it's always good to keep an eye on its capacity just in case.

• Cost: $3,000 per prison
• Size: 4x4 tiles