Jude stood on a makeshift platform in the prison yard, megaphone in hand, watching several hundred inmates mill around like cattle in a sorting pen. The air smelled like sweat, concrete dust, and the particular kind of desperation that came from realizing your freedom had a price tag attached to it.
He turned a deaf ear to the prisoners' discussions—the muttered threats, the whispered plans for gang reorganization, the standard jailhouse posturing that meant absolutely nothing when you were facing decades behind bars.
"Alright, alright, stop making such a fuss." His voice crackled through the megaphone with cheerful authority. "Everyone, listen to me. This is simple mathematics, so pay attention."
Jude gestured with his free hand like a tour guide explaining the attractions. "Those serving sentences under one year, stand on the left. Those serving sentences under ten years, stand in the middle. Those serving sentences under fifty years, stand on the right. Those serving sentences over fifty years—congratulations, you're the VIP guests—follow me for the premium experience."
The prisoners immediately became agitated.
There were too many people here who originally came from the two major crime families. The Falcone and Maroni organizations had been bleeding personnel into the legal system for weeks now—dealers, enforcers, accountants, muscle, anyone with a connection to either family was getting swept up in the ongoing legal warfare.
After seeing familiar family members in the crowd, many of the inmates had already been thinking about how to form gangs inside. Protection networks. Territory control. The usual prison economy that made life bearable behind bars.
Now they heard they were going to be separated—upper, middle, and lower level members divided by sentence length—and they couldn't help but feel dissatisfied. Unity was strength. Separation was vulnerability.
"Hey!" A voice rang out from the middle of the crowd. "You idiot on the stage! Look here!"
At that moment, a prisoner—a man with the kind of face that suggested a lifetime of poor decisions—suddenly dropped his pants and gave Jude an anatomical gesture that would have gotten him arrested in most jurisdictions.
The already disgruntled prisoners began to laugh loudly. Mockery rippled through the crowd like a wave. This was classic prison psychology—testing the new authority figure, seeing if they'd crack under public humiliation.
Jude looked down at his clipboard without changing expression.
"Mitt Courtney," he said calmly, reading from the file. His voice through the megaphone carried the flat neutrality of someone reciting a grocery list. "I know you're already a thorn in the Maroni family organization. Both your parents are dead. You have no ties to anyone who matters. But you still live on Earth, which means you still have vulnerabilities."
The laughter started dying down.
"You have a girlfriend, right?" Jude continued conversationally. "She lives at—" He rattled off a specific address in the Bowery. "Works at that diner on Seventh. Waitress, evening shift, decent tips."
The smile on Mitt's face disappeared immediately. His pants were still around his ankles, but the bravado had evaporated like morning fog.
"Bastard!" Mitt's voice cracked slightly. "If you dare to touch her—"
"No, no, no." Jude shook his head with the patient disappointment of a teacher correcting a slow student. "That's not our style at all. We're not gangster. We don't threaten people's families."
He paused for comedic timing.
"But she will receive excerpts of your prison video tonight. In fact, all your family members, friends, acquaintances, and former coworkers will receive such a video compilation. So I suggest you be very careful about what you say and do going forward."
Jude gestured at Mitt's current state of undress. "For example, Mitt, your behavior of 'walking your bird' in public will reach your girlfriend's phone in approximately—" He checked his watch. "—six hours. Along with everyone else on her contact list. Social media is a wonderful thing."
Mitt's face went from pale to blue to a shade that didn't have a name in normal color palettes. At that moment, he wanted desperately to charge the platform and fight Jude to the death.
"Before you do something regrettable," Jude said, reading his body language perfectly, "you should know that you don't have to worry about violating the law with violent behavior. Because I didn't enter this prison as a prison guard."
He showed a sunny smile that would have looked perfectly at home in a customer service training video.
"I entered the prison as a prisoner. I'm just performing some administrative functions as part of my own sentence. So even if you assault me and your sentence gets longer, I have no objection. It means I get to spend more time with all of you fine gentlemen."
The yard had gone completely silent.
"Of course," Jude continued in the same cheerful tone, "you can also choose to purchase our value-added services. For example, deleting the clip of you walking your bird just now. This service costs one hundred dollars."
He let that sink in, then added: "However, since the pricing is based on risk assessment, we multiply the fee by your sentence length. You're serving thirty-six years, Mitt. So deleting that footage will cost you three thousand six hundred dollars."
The prisoners who'd been laughing moments ago weren't laughing anymore. They were doing math in their heads.
"Or," Jude offered generously, "if you think that's not cost-effective, you can choose probation. We'll keep your bird-walking history on file but won't publish it. If you violate the rules again, your punishment will be triggered together with the next one. Note that this probation privilege is free the first time each month."
His smile widened. "The second violation costs fifty dollars times your sentence. The third costs one hundred times your sentence. And so on. The fees scale exponentially. We're very transparent about our pricing structure."
Most of the prisoners in the yard were stunned into silence. A few were frantically calculating what this meant for their futures. If you followed this rule structure, how much money would you need just to survive prison without being financially ruined?
A small number of prisoners with shorter sentences looked almost happy. Their sentences would reduce the cost of mistakes. A one-year sentence meant violations only cost hundreds instead of thousands.
