I AM in favor of high-rise prisons, as the idiots who seem to design them in my area can't come up with anything that doesn't swallow up a thousand acres on which is planted, at best, a 3 story building.? 2 stories if it's a large facility.? Go underground as well.? Might as well save on heating and cooling bills and use the earth to save us money there.
Can't be done, Drew. It's not possible to evacuate a 9 story prison in the case of a fire or similar emergency. Not with any type of order or without rioting. It's ironic, really, that we have to protect the prisoners from themselves, but there we are.
Interestingly enough, since this topic was dredged up elsewhere and I was re-reading through here (some comedy gold!), I've since seen a few of the shows on Discovery or History channel or one of those learny-type shows. Turns out, there's a prison that looked to be about 3 stories high that has inmates often commit sooey-side by jumping off the railing and doing a swan dive onto the konk-rete below.
Seems pretty easy to fix. Throw some more bars up there or some fencing like they've got across the bridges around my city so some nutjob doesn't jump down into traffic on the freeway.
There's GOT to be some way to evacuate 'em. I refuse to believe that's the reasoning behind it. They build HOSPITALS taller than that, fer cryin' out loud, and there's people confined to beds in there who couldn't get out without someone else's help, whose family would sue the friggen pants off the hospital if they died due to circumstances like that, so I don't buy that line of reasoning as to why we can't make high-rise prisons.