A Fiction Friday Exclusive, right here on Consider Your Ass Kicked!
Rising like a dully-gleaming citadel from the heart of Prison City, Idaho, Prison City Prison has served and shocked the entire nation over these past two short decades of its history. What began as a bold experiment in civic planning, progressed as a thrilling criminological Cinderella success story, and became a shining example of the triumph of the new modern spirit of sociological courage, is now a model for forward-thinking correctional facility designers and administrators nation- and world-wide.
Prison City proper snugs and nustles up against these hard, sheer, towering walls from all sides. And Prison City Prison? Why, this crowning jewel of the nation's justice and correctional system sits, a somber palace of punishment and rehabilitation, set hard like a diamond into its impeccably-planned sleek and shining art deco setting. Prison City! A Utopiopolis, some have called it. Oh, happy city. Whose polite, law-abiding citizens thrive amid clean streets, plentiful parks and libraries, enjoying all the amenities and civilizing institutions of a major American city! A first-class Art Museum. A highly-regarded Symphony Orchestra! Not to forget downtown's state-of-the-art Big House Stadium - home of Prison City's beloved Triple-AAA baseball Prison City Cons! Nationally-regarded gourmet restaurants. Or, if you're feeling the need to step out, there's the Downandaround district's variegated semicircular strip of trendy discotheques, comedy clubs and other nightlife hotspots - such as the legendary dive cabaret/trattoria the Third Curtain, infamous nexus of Prison City's thriving, if somewhat snotty-and-insular, indie rock music scene.
Yet in the midst of all this peace and pride and bustling civic tranquility, in the very center of "Con Town" as some cheeky natives style their home 'burg - sits an unmissable monument to the seeming urban paradise's seemingly-jarring principle industry: the shocking edifice of Prison City Prison itself. The plaque at the foot MacNeck Isle's famous and towering Statue of Justice strikes a seemingly perverse note, almost as if in a satirical dig at its more storied counterpart at Ellis Island: Prison City calls out not for your tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free - but rather for your hard-bitten, hardened convicts, who may yearn to break free, but who harbor no illusions about breathing free any time soon. Prison City Prison has never suffered a single escape.
Prison City! This seeming paradox of modern metropolitan engineering. The City With The Lowest Crime Rate On Earth! - radiating out from, and ringed in around...the Most Enormous Prison On Earth.
But within Prison City Prison, at the center of the heart of the paradox within the heart of the greater paradox of Prison City itself, lies an even greater paradox. One few speak of...except in chilled whispers. Or with a shocked, disbelieving guffaw. A paradox that few can even conceive, can even believe could possibly be "for real." For Prison City Prison holds a secret within it! A ghost in the works if you will, that frustrates all of its perfect planners, even as it upholds the very values of law and justice that they strive to maintain! - by circumventing the flaws in the machine that they have built to enforce the rules of that game. For Prison City Prison's paradox is no mere abstact philosophical problem. This paradox is one man. A dark avenger, stalking at will through Prison City Prison's massive, labyrinthine campus of locked-down, interlocking buildings. An ever-vigilant two-fisted cheerful spirit of violence, who visits his own rough brand of justice in the guise of a one-man wave of mayhem - forever poised to break with a crash upon the criminals who inhabit his home! For he too is one of them! Once wrongly convicted, thence thrown into despair, shortly to be shocked wide awake by the unspoken, unspeakable flaws and unthinkable corruptions that have slept unmarked or crept discreetly into Prison City Prison's touted and trumpeted too-perfect "system," he now willingly embraces the full, unfair length of his sentence! He has taken on his unjust punishment as a mission: to redirect that whole stinging portion of unjust justice straight back onto the criminal element that feeds it in the first place! To fight crime from the inside.
Prison City Prison. One man has taken this stacked, sprawling warren of prison blocks that goes on and on for city blocks - and made it his own personal one-man protectorate. Feared by the predators and incarcerated elite. Hated and hunted by the wardens! To a select few guards and repentant inmates, whose eyes are clear enough to see what's going on - he is an implacable symbol of a hope too tenuous to state, too elusive to place, too pervasive to shake, and too enormous to mistake.
WHO is he? Who is this paragon? Who is this hero?
I'll tell you who he is.
He is JAIL MAN: The Grim, Incarcerated Guardian of Prison City.
"If you really want to hurt criminals...you have to hit them where they live."
- JAIL MAN
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