When I was growing up, one of my favorite video games was RollerCoaster Tycoon. There is something about children that makes us want to build, and there is little that satisfies that impulse better than this PC game, created by the independent Scottish programmer Chris Sawyer. The premise is incredibly simple. You are the architect and proprietor of an amusement park, and it’s your job to build rides and attractions that bring guests to your park to spend their money. There are little goals and tasks you are meant to complete to earn money, expand your park, and unlock new worlds. 

But the real joy of the game is the endless ability to experiment and customize every little detail, pushing the boundaries of physics, time, and human decency. Others, far more creative (or sadistic) than I, used the game to build coasters that move so slowly they take trillions of years to finish, or that launch their patrons into a lake, or that run over their park’s mascots. But I was admittedly a bit of a rule-following square at the age of nine. So I mainly derived joy from watching the world I made fill up with faceless little pixel people and letting the number on the “Excitement” meter tell me they were having a good time riding my rides.

I don’t play many video games as an adult, and I hadn’t thought about RollerCoaster Tycoon in years. But I was suddenly reminded of it a few weeks ago. I was half-listening to some YouTube video or another while folding laundry. As is the case roughly every two or three minutes for those of us who are too cheap to pay for premium, an ad disrupted my daze, for another video game. It instantly reminded me of RollerCoaster Tycoon, or any of the other management simulation titles like SimCity that have gained similar acclaim. It was full of faceless little guys zipping around a sprawling, isometric complex created and controlled by the player. YouTube is littered with ads for scammy, low-effort mobile games, so much so that I have learned to tune them out. But this game was very, very different from any I’d seen before.

“Every prison facility is yours to design,” a chipper announcer said. “From interrogation rooms to solitary confinement. You make the rules!” In the ad, you see a cartoon cop strapping one prisoner to an electric chair and hurling another into a filthy solitary confinement cell. Cut to a scene of pixelated mayhem: cops whaling on prisoners left and right with their batons, while the announcer tells you to “crush riots” and “keep 24/7 surveillance on felons.” Or, he says, “Take a different approach: Let inmates work themselves to the bone while you cash in on their labor!” 

The game was called Lands of Jail. I had never heard of it, but soon learned it was quite popular. It has over 4 million downloads on Android and is among the top ten most popular “strategy” games on the Google Play store, with around 27,000 downloads per day. The game has been around since September 2024, but the vast majority of its downloads have come since March of 2025. 

That the game took off in the fledgling months of the second Trump administration does not feel like a coincidence. Its marketing copy sounds like it could be a press release from the current Department of Homeland Security:

In a world plagued by rampant crime and deepening social divisions, you’re dispatched to the Isle of the Banished—where criminals are banished far from civilization—and face the challenge of turning chaos into order. Roll up your sleeves—it’s time to prove you're the Warden who can take charge!

Your goal isn’t just to “turn chaos into order,” though. It’s also to “turn a profit.” Like in RollerCoaster Tycoon, your goal is to expand endlessly, and as the first graphic on the download page says, “build your prison empire.” Lands of Jail is a game about owning a private prison. If its advertisements are any guide, it is also a game about being a sadistic authoritarian who inflicts misery on captives for fun and profit.

Prison is a hellish experience in the United States, but especially so if you are one of the more than 90,000 people in private facilities. The companies that run these hellholes, like CoreCivic and the GEO Group, have every incentive to spend as little money maintaining their facilities as possible. Private prisoners have less access to healthcare and are more likely to die while incarcerated. And prison staff, who are underpaid to save money, are more likely to subject their prisoners to physical abuse and less able to prevent assaults by other inmates. All the while, the companies that profit from these prisons aggressively lobby for more punitive laws and “lockup quotas” that force more people into the system.

I was morbidly fascinated enough to seek out more about Lands of Jail. Despite the game’s popularity, there is very little information to be found online about its developer, Singapore Just Game Technology. The Google Play Store lists Lands of Jail as the company’s only title, though it has some others available for download outside the United States.

In many ways, Lands of Jail is thoroughly unremarkable. It resembles the typical microtransaction-laden “gacha” game that is advertised incessantly online. The makers of these games dedicate the bulk of their attention not toward making a quality product that garners a loyal following, but toward getting as many people through the door as possible. The games themselves are dirt cheap to make, so by luring just a few “whales”—people willing to sink endless amounts of real money into accumulating in-game currency and items—they can become wildly lucrative. The Facebook page for Lands of Jail boasts that it “actually shows you the gameplay in the ads,” a clarification made necessary because so many mobile game ads just straight-up lie to viewers about what the game will contain when you download it. Often, these ads show fun, addictive puzzles or action sequences that don’t actually occur in-game. So, how does Lands of Jail entice you to download it? Well, its ads also lie to you about what it contains. But instead of enticing you with fun puzzles, it entices you with the promise of getting to indulge your most depraved power fantasies.

