Our character has been imprisoned. They may be a Play-Along Prisoner, they may be falsely accused, they may deserve to be there, or the work is set in prison and every character is either a prisoner, a guard, or the warden.
Expect everyone to be dressed the same (except for the occasional headband), the food to be terrible, homemade weapons, uncomfortable confrontations in the showers, escape plans, the ever-present threat of being thrown in solitary confinement, and the guards to be completely unconcerned with anything involving preventing recidivism.
Simply put, being in prison is not a pleasant experience, no one wants to be there, and everyone wants to leave (with the exception of the seen-it-all oldtimer who has become completely institutionalized and is terrified of being paroled and sent back into a world he can't cope with).
Much like portrayals of the military, police, doctors, and firefighters; there tends to be a great deal of leeway taken by writers, directors, and creators in order to create tension, provide opportunities for escape, show what a Crapsack World prison is, make the narrative flow smoother, etc. Most people have never been imprisoned or worked in such an environment, therefore it's unlikely they'll notice such errors. Those who have either been imprisoned or worked there would have a much easier time of it.
Common errors that can readily be found are things like all prisons being depicted as maximum security, or people being sent to maximum-security prisons for minor crimes. In reality, there are multiple levels of incarceration with different levels of security/procedures. Minimum security prisons, which are rarely displayed in fiction, have the inmates staying in dormitory-like rooms, there are fewer guards, and the inmates can leave for employment, school, etc., returning to the prison afterwards. Security is so light that inmates can pretty much leave whenever they want. It's not a good idea since doing so means being sent to a higher level of prison when the law catches up with you, as well as having your sentence extended. Also, first-time offenders for non-violent crimes would not be sent to maximum security prisons.
Occasionally, you will have a scene where a prisoner has a cell with a barred window that looks out onto the outside world. No modern prison, particularly maximum security, is going to give a convict a room with a view. Not only is it making the cell wall weaker, but it's much cheaper to build featureless walls than to give each cell a window.
Another common area is having the warden be much more heavily involved with the prisoners than is advisable or allowed. There is a chain of command that the prisoners must go through before seeing the warden. The warden seeing prisoners too often or the same prisoner multiple times means there's a breakdown occurring between them and the prisoner.
Also, inmates being shown to have items in their cells or possession that would not be allowed under any circumstances. This includes glass objects, metal, etc. Prisoner ingenuity when it comes to making weapons knows no bounds.
For prisoners on Death Row, expect their requests for a last meal to come with no strings attached. Whatever they want, however much of it they want, the prison will gladly accommodate. However, in reality, several restrictions on a last meal request can apply, depending on the jurisdiction. For instance, many places limit last meal requests to a tight monetary budget, and foodstuffs must be available for purchase from a local grocery store. The State of Texas, in particular, no longer even grants such requests, and a death row prisoner's last meal is strictly whatever the general population is served on that day.
Related to Artistic License – Law, which deals with courts, lawyers, legal proceedings, law firms, etc. Artistic License – Law Enforcement can come into play as well.
Creator's Culture Carryover, Eagleland Osmosis, and similar tropes can come into play when the depiction of the prison is correct, but not for the country/region/place where the story is set.
A Super-Trope to:
- Cardboard Prison
- Girls Behind Bars
- The Guards Must Be Crazy
- Falling into Jail
- "Inescapable" Prison Easily Escaped
- Juvenile Hell
- No Prison Segregation
- Prisoner's Last Meal
- Widely-Spaced Jail Bars
Examples:
- Ant-Man and the Wasp: In the flashback scene where Scott and Luis are in prison, Scott is reading a thick stack of papers held together by a large metal clamp. The guards would have removed the clamp from the papers before it was given to Scott. It's a good-sized piece of metal that could be fashioned into a weapon. Scott wouldn't do it, of course, as he's a Nice Guy, but rules are rules.
- Exploitation films of the Girls Behind Bars genre (Black Mama, White Mama for example) feature inmates in absurdly short and/or low-cut uniforms that are all about the Fanservice. Real-life prison uniforms throughout history are usually plain, drab, and VERY far from flattering, let alone sexy.
- The Irishman: Towards the end, Russell and Frank are both in prison and still practicing their custom of drinking wine and eating bread together. They're in prison, so naturally there's no wine, so Frank has a bottle of grape juice. The problem is that the grape juice is in a large glass bottle. They wouldn't be allowed to have it in prison. It's a potential weapon on its own, or it could be broken into pieces and the large pieces used to make cutting or stabbing weapons.
