Luxury Prison Suite/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A criminal is sent to prison, but still enjoys several privileges and comforts that most other prisoners don't have.

  • Straight: Danny DeVillione, a criminal mastermind, is finally caught and sent to jail. However, his cell is made surprisingly comfortable, with better food, furniture and other perks that the regular prisoners don't enjoy.
  • Exaggerated: Danny's private cell looks like it'd fit right in at a mansion, boasting only the finest trappings availible.
  • Justified: Danny secured his special accommodations through bribes and "special favors".
  • Inverted: The conditions of Danny's cell are far worse than what the regular prisoners put up with.
  • Subverted: When Fair Cops Alice and Bob visit to check on Danny, they see that he isn't treated any better or worse than the other criminals.
  • Double Subverted: ...However, after they leave, Danny returns to his luxury cell; its existence is being kept quiet to try and avoid scandal.
  • Parodied: When Danny is escorted in, he is given his pick of several dozen palatial cells, taken to increasingly-ridiculous levels. The entire scene is played out like he's picking out a hotel room, down to an obsequious bellboy.
  • Deconstructed: Danny's comfortable cell makes him a target of envy and greed among his fellow prisoners; he has to keep pulling strings and taxing his connections in order to avoid getting killed by the other inmates.
    • Alternatively: Since most people in society knows that their prisons ain't so bad afterall, most of them quickly take advantage of it and crime rates rises up in record numbers, causing civil unrest and great levels of fear to grow within society. The civilian population's trust for the judicial system drops dead and most of them begun to arm themselves before anytime they walk out of the door.
  • Reconstructed: Danny's connection keep him in comfort/protect him nonetheless, because if anything ever happens to him, someone else on the outside will make them pay dearly for it.
    • Alternatively: Despite the free benefits, being in isolation and without any true freedom is still an incredibly debilitating thing, and thus, people still want to stay out of prison.
  • Zig Zagged: After being arrested, Danny tries to get special treatment, but is refused... at first. After greasing enough palms, he's able to get everything he wants and live comfortably. The media gets wind of this and starts running exposes, decrying the prison for using state taxes to coddle criminals; this leads to Danny's privileges being revoked, and he fights to have them reinstated on his own dime.
  • Averted: The Warden laughs his ass off and has Danny thrown into Solitary Confinement just for presuming to dictate terms to him.
  • Enforced: The writers want to show just how powerful Danny was and still is, despite his incarceration, but don't want to use a Cardboard Prison. Not just yet, anyway...
  • Lampshaded: "This is a prison? ...Excuse me, I think there's a bank that needs robbing."
  • Invoked: A vigilante, knowing that this will likely be the result if Danny DeVillione is sent to prison, simply kills him when he has the chance.
  • Defied:

Danny: Several of my good friends, namely a Mr. Benjamin Franklin, say that it would be in your best interest to provide for me the occasional...privilege.
Prison Guard: Ha Ha Ha No.

  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???
  • Played For Laughs: Danny's special accomdations is pretty much his ability to buy as much luxury goods from the local jail store, he doesn't have get any luxury from his previous life as a criminal. So while the other convict only get their three meals, Danny can have his three meals and an ice cream sundae courtesy of the store.
  • Played For Drama: Danny's special accomodations reveal the fundamental injustice in the system, and he actually does a better job of running his criminal empire from within the cell than he did outside since the protagonists believe him to be safely imprisoned.

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