Being found guilty of a crime grave enough to merit imprisonment, a life sentence or death row tends to make people less sympathetic to your situation in life, such as is left. This is why cons are on a
very short list of
Acceptable Targets for a whole slew of not nice things; and in fiction, there are
plenty of these not nice things. Military conscription, medical experiments,
Blood Sports,
Deadly Games,
Human Sacrifice, the list goes on and on.
The cons aren't shipped off to a sub-human prison, that would be...
wasting resources. Usually they're "kidnapped" and officially were "
Released To Elsewhere", but there's plenty of distressingly legal ways to whitewash the whole bloody affair. The government may declare that
All Crimes Are Equal, and as un-persons prisoners can be used for basically whatever. If there are those who want to maintain a semblance of humanity and legality, the cons will be offered it as an "option" to serving their full sentence. For some reason, the general public is rarely upset by the possibility of a battle hardened ex-con who is in no way rehabilitated being released onto the street... or they would be, if it were public knowledge and
if any actually survived. When this trope is used in conjunction with
Blood Sport, the reverse seems to be the case. The most successful cons will develop a fan base clamoring for them.
This story very likely takes the POV of the cons, because sympathizing with people conducting whatever horrific acts are about to be perpetrated on the cons is usually a bit too alienating for audiences. So aside from giving most of the cons a smidgen of sympathetic characterization, there will be one
innocent man who was framed to get him specifically into the night's debauchery. Usually this one innocent man and the most likable, noble or least evil con
will survive to the end. The game is of course rigged to kill all the Condemned Contestants, which makes the protagonist's success a "threat" both because they might get out and expose the charade, and are getting too popular with the audience at home that
they'd listen.
Compare
Boxed Crook.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Not sure if this quite counts, but in Hunter X Hunter, as part of the Hunter Exam, a number of convicts are given instructions to waylay the examinees, with them getting a year off their sentence for each hour they take from the examinees' time.
- Kabuto pulls this in one chapter of Naruto. Basically tells a bunch of random ninja in his prison to kill each other and whoever's alive at the end goes free. He was lying though, as his plan was to quickly find who was strongest and Orochimaru steals the winner's body.
Film
- The Condemned is made of this trope.
- The 2009 remake of Death Race.
- In the Doom movie, which has them test alien DNA on a death row criminal (and said DNA makes evil people into monsters).
- The villain in Robocop 2 used for Brain In A Jar cyborging (they hoped to control him through his drug addition).
- The Running Man, here the cons were all political dissidents. Naturally Arnie and his love interest are framed innocents; Arnold for refusing to open fire on innocent civilians (which is ironically what he is then framed for doing) and the girl for trying to expose the coverup. It also turns out that no-one ever wins, the three winners were killed secretly and their appearances faked using video editing.
- Terminator Salvation has Marcus as a willing donor.
- In Virtuosity convicts are used to test the new (and inadvertently deadly) VR police training system. The hero is an ex-cop who in a break from the norm is actually guilty of the crime he was imprisoned for, although there were some pretty mitigating circumstances.
Literature
- In the Matthew Reilly novel Area 7 the secret government base has a cell block containing prisoners used in secret medical experimentation. Naturally they end up escaping to make things even harder for the protagonists.
Video Games
- In the Dreamcast game Headhunter we learn that criminals imprisoned in the undersea-dome (so you could say it's sort of a waterdome) get to fight each other to the death which then gets broadcast live on TV, the winner gets a shorter sentence and the loser gets to generously donate their organs. Maybe they just didn't like Wade but some criminals got much better weapons than others.
- The entire Speedball series of games is built on this premise.
Web
- The D-rank personnel at the SCP Foundation. Tested, experimented on, used as cannon fodder in as many ways as there are in the book (and making up a few new ones as it goes along), and (ex)terminated after a month. That is, until they run out of crooks and start bringing in fresh Red Shirts from the average populace.
Real Life
- The gladiator games in Ancient Rome. Unlike in fiction, the Gladiators were POWs and sometimes criminals. Very few were actual willing contestants or Romans, though the Gladiators were probably really good at fighting if they lived past a week, fiction got that part right.