The system was designed to extract maximum profit from long-term inmates.
"By the way," Jude added casually, "fighting and bullying in prison will collectively increase your sentence and incur fines. If you commit too many offenses, you'll stay in prison forever. Literally. The math works out that way."
He consulted his clipboard. "If you don't have money, that's okay. The prison will arrange for each of you to undergo labor reform. You'll receive compensation for your work—although it won't be much, it's enough to support your normal living expenses with some money left over. And you won't risk your life doing it. In other words, you just work honestly, get paid, and avoid accumulating debt."
Mitt opened his mouth again. "I have an early—"
"Stop it, Mitt!" The Maroni family members beside him grabbed him and covered his mouth physically. Although they had some savings, they definitely could not withstand Mitt's continued involvement in expensive violations.
Jude shrugged sympathetically. "Finally, there are some diehards who think they're not afraid because they have nothing to lose. Or who think they're rich and powerful enough to ignore the rules. For these people who don't want to participate in labor reform and still want to bully others—we will treat them like prisoners serving sentences of over fifty years."
He paused for dramatic effect. "Every time you resist the normal prison arrangements, you will spend one week in the same prison environment as our long-term guests. Just to give you perspective."
One prisoner, braver or more curious than the others, couldn't help but ask: "Is there any difference in treatment between minor and serious criminals?"
"Oh, excellent question." Jude's smile turned absolutely radiant. "In short, if you don't see the first batch of high-security prisoners paying to return to regular prison conditions within the next week, it's probably because they've taken their own lives. Not because they've developed tolerance for the accommodations."
The yard went dead silent.
"Just kidding!" Jude laughed. "Mostly. Look, poor people don't have money anyway, so they're not our target demographic. Wayne's private prisons rely heavily on you—the high-ranking officials, the wealthy, the underworld figures who've made fortunes through illegal means. If the living conditions in maximum security aren't bad enough to make you pay for an upgrade, then you're tougher than we expected."
He gave a cheerful thumbs-up. "Which would make you the exception. And the Gotham Golden Triangle—" He pointed downward with his thumb, the universal gesture of failure. "—would be the rule."
The message was clear: this was a for-profit operation designed to extract money from anyone who had it. The horror of the conditions wasn't a bug; it was a feature.
Salvatore Maroni was also transferred to Wayne's private prison.
He did not meet Jude during intake processing. Instead, in his section of the facility, there was another person announcing the same prison rules to the inmates.
That person was Poison Ivy.
Her methods were considerably more brutal than Jude's cheerful corporate presentation. She wore her usual outfit—strategically placed leaves and vines that covered the absolute legal minimum—and radiated the kind of casual menace that came from having literal power over life and death.
When one inmate made the mistake of catcalling her, Ivy didn't bother with threats or explanations. She just walked over, smiled sweetly, and injected him with a custom-formulated plant toxin using a thorn that grew from her fingertip.
"This particular compound," she explained to the now-horrified crowd, "will keep you in a state of complete impotence for approximately one year. All the desire, none of the function. Enjoy."
After learning the specific effects of the toxin, the other prisoners fell completely silent, quietly listening to her instructions with the attentiveness of students facing a final exam.
"Your toxins last for a year," Ivy continued pleasantly, "but I'll continue to replenish them next year, and the year after that. The toxins will only stop when you're released from prison. There's no sex life in prison anyway, so really, you're not missing much."
Perhaps these prisoners should have been thankful that rape was prohibited in Wayne's private facilities. Otherwise, instead of being unable to act as keys, they would have just become natural locks in the prison ecosystem.
A horrifying thought that nobody wanted to examine too closely.
Sal Maroni didn't know much about the situation in the general population areas. But the moment he learned he could pay to upgrade his accommodation; he had made up his mind about this prison.
It's just a profit-making organization, he thought with relief. I'm Sal Maroni. I have money. I have power. I can do anything here if I just pay the right price.
It was worth mentioning that his sentence at this time was no longer thirty years.
In the ongoing legal war between the two families, massive amounts of evidence and criminal records had been exposed by both sides. Luigi Maroni had watched helplessly as his son's sentence rose from thirty years to seventy years. Then from seventy years to one hundred and nine years. And it was still climbing as prosecutors found new charges to file.
At this point, Luigi's heart was basically numb to the numbers.
"Yes, I have a son serving time," he'd said to Falcone during one particularly bitter exchange. "And you have a daughter facing charges, right? Your family is much larger than mine. Let's see who runs out of members first."
So Maroni was now officially a serious criminal with a triple-digit sentence. With a mixture of curiosity and unease, he and nineteen other high-security inmates were escorted away from the general population and brought to the maximum-security wing.
That's when his mentality started to crack.
The prison guard led twenty prisoners—twenty human beings—to a damp space of approximately twenty square meters. That was roughly two hundred square feet for twenty people. Ten square feet per person. The walls were covered in mold that grew in fractal patterns. Water dripped from the ceiling with the irregular rhythm of water torture. The air smelled like rot, mildew, and despair.
Maroni's eyes adjusted to the dim lighting.
He could swear he just saw two small creatures with tentacles crawl under the triple bunk bed that took up most of the available floor space.
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