History Main / DeadlyEnvironmentPrison

* In ''Film/BootCamp'', Dr. Hail tells the new arrivals at Camp Serenity that it is not a prison because there are no bars. However, as they are on an island, there is no way off for them except to swim, and as they are in the middle of the south Pacific, there is nowhere for them to swim to.

* ''AudioPlay/BigFinishDoctorWho'': In "[[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWho076Singularity Singularity]]," people recruited by the Somnus Foundation have their minds transported to Ember, the last surviving world in the universe at the NaturalEndOfTime. Here, they're rehoused in the decrepit cyborg bodies of the Somnus residents and doomed to wait for the universe to end, while [[GrandTheftMe said residents are transferred into their vacant bodies back on Earth]]. Though a Somnus guard is protecting the equipment used for the transfer, there's otherwise no security and no walls, so the inmates are theoretically free to leave... but the settlement on Ember is the only place that's holding out against entropy, so nobody dares unless they want to feel what it's like to die along with the rest of the universe.

* One episode of ''Anime/OutlawStar'' had Gene infiltrating a prison that was located on a high-gravity planet. No prisoner sentenced to go there had lived to see the end of their stay because their hearts gave out from the gravity's strain sooner or later.

* In ''ComicBook/{{Saga}}'', when Alana is captured, she's sent to one of these on a remote planetoid.

* ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'':

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[[quoteright:350:[[WesternAnimation/StarWarsTheCloneWars https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/deadly_environment_prison_citadel_2.png]]]]

* One episode of ''Anime/OutlawStar'' had Gene infiltrating a prison that was located on a high-gravity planet. No prisoner sentenced to go there had lived to see the end of their stay because their hearts gave out from the gravity's strain sooner or later.

* In ''ComicBook/SerenityLeavesOnTheWind'', Zoe is sent to an Alliance PenalColony on a planet where the {{terraform}}ing didn't take, leaving it a barren desert. The prison camp doesn't have walls--if you leave any way but by ship, you die of thirst--and the guards don't bother breaking up fights between the inmates or bother to chase you if you run. [[spoiler:Zoe excepted: the guards quickly pursue her once they realize she's running to meet Mal and the others, who came in on ''Serenity''.]]

** ''ComicBook/TheSuperRevengeOfLexLuthor'': The planet-prison where ComicBook/LexLuthor, ComicBook/{{Brainiac}} and three members of the [[ComicBook/LegionOfSuperHeroes Legion of Super-Villains]] are serving time is located on a distant planetoid and surrounded by an inhospitable mountainous desert. Even if an inmate managed to walk out of the only inhabited place in the entire planetoid, he would have no way out of the planet and face the possibility of dying from thirst and hunger.
* ''ComicBook/RobynHood: The Hunt'': The interdimensional prison Robyn is sent to is located on a FloatingIsland and surrounded by a HungryJungle.

* In ''ComicBook/{{Saga}}'', when Alana is captured, she's sent to one of these on a remote planetoid.
* During ''ComicBook/JokersLastLaugh'', Creator/DCComics' ExtranormalPrison the Slab was accidentally teleported to Antarctica. It was subsequently decided this was the best place for it.

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
* The underground Klingon labor camp Rura Penthe where Kirk and [=McCoy=] are imprisoned in ''Film/StarTrekVITheUndiscoveredCountry'' has nothing preventing prisoners from escaping -- except the extreme cold and storms of the surface, where death by exposure would be a certainty (technically, there's also a magnetic field to prevent transporter use). In fact, prisoners are threatened with expulsion to the surface if they don't work.
* ''Film/TheDarkKnightRises'': Bane's prison has no guards or fences, just a gaping hole for a roof that only one child has ever managed to climb out of. Many more have fallen to their deaths trying to escape.

* ''Film/WildWildWest'': After Loveless captures Jim and Gordon, he places them in a small unguarded entrapment in the middle of nowhere. They can leave whenever they want, but doing so will activate a device that sends a DeadlyDisc after their magnetic collars. Jim being Jim, he triggers it without even thinking.

