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I'm playing Prison Architect via Steam with a bunch of DLCs (Aficionado, Cleared for Transfer, Free for Life, Island Bound, Psych Ward.) I recently picked up 'Free for Life' (since it was free on Steam) and almost immediately started seeing a strange problem with my prisoner intake.

I have minimum, medium, and max security zones in my prison, with a discrete number of beds in each -- 118, 40, 34. (I've also got some "protected" cells, bringing me to a total of 202 cells.) I have my intake set to only accept minimum and medium security prisoners, the idea being that if any of them are troublesome they'll be bumped up to max sec. My prisoner intake is configured to "Fill Capacity". "Prisoner Replacement" is disabled.

Up until very recently, this has worked out fine. The TODO list would show inbound prisoners equal to the number of empty beds I had in minimum and medium security. However, now I'm having a problem where the TODO list is showing the correct number of inbound prisoners, but the number of prisoners who arrive exceeds that. Or, sometimes, the number of total prisoners is as expected, but the category doesn't match the intake roster.

As an example -- last night I had 7 empty minimum security beds, and 1 empty medium security bed. The TODO list showed prisoner intake: 7 minimum security, 1 medium security. Cool.

But what actually arrived were 6 medium security, and 3 minimum security prisoners! I've now got 5 too many medium security prisoners. What's worse is that the intake page showed the same number of inbound prisoners/distribution, so I had no way of knowing that I wasn't getting what it said I was.

This is an existing save from before the "Free for Life" DLC was added. The same behavior happens every night whenever I have any free medium security beds. One prisoner transfer actually sent me 5 stoic max sec prisoners, even though the intake tab shows max sec as "closed" and "unavailable".

What is going on? How do I control my intake?


Concrete example.

Immediately before intake (I minus 4 minutes), I have the TODO showing 9 inbound prisoners: 8 minimum security, 1 medium security.

TODO showing intake of 9 inbound prisoners

This is accurate, per my capacity. I have 8 free minimum security beds, and 1 free medium security bed. (I'm having a bit of a placement problem with a protective custody prisoner, but we can ignore him for the time being.)

Capacity drop down showing 9 free medium and minimum beds

And it agrees with the intake tab.

Intake tab showing 9 inbound prisoners

Then the intake happens. And what do I get?

  • 5 medium security
  • 4 minimum security

Capacity drop down showing new bed allocations

And now I'm 4 beds short in the medium security wing. The prisoners haven't been processed in reception yet, which is why the drop down only shows 1 prisoner unable to be assigned a bed; after processing it'll go up to 5 (1 protected + 4 medium).


I have a theory that some of these inbound "medium" security prisoners are actually minimum security wearing the wrong designation. While some of them come in with expectedly long sentences (20 years, etc.) for serious crimes, others show up with 0.5 years left on a 1 year sentence. If this is the case, it's also obnoxious because ain't nobody got time to manually reorganize who's wearing what uniform on intake.

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