The game’s Facebook page contains many other ads, and they go to even more disturbing places than the first one I saw on YouTube. In one, filled almost entirely with AI-generated imagery that does not actually appear in the game, you are shown an underwater prison at the bottom of a 10,000-meter deep abyss, “home to the world’s most dangerous criminals,” where “as the warden, you call all the shots” controlling every aspect of their lives. “Make them grind, while you sit back and watch,” it says, cutting to a fat executive reclining next to a giant treasure chest full of coins. The ad does warn you not to “push them too hard,” lest your prisoners “get unsatisfied” and start a riot. But the solution it gives you is not to stop abusing them. Instead, the voiceover urges you to “lock them in dark water dungeons” or “toss them to the sharks.” A promotional image on the official page shows you cooking a prisoner in a giant cauldron, overlaid with a pair of buttons that read “Reform” and “Punish.”

Another ad shows the player (narrated by a truly insufferable Morty Smith AI soundalike) repeatedly punishing prisoners for complaining about their conditions. It encourages you to make them all share a bed because “prison isn't a luxury hotel.” When they complain about the lack of gym equipment, it encourages you to “Turn the workout room into a factory! Work is their new workout routine!” When they complain about the food, you’re told to “give them the runs” and then charge them to use the bathroom. Torturing your prisoners is not just a means toward acquiring riches. It is part of the game’s appeal.

The digitized torment goes on and on. Another ad, screenshotted by a horrified user on Reddit, shows a bawling female prisoner standing in a bathtub while a prison guard prepares to electrocute her. Another, which has since been removed from Facebook, depicts the player as a prison guard (Labeled “Level 15”) sexually assaulting a prisoner (labeled “Level 4”). I am not exaggerating at all. You grab him from behind while he’s at the urinal and say “ohh baby” while pink hearts come out of your eyes. Then you slap him on the butt. Then you blame it on another prisoner, leading him to get beaten up. Then you grab him and drown him in the toilet for fun. (You can do this, it seems, because he is only a “Level 1.”) 

If there’s any silver lining to Lands of Jail, it’s that most of these more visceral horrors don’t appear in the game itself. You still beat up plenty of prisoners and put down plenty of riots, which are really the only things motivating you to treat your prisoners well at all. But it’s not nearly as graphic as the marketing suggests. What’s more striking are the moments of banality. There is really no difference between playing Lands of Jail and playing Farmville, except that in Lands of Jail, your livestock are human beings. 

In the early stages of the game, you are guided by your buxom blonde “Secretary,” who constantly shows up to wink at you and blow you kisses while dispensing advice about how to maximize your prison’s efficiency. Adding to the overall male power fantasy of the game, she takes on the role of a doting female assistant, addressing you always as “Warden” and lauding you for your “generosity” when you do something like build showers for your prisoners or let them go outside. She’s also there to let you know when it’s time to turn the screws to keep the profits flowing. “Money is tight,” she says, “we’ll need to crank up work intensity to get through this rough patch!” Once you set up a kitchen, she excitedly tells you, “We’re now equipped to imprison more prisoners!”

Even if you aren’t actually drowning and groping prisoners in-game, the fact that the creators felt compelled to pretend you do in order to sell their product might be even more disturbing. While some surely felt a churn in their stomach upon learning that this game existed, millions of people got a glimpse of this carnival of computer-generated horrors and thought, “Where do I sign up?” That’s a worrying sign at a time when the current government’s goals for prisons—including Donald Trump’s ludicrous plan to reopen Alcatraz—seem as if they could have come right out of one of these advertisements. 

Private prison simulators have been around for decades. And just as Lands of Jail reflects the AI-sloppified authoritarian ethos of the Trump era, previous attempts to gamify the carceral system have reflected their political climates. In 2005, near the height of the War on Terror and near the tail end of America’s private prison construction boom, Valusoft—a notorious purveyor of bargain bin shovelware—attempted to skim off the success of RollerCoaster Tycoon with a game of its own, called Prison Tycoon.

The game was panned by critics, less for its objectionable premise than for its janky graphics and useless gameplay features. But some pointed out that the game incentivized cruelty: “To make money in prison tycoon,” one blogger wrote in 2008, “all you need to do is create a dormitory with enough beds for all your prisoners and let them wallow in their misery with nothing to do. You’ll reap huge profits and have very little expenses with no penalties for all the starved, limping convicts staggering around your hellhole.” 

Prison games during the Obama era similarly reflected the times. In the wake of scandals like “Kids for Cash,” in which a private juvenile prison in Pennsylvania paid off judges to issue maximum sentences to thousands of children in order to increase occupancy, the simulator that emerged attempted to reflect a newfound sobriety about the horror our society had created. The big game from this period is Prison Architect, which came out in 2015. Unlike Tycoon, which was filled with meaningless stats with no bearing on gameplay, Architect is exceptionally meticulous, with everything from the weather outside to the width of the halls to the leniency of the parole board affecting the experience. The developers at the British company Introversion Software expressed a desire to create a “proper exploration of the prison system,” according to a profile in The New Yorker.

