Corner Detention Center

The Corner Detention Center sits in the marsh country northwest of the Downtown islet, built into the remains of an old wastewater treatment plant. The choice was deliberate: the place already understood hard, foul work and the handling of what nobody wanted to look at. Vestige turned that inheritance into policy. The plant's basins became holding yards, its pump buildings became barracks and lesson rooms, and its service roads became guarded paths out into the swamp. What comes out of the Corner is peat and sulfur; what the city hopes comes out of its prisoners is proof that they still hold worth enough to be won back.
  That framing is why the Corner draws a strange gratitude from people who would hate any other prison. In the Stack, an inconvenient person may return only as Infection in a bottle or as a body cut down at the Roman. In Harbormarch, a social burden gets pushed out toward the Dead Duck Warrens to die among strangers. Vestige offers a different answer: fail out in the open, and you may still be handed a structured road back. The labor is not wasted, either. The peat feeds thin farm soil, warms districts short of firewood, and lends its dark taste to distilled drink, while the sulfur travels to the artisans of Downtown Vestige to be worked with charcoal and guano into black powder. In the Holy City, no suffering is allowed to stay merely punitive if it can be turned to some use.
  Work is sorted by faith. Most inmates put in seven hours a day in the sulfur pits, the handling yards, or the peat cuts, filthy labor waged knee-deep in black muck. Those counted faithful to a sanctioned religion have their hard hours trimmed in favor of study and supervised spiritual repair; the faithless, the heretical, and the followers of cults the city deems corrosive draw a harsher nine hours, on the reasoning that they must be worn back into shape before any deeper teaching can land. The guards are more than guards. Many double as doctrinal teachers, and the Accensorites among them believe they are there to open a road back into society for the lapsed, aided by trusted long-serving inmates who earn shorter shifts as teaching aides.
  The Corner's grimmest truth is its morgue, kept in a locked building to stop would-be Mortis Practitioner escapees. Death does not end a sentence here. A prisoner who dies inside is still expected back through the usual necrological process, and the labor and civic debts they carried are waiting when they return. Vestige has built a punishment able to follow a person across the Mortis and greet them on the far side. Escape by the marsh is barely more forgiving. The channels choke down to muck, the footing drops away without warning, and rumor puts scattered Wasteland Merican camps and wastelanders hungry for Lineage flesh out in the far reaches. On bad nights shamblers heave up against the outer walls, and the insects the locals call Swamp Devils are dreaded more still. Most prisoners who run come back only through the morgue.