* ''Film/Alien3'': Incarceration on the penal planet of Fury 161 is entirely voluntary. There's a minimal staff with no weapons, as there's no place for anyone to escape to without a functioning spacecraft, and the supply ship that drops by every so often is guarded. However, the facility used to house several thousand prisoners, so presumably security was more expansive when the site was fully operational.
* In ''Film/BootCamp'', Dr. Hail tells the new arrivals at Camp Serenity that it is not a prison because there are no bars. However, as they are on an island, there is no way off for them except to swim, and as they are in the middle of the south Pacific, there is nowhere for them to swim to.
* In ''Film/TheManhunt'', Ethan Wayne's cellmate tells him that the prison is surrounded by desert for 30 miles in every direction and that he will fry before he makes it out. Nevertheless, Wayne breaks out and makes it across the desert, with no indication of how he manages it.

* In ''Literature/AGameOfThrones'', the Arryns' cells have only three walls... with a 600-foot drop off the side of a mountain on the fourth side. [[EnfantTerrible The Lord of the Eyrie]] also tries to force the imprisoned [[spoiler:Tyrion]] to leave their castle via the Moon Door (again, with a 600-foot drop on the other side.) When [[spoiler:Tyrion]] manages to get pardoned, Lady Lysa Arryn manages to do Death By Freedom ''again'' (he can now leave the castle via the road full of shadowcats and hostile tribes.)

* In ''Literature/TheStarsMyDestination'', everyone can teleport, so criminals are kept in a location they don't know. You are welcome to TeleFrag yourself whenever you want.
* ''Tribesmen of {{Literature/Gor}}''. The salt mines of Klima are staffed entirely by male slaves. There are no guards, and you're free to leave at any time. But it's surrounded by hundreds of square miles of desert, and canteens are limited to small sizes; you'd die of thirst & exposure if you try to leave.

* At the end of [[Literature/HumanxCommonwealth the Icerigger Trilogy]], some human lawbreakers need to be confined at the Tran-ky-ky outpost of Brass Monkey. The settlement isn't nearly big enough to have a suitable prison, so the criminals are herded into a vacant warehouse and stripped of all but the minimum of clothing. This is more than enough to keep them confined, as ambient temperatures at Brass Monkey hover around -30 degrees Celsius at high noon, with a non-stop lethal wind chill.

* The prison in ''Literature/EscapeFromFurnace'' is still a mile underground, with only one way up. Donovan does toss out the suggestion of picking a spot and digging a way out in the span of about a thousand years. But even in the chipping rooms, there runs the risk of a complete cave-in which previously reduced Room Two to rubble. Even though Alex tries to exploit the underground river in Room Two, it only takes him deeper into the bedrock of the prisons tunnels and into the hands of bloodthirsty rats.
* In ''Literature/HarryPotter'', Azkaban is located on a tiny islet in the middle of the North Sea, that's impossible to plot on a map. Just in case the soul-sucking [[EmotionEater dementors]] didn't completely sap your will to escape.
* ''The Guns of Pluto'' by Creator/AllenSteele. Cold Hell is a PenalColony built into an iceberg on Pluto. Anyone in the open would have their blood freeze in seconds unless they wore a specially-designed environmental suit, and the natives are notorious for being cannibals (though it's later revealed that, while the Kuiperans do eat human flesh, they don't kill people for food). When the Black Pirate turns up with a hijacked space liner to rescue the members of his organisation, he gives the other inmates a choice of joining him or using one of the other spacecraft to escape, but as they're way out in the Kuiper Belt everyone knows there's nowhere else to escape ''to''.

* ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'': The episode "[[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS3E3TheChute The Chute]]" has Harry Kim and Tom Paris being sent to an alien prison. The only access to it is a chute from which new prisoners and supplies are delivered. After some effort, Kim manages to climb the chute, only to find that the prison is actually free-floating in deep space. After that, all they can do is survive until ''Voyager'' finally manages to locate them.
* ''Series/StargateSG1'' had an underground prison colony accessible only through a Circle Gate or a Stargate with no Dial Out Device, which is used to deliver food rations for the prisoners. The prisoners believe that it's possible to escape through the Stargate during the moment it opens, which is impossible, as anything in front of the gate is vaporized when the energy burst starts. [[spoiler:The team manages to escape by using cold fusion, invented by a scientist named Linea (unbeknownst to them, she's a mass murderer), and manually spinning the inner circle and locking each coordinate.]]

