Playing With / Wardens Are Evil

• Basic Trope: The warden of a prison is horrible.
• Straight: Warden B. Knight of Troperville prison is downright horrible to the prisoners, torturing them mercilessly when he's especially bored, or if he thinks they're plotting to escape.
• Exaggerated: Warden Knight outright murders his prisoners.
  • Even the biggest and baddest criminals in Troperville cower in fear upon hearing Warden Knight's name, and they earnestly ask for Anything but That! if they are threatened with being sent to his prison.
• Downplayed: Warden Knight is kind of mean, but doesn't outright torture or abuse his prisoners.
  • Warden Knight isn't outright evil, but he's rather inattentive and comes off as this due to constantly ignoring a lot of ongoing problems.
• Justified: Warden Knight once lived in a town with a very incompetent police force, and even more incompetent prison guards. He rules this prison with an iron fist out of fear that the prison will turn into the prison that inspired him to run the prison he's running now in the first place.
• Inverted: Warden Knight is very lenient, tries to make friends with the prisoners, and has a tendency to let them out on good behavior quite often.
• Subverted: Warden Knight realizes that his...techniques for running the prison aren't reforming the criminals at all; in fact, it does quite the opposite. As a result, he vows to never be so hard on his prisoners ever again.
• Double Subverted:
  • Aesop Amnesia
  • After one or two very bloody riots and other crimes occur within the prison courtesy of said criminals believing Knight's attempts to reform are him "becoming weak", Knight is forced to quadruple the brutality in order to both stomp down on rebellion and make the offered carrot of lower-security wings with cable TV, access to education and therapy and the possibility of getting out of this prison alive look more appetizing.

• Averted: Warden Knight is a tough, but fair warden.
• Enforced:
  • The episode of the show where Warden Knight appears is a criticism of shoddiness-laden prisons that seek to enhance a corporate bottom line instead of actually helping enforce the law and/or how law enforcement nowadays is full of violent jerks as one more cog of a horrific machine.
  • The episode is a homage to The Shawshank Redemption.
  • It is a Prison Episode and there is no time to give the antagonists (one of which is the Warden) a nuanced morality.
• Lampshaded:
  "You see that prison? You don't want to end up there. The warden is almost as bad, if not worse than the people that it contains."
• Invoked: Warden Knight deliberately becomes more strict, to encourage prisoners to behave, or else....
• Exploited: The staff at a Hellhole Prison notice Warden Knight's strictness, and offer him a job there, seeing it as a chance to really terrify its prisoners.
• Defied:
  Warden Knight: "The entire purpose of a prison is to reform people. If I'm way too hard on them, it will make them worse than they were when they first came in."
• Discussed: [after Warden Knight makes his introductory speech to the new prisoners] "Someone's a fan of The Shawshank Redemption, it seems."
• Conversed: "Why is it that in all this media with Prison Episodes, the warden is always an asshole?"
• Deconstructed:
  • The prisoners grow extremely tired of Warden Knight's extremely awful treatment of them, and a Prison Riot ensues.
  • Warden Knight is fired after word gets around about his terrible behavior, and he ends up in the very same prison he once ran...with a bunch of vengeful prisoners out for blood.
• Reconstructed: Warden Knight easily quells the riot, and extends the prisoner's sentences, to really get the message through that he is not to be messed with.