- Richie Rich: The scene where Cadbury breaks out of jail has all sorts of issues. First, the prisoners are sent into a bathroom area without a guard watching them. Such areas don't exist in prisons, and if they did, they would certainly be guarded. Second, a huge prisoner enters wearing Badass Biker garb, which would never be allowed. Third, the toothpaste and card that Richie gave to Cadbury would certainly have been inspected before they got to him, which would have shown that the toothpaste was a metal-dissolving agent created by Professor Keenbean, and the card had an explanation of how to escape. Cadbury screams for help after the biker attacks him, yet nobody shows up. Aside from the aforesaid problems with the room being unguarded, fights in prison are usually over quickly because everything the prisoners do is monitored at all times. Finally, Cadbury escapes out the window of the prison, and nobody ever notices that one of their prisoners is missing. Presumably, everything got cleared up off-screen, but the fact that no one came looking for Cadbury is relatively suspect.
- Spider-Man: Homecoming: When Toomes is in prison, he's walking down the hall in a line of prisoners. His former crony Max Gargan is in another line of prisoners walking the other way down the opposite side of the hall. Both Toomes and Gargan stop in the middle of the hallway and have a conversation (Gargan wants to know who Spider-Man really is, but Toomes lies and says he doesn't know). Prisoners can mingle and talk freely in certain areas like the yard, but when moving inside the prison from one point to another, they have to stay in line and are not allowed to stop and talk, especially to someone moving in a different line.
- Watchmen:
- During the prison break, Rorschach kills the prison gang leader Big Figure by following him into a public restroom located on the cell block (there are clearly cells adjacent to the restroom). The problem is, there wouldn't be such a restroom where the prisoners are housed. The prisoners have toilets in their cells, and prisons don't have such restrooms in the cell blocks because it would create a place where prisoners could meet without being observed, and the guards wouldn't enter because they wouldn't know what was going on inside and could easily be trapped.
- Rorschach takes out an attacker in the cafeteria by throwing a pan full of frying oil into his face. There wouldn't be an oil fryer on the serving line for the prisoners, in order to prevent exactly that sort of thing from happening.
- In The Act, there is a scene before the trial where the male inmates are against a wall, and Nick runs to the fence to talk to Gypsy, whose group is returning to the unit. In real life, at least three guards would have tackled him before he could get out two words, especially when the other inmates are up against the wall. Similarly, no guards would allow Gypsy to get out of step.
- Fire Country: Bode is part of an inmate firefighter program in return for a lesser sentence. In the pilot, his handlers find out about his smuggled phone and attempt to leave the camp. As the real Cal Fire pointed out in a disparaging review
, both violations on their own would have resulted in an immediate dismissal from the inmate program and a return to prison, not a slap on the wrist.
- Hogan's Heroes has numerous errors in regards to how a prison camp would be set up, even setting aside the staggering incompetence of the staff that makes the central premise of the series possible.
- The doors and windows of the prisoner barracks open in. A real camp would have them open out, so that the guards can bar them shut from the outside after dark.
- Several facilities that should only be accessible by camp staff, most notably the armory and Klink's office, are inside the general compound. In a real camp, those areas would be in a separate area fenced off from the main compound, so that prisoners cannot get to them without being the explicit permission and supervision of a guard. But then there wouldn't be the Running Gag where Once an Episode, Hogan walks into Klink's office, steals his cigars, drinks his schnapps, reads classified documents left out on his desk, manipulates the Kommandant into doing something that Hogan needs to be done... (this sort of thing being why prisoners, even senior ones, aren't supposed to have unrestricted access to staff-only facilities).
- Leverage: At the beginning of Season 3, the Leverage Team seek to protect a man serving an egregiously long prison sentence for a misdemeanor because the prison is a crooked scheme involving private prisons, and needs to maintain a certain headcount. Nate is currently in the same prison for his crimes over Season 2. Even if one buys that Hardison created absolutely foolproof documentation for Eliot to get into the prison as a dentist, there is no way the guard would leave Nate and Eliot alone for any length of time, especially since part of Eliot's "backstory" is that the doctor he's playing was "shanked with his own instruments" the year before. Audio Commentary reveals that the private prison scam is legit, and had to be toned down to be made more believable to the audience.