* The PrisonShip ''Purgatory'' in ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'' is one as it is located in what is the least-survivable environment known to life itself: the cold vacuum of space. The warden who runs this tight ship, a corrupt turian who is as likely to extort your planet for money, lest he "misplace" a particularly dangerous prisoner or two on it as he is to look at you, boasts that he is able to prevent escape attempts simply because there is ''nowhere'' for the prisoners to go, and if they act up, he'll vent the cell of the trouble-making prisoner into space anyways. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of trying to enslave [[OneManArmy Commander Shepard]] for ransom money, and Shepard responds by shooting their way through the ship and waking up the resident TykeBomb and [[FromBadToWorse it only goes downhill from there.]]

* There are multiple indications throughout the ''VideoGame/{{Portal}}'' series that the world outside the Aperture Science complex poses [[VideoGame/HalfLife2 more danger]] to Chell than the tests endlessly invented by the murderous AI [=GLaDOS=] inside.

* In ''Series/TheWalkingDead2010'', Rick chooses to allow one of the prisoners to escape into the walker-infested woods rather than wasting a bullet on him.

->''"You see any barbed wire fences? Any guard towers? No? That's because we don't need 'em. Go ahead, start running away. I won't stop you… You wanna run away, them buzzards'll pick you clean by the end of the third day."''

* In ''Series/TheWalkingDead'', Rick chooses to allow one of the prisoners to escape into the walker-infested woods rather than wasting a bullet on him.
* ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'': The episode "The Chute" has Harry Kim and Tom Paris being sent to an alien prison. The only access to it is a chute from which new prisoners and supplies are delivered. After some effort, Kim manages to climb the chute, only to find that the prison is actually free-floating in deep space. After that, all they can do is survive until ''Voyager'' finally manages to locate them.

* ''Film/TheChroniclesOfRiddick'': The Crematoria Prison is located on a planet orbiting an extremely bright sun. Temperatures on the surface vary between so hot during the day that you'll be instantly incinerated and so cold during the night that you'll instantly freeze to death. The outside is only survivable for a short period during twilight.

* In ''Film/{{Papillon|1973}}'', when the titular character is sent to Devil's Island, he's told that conditions are quite lax there as the sharks make sure no-one escapes.
* ''Film/Alien3''. Incarceration on the penal planet of Fury 161 is entirely voluntary. There's a minimal staff with no weapons, as there's no place for anyone to escape to without a functioning spacecraft, and the supply ship that drops by every so often is guarded. However, the facility used to house several thousand prisoners, so presumably security was more expansive when the site was fully operational.

* A reason why [[DeathWorld Australia]] was chosen to be the primary PenalColony of the British Empire is that it was a big island far from the mainland where EverythingIsTryingToKillYou.

* ''The Guns of Pluto'' by Creator/AllenSteele. Cold Hell is a PenalColony built into an iceberg on Pluto. Anyone in the open would have their blood freeze in seconds, and the natives are notorious for being cannibals (A Kuperian later reveals that escapees actually die of exposure rather than being killed for food, as it needs a special environmental suit to survive). When the Black Pirate turns up with a hijacked space liner to rescue the members of his organisation, he gives the other inmates a choice of joining him or using one of the other spacecraft to escape, but as they're way out in the Kuiper Belt everyone knows there's nowhere else to escape ''to''.

[[quoteright:350:[[Film/TheChroniclesOfRiddick https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/crematoria.png]]]]
[[caption-width-right:350:Even if you ''do'' escape, where are you going to go?]]

* Parodied in the very first ''ComicBook/JudgeDredd'' story, which ends with the perp being sentenced to a prison called Devil's Island -- which is a road island surrounded on all sides by a multiple-lane super-freeway with traffic streaming along it at high speeds at all hours.

* The PrisonShip ''Purgatory'' in ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'' is one as it is located in what is the least-survivable environment known to life itself: The cold vacuum of space. The warden who runs this tight ship, a corrupt Turian who is as likely to extort your planet for money, lest he "misplace" a particularly dangerous prisoner or two on it as he is to look at you, boasts that he is able to prevent escape attempts simply because there is ''no where'' for the prisoners to go, and if they act up, he'll vent the cell of the trouble-making prisoner into space anyways. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of trying to enslave [[OneManArmy Commander Shepard]] for ransom money, and Shepard responds by shooting their way through the ship and waking up the resident TykeBomb and [[FromBadToWorse it only goes downhill from there.]]

