Vice Media’s Waypoint has a series on prison culture and we’re looking at D&D. Some prisoners are able to use the hobby to hold their lives together.
It turns out that Dungeons & Dragons is more common in prisons in America than you might have suspected. It is likely that most lock-ups have at least one game going and in some there’s a player in every block. One prisoner describes how they had their own table – you know, in the way the Mexican mafia had a table and so did the Aryan brotherhood.
However, some prisons are writing rules against gamers. The Idaho State Correctional Institution’s 2014 Handbook bans horseplay, gambling, making dice and roleplaying games. Perhaps prisoners trying to gamble tried telling the wardens they were just being level 15 fighter-clerics instead?
Where do you get dice from in a prison? Waypoint has photographs of clever origami dice.
