Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #65 - Prison Guards

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Prison Guards

Tell me a story about prison guards in your setting ! Often maligned in fiction as the lowest of the low, prison guards have a place in so many stories.

What are yours like ? How are they recruited, what are their lives like outside work, how do their individual personalities vary ? Are they stupid brutes, butts for comedy because of their incompetence and venality ? Are they terrifying sadists feared by the inmates for their cruelty and impunity ? Or perhaps they are masked as do-gooders, pretending to be about rehabilitation and forgiveness ? Are they even human, are your prisons automated hell-holes or lost moons with no hope of escape and no need for wardens ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.