* The World of ''Manga/{{Toriko}}'' [[DeathWorld has no shortage of insanely deadly environments]], but the people who build the three Great Gourmet Prisons still decided to go the extra mile. The Sky Prison floats ten kilometers above the ground. The area around it is prone to tornadoes and inhabited by giant carnivorous birds with a taste for human flesh. The Prison Submarine is submerged two kilometers below sea level and the waters around it are filled with carnivorous fish, just in case someone manages to survive the water pressure at that depth. [[HellholePrison The Honey Prison]] hangs on the edge of a cliff above one of the harshest environments in the human world - areas with abnormal climates. In the summer frequent eruptions flood the entire zone with magma and temperatures rise to the point when even the air can burn human skin upon contact. In the autumn the area is covered by a fog so thick that vision is limited to just one meter and so poisonous that inhaling it three times is enough to stop a human heart. In the winter temperatures can drop to 200 below zero. Only the spring period is survivable... which is why all horrifying monsters, who live in that area, come out of hibernation and become active during that season. The only safe road ("safe" meaning, that monsters are less likely to attack there) is blocked by several kilometer-long drawbridges and specifically trained monsters.

* The interdimensional prison Robyn is sent to in ''ComicBook/RobynHood: The Hunt'' is located on a FloatingIsland and surrounded by a HungryJungle.

* During ''Comicbook/JokersLastLaugh'', Creator/DCComics' ExtranormalPrison the Slab was accidentally teleported to Antarctica. It was subsequently decided this was the best place for it.

* ''WesternAnimation/SupermanTheAnimatedSeries'': When the GovernmentConspiracy that created Volcana manages to capture her again, she is placed inside of a special cell that has absolutely no oxygen (and thus nothing for Volcana's powers to burn) and the only supply comes from a mask and umbilical which is controlled by her captors. She is free to try to get out, if she can do it before she suffocates to death.

* ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'': One episode has Kim and Paris being sent to an alien prison. The only access to it is a chute from which new prisoners and supplies are delivered. After some effort, Kim manages to climb the chute, only to find that the prison is actually free-floating in deep space. After that, all they can do is survive until ''Voyager'' finally manages to locate them.

Often overlaps with PenalColony, which are built in remote (but not necessarily deadly) locations by definition.

SubTrope of TheAlcatraz. SuperTrope to SkyCell, and to FireAndBrimstoneHell.

* During ''Comicbook/JokersLastLaugh'', Comicbook/DCComics' SupernormalPrison the Slab was accidentally teleported to Antarctica. It was subsequently decided this was the best place for it.

** In the sequel ''Literature/MakingMoney'', when placed in the same scene and offered the same choice, Moist theatrically goes to test the depth of the "alternative"... only to find that now it's an ordinary exit door, because this time Vetinari really is giving him the option to refuse.

* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000''. The old Dark Eldar codex mentioned that slaves pens in Comorragh don't have walls to keep the slaves in. They can leave any time they want... and wander out into the [[WretchedHive Dark City]] where they're likely to suffer [[{{FateWorseThanDeath}} an even worse fate]].

* The Blackrock prison in ''VideoGame/TheLongDark'' is on top of a mountain peak on the fictional Canadian island of Great Bear Island, and Great Bear Island is an environment that leads some to claim (as mentioned in the "Building Blackrock, Part One" book that can be found in the Wintermute mode, episode 4) that the island's inhabitants should have nothing to fear from the likes of maximum-security prison inmates considering they're tough enough to live on this island...and this was ''before'' the "quiet apocalypse" shorted out the world's electrical equipment (to say nothing of the nearly-relentless winter season the game takes place in). A newspaper clipping that can be found as well mentions five escapees from the prison a month ago where one turned himself in, one was found dead, and the remaining three missing with authorities assuming they just perished in the surrounding terrain.

* The Blackrock prison in ''VideoGame/TheLongDark'' is on top of a mountain peak on Great Bear Island, and Great Bear Island is an environment that leads some to claim (as mentioned in the "Building Blackrock, Part One" book that can be found in the Wintermute mode, episode 4) that the island's inhabitants should have nothing to fear from the likes of maximum-security prison inmates considering they're tough enough to live on this island...and this was ''before'' the "quiet apocalypse" shorted out the world's electrical equipment. A newspaper clipping that can be found as well mentions five escapees from the prison a month ago where one turned himself in, one was found dead, and the remaining three missing with authorities assuming they just perished in the surrounding terrain.