- MacGyver (2016): In Can Opener, Mac has to befriend a cartel boss in supermax and escape with him in order to find his HQ. The method he uses wouldn't work as it involves things like light fittings that wouldn't be in supermax and areas that prisoners wouldn't have access to. This is presumably because the showrunners didn't want to show an escape method that would work, or couldn't think of one.
- Prison Break:
- Michael visits the warden's office on several occasions, mainly to help the warden complete an elaborate model he's constructing as a present for his wife. No matter how much he's trusted, Michael wouldn't be allowed to meet with the warden one-on-one; regulations require that there always be a guard present for the warden's protection. A prisoner also would not be left alone and unobserved in the warden's office. He'd have access to files, the phone, the computer, and office supplies that could be crafted into weapons. This is deconstructed in season 2 when a disciplinary board concludes that the Warden and the Captain of the Guard have broken numerous rules of conduct that together enabled the escape of the Fox River 8. Both men are fired or forced to resign.
- The Illinois corrections officers are portrayed as poorly paid (e.g., a veteran officer saying "I ain't a hero for $14 an hour"). In reality for Illinois, because of the poor working conditions the pay is not bad for a job requiring only a high school education: about $24 an hour fresh out of the academy.
- There's no death penalty in Illinois. The state has had a moratorium on executions since 1999, and it was officially abolished by the governor in 2011. Also, the preferred method before then was lethal injection; the last use of the electric chair was 1962.
- This is combined with Idiot Ball on the part of the guards on countless occasions. Inmates in Fox River are shown to have shivs concealed in their bibles, under the toilet seats, etc. In reality prison guards know all about these hiding places and check them often. Trying to hollow out a space in your bible to conceal a shiv is a waste of time.
- While at Fox River, Lincoln is frequently shown interacting with the other prisoners, and even has a job in prison industry during Season 1. In reality, most prisons are pretty strict about keeping Death Row inmates isolated from the rest of the prison population, and it's very unlikely that they would give a paying industrial job to someone who was slated to be executed.
- In some GoAnimate videos, whenever a troublemaker is arrested for committing a serious crime, they're denied basic amenities like a bed, a toilet, a sink, food, and water. In real life, criminals are always given these amenities regardless of their sentencing, and refusal to do so is a human rights violation.
- The Dexter's Laboratory episode "Dexter Detention" is full of this, although it's mostly Played for Laughs.
- Overlapping with Artistic License – Education, the Detention Warden whom Dexter meets in detention class when put in detention for yelling, while based on the stereotypical Drill Sergeant Nasty towards students receiving Disproportionate Retribution, clearly goes beyond treating the students as typical criminals, using disciplines like solitary confinement and max-security prison arrangements for petty reasons, and even performing Misplaced Retribution when one of the students makes Dexter mess up with a written line.
- When Dexter and the rest of the students in detention escape from the class via Fast Tunneling, they end up breaking into an actual prison and are forced to stay there as punishment. In such a rare occurrence in real life, a prison would most likely keep any child who breaks in at a visitor section and contact their parents or guardians.
- The Ghost and Molly McGee: Daryl wants to get the teachers out of the school for a while so they stop spoiling everyone's "fun" (i.e. pranks). He develops an elaborate plan to have the three teachers wear orange jumpsuits, forges a letter from the principal telling them they're going on a team-building exercise, uses the letter to arrange for a school bus to take them to the local prison, where they get off and walk inside. Prison populations are kept under constant surveillance and any new prisoners are noted well in advance of their arrival. Three people in orange jumpsuits who randomly show up at a prison without an escort or any paperwork would never be mistaken for inmates, let alone actually let inside.
- The Powerpuff Girls: The prison in Townsville seems to hold pretty much any villain the Powerpuff Girls defeat, including female ones like Sedusa or Princess Morbucks (who’s even a minor). The dress code is rather inconsistent as well, with the inmates clothing fluctuating between black and white stripes, orange suits, or just their regular supervillain outfits.
- South Park: Subverted in "Cartman's Silly Hate Crime 2000", where Stan and Kyle bring Cartman a cake they've baked (which has a file in it to enable him to escape) when visiting him in prison. Cartman tells them he can't take it back to his cell (a real-life thing to avoid situations like that in jail).