To its credit, the game is somewhat more sympathetic in its portrayal of the prisoners who run through its system. It shows some of the ways incarceration exacerbates their hardships, displaying, for example, how traumatic experiences in prison increase recidivism and lead to other maladies like alcoholism and drug use. However, it suffers from the same lack of imagination that plagued the Obama era at large. Aside from the fact that its mere existence assumes the perpetuation of the private prison system (which, I suppose, is a necessity if you want to graft the Tycoon format onto the prison system at all), the game totally sidesteps the obvious realities of racial disparities in the criminal justice system—an inexcusable shortcoming at a time when America was reading books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and reeling from the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. And as Yussef Colepointed out in Vice, the only form of resistance the game portrays for prisoners is to mindlessly riot, when actual prisoners at the time were doing things like going on well-planned strikes to protest for fair wages.

In the meantime, Valusoft would continue to squeeze out Prison Tycoon games. For years after their first release, they’d continue pushing players to build squalid torture fortresses to extract maximum profits from their inmates. However, after the events of 2020 made the ugly realities of our criminal punishment system unavoidable, it became clear that a redesign was necessary. The goal of 2021’s Prison Tycoon: Under New Management is still, above all, to turn a profit. But the title suggests a mea culpa for the franchise’s earlier installments, which incentivized maximum cruelty and deprivation. 

Instead, this new game’s marketing emphasized rehabilitation. Players were rewarded not just for filling as many cells as possible, but for successfully rehabilitating and reintegrating their prisoners into society by giving them therapy, letting them paint and tend to plants, visit with loved ones, and even let them play in a zero gravity machine. But this presents the opposite problem—in the game, mentally ill prisoners came away from these treatments reformed immediately, which, while a nice thing to imagine, paints for the undiscerning gamer a much rosier picture both of the ease of recovery for those suffering from mental illness and the conditions prisoners are actually subject to. In the America of 2021, there were still lots of private prisons, but companies like the GEO Group started using phrases like “continuum of care” and putting smiling inmates and service dogs on their brochures. Likewise, in Tycoon, you were still making money by endlessly expanding your human terrarium, but at least now you were encouraged to reform your prisoners by letting them make flower arrangements rather than beating them with sticks all day. You got to imagine that the people in charge of these systems of punishment and control were benevolent. 

The arrival of the second Trump administration has been a bonanza for the private prison industry. CoreCivic and the GEO Group are some of Donald Trump’s top corporate backers, and their loyalty has paid dividends, as they have reaped massive new contracts to warehouse the undocumented immigrants snatched up by ICE as part of Trump’s “mass deportation” crusade. When the Laken Riley Act—which requires federal law enforcement to detain immigrants arrested for offenses as minor as shoplifting—passed in January, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger squealed on an investor call that it was “truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company.” 

Lands of Jail is barely a “game” in any real sense. But in a truer sense, it is the quintessential game of 2025—the year that artificial intelligence, scam culture, and fascism converged into one three-headed hydra. It’s quite telling that it was not even the only private prison management-based mobile game to debut this year. The pop-up ad-filled Prison Empire Tycoonhas also garnered millions of downloads, though its ad campaign is not nearly as horrifying as Lands of Jail. It at least encourages you to “meet the inmate basic needs” and “help the society.” (Yes, those typos are part of the game’s description.)

Watching the ads for Lands of Jail, in which buzz-cut prisoners—“the world’s most dangerous criminals”—are marched down a dimly lit hallway, it was impossible not to think of the spectacle coming out of Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele’s CECOT prison, where the Trump administration has shipped totally innocent people—dubbed the “worst of the worst”—to endure ceaseless torture. Seeing Lands of Jail advertising the crying woman being electrocuted, I couldn’t help but think of the official White House account tweeting out an artificially generated cartoon of a crying woman being handcuffed by ICE guards. The panorama of cartoon cops beating on silent, faceless felons made me think of Andry Hernández Romero, the very real Venezuelan makeup artist who was hauled off to El Salvador by ICE in March without even being charged with a crime. He was filmed praying and crying for his mother as very real prison guards beat him senseless. 

This sort of humanity is not portrayed anywhere in Lands of Jail. But that erasure is not an aberration. It’s inherent to the format of the management simulator, in which the way to thrive and expand is to treat the humans who interact with the system you control as numbers on a ledger—as indistinguishable and replaceable as ants. It is one thing to look at human beings this way when they are zipping around your amusement park and you’re testing how much you can get away with charging them for cotton candy. It’s another thing when you are deciding whether or not they get to shower or go outside or how much slave labor you’re going to make them do today. The fact that these two decisions are treated essentially the same way in these games is, in one sense, appalling. But it is also basically a correct portrayal of life under a system that commodifies everything. The games reflect that reality back at us.