Why are many of my prisoners staying in their holding cell? [duplicate]

Although there is plenty of space for the 170 prisoners in my prison (capacity: 210), the prisoners stay in holding cells instead and leave many individual cells completely unoccupied. I can tell individual prisoners to go to unoccupied cells, but a day or two later, the prisoners end up back in the holding cells.

Any ideas why this might be happening?

All rooms are complete (enclosed, have toilet and bed) and range in quality from 3-10, with an average around 6-7.

Since the room quality feature just came out in Alpha-33 (my version), I wonder if it has something to do with that. It's hard to tell whether this problem is a bug or a feature which I haven't learned about yet!

prison-architect

Best Answer

This is due to the fact that each of your cells' living quality is above that which the prisoner deserves. Occasionally they will occupy a nice room when they don't deserve it, but most of the time they will just default to the holding cell. Since the holding cell does not have a room quality, they plop themselves en masse there. This tends to start fights, creating this nasty self-perpetuating cycle.

If you want to resolve this issue for the time being, remove the holding cell designation (click 'Rooms' and right click/drag to remove the room designation) or create a whole bunch of cells with a room quality of 0.

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Why are there so many prisoners in my holding cell?

This is due to the fact that each of your cells' living quality is above that which the prisoner deserves. Occasionally they will occupy a nice room when they don't deserve it, but most of the time they will just default to the holding cell.

Why are prisoners not being assigned cells?

this is caused by the quality Grade of the cells being too high for the entitlement of the prisoner. to be exact: if the inmate is entitled only to a cell-quality of grade 0, then the game bans them from accepting a cell of Grade 4 or higher.

Solution to Prisoners in Holding Cell - Prison Architect : Quick Tutorial

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