Tailor-Made Prisons in Literature.
- In 20 Years After, D'Artagnan and Porthos have been captured on the orders of Cardinal Mazarin and are imprisoned in Rueil Castle. Mazarin requests thirty extra soldiers to guard exclusively the two "special guests". Unsurprisingly, they manage to escape anyway.
- Animorphs:
- Downplayed. Visser Three (by then, promoted to Visser One) is tried and imprisoned in a special "Yeerk box", built by the Andalites that lets him hear and speak, and then he's shipped off to a special max-security prison until he dies. The 'downplayed' comes from the fact that he's a sentient slug that can barely move under its own power and is deaf and blind. The reason he's imprisoned now is that he led the Yeerks trying to take over the human race.
- Also, David. He was trapped in rat form (by being kept in a space too small for him to resume human form, thus unable to change back before Shapeshifter Mode Lock set in) and kept on a rocky island with not much life on it for being willing and able to destroy the Animorphs and any hope for the world with a few words to the Yeerks and repeatedly trying to kill them. Books later, Crayak and the Drode give him a chance at revenge at Rachel, but when Rachel ignores Crayak's offers for super strength, Crayak and the Drode leave. Rachel catches David and David pleads to be killed, as being put back on the island would be a fate worse than death. It is left unclear at the end whether Rachel killed him or sent him back to the island.
- Isaac Asimov published books that were a collection of short stories. One involved an alien species trying to deal with an alien murderer and considered the constrictive prison to be inhumane. They created a much larger building for that alien to reside in, with food deliveries through a Pneumatic Tube system, and no way out other than a fatal 50-foot drop. The prisoner opened its wings and flew away.
- Codex Alera has several mentions of prisons made to hold particular types of crafters. Earthcrafters are held in cages off the ground to prevent contact with the earth, windcrafters are held in windowless stone cells to prevent breezes (or buried up to the shoulders), watercrafters are held in a ring of fire that dehydrates the air around them, and so on. Since it's not that rare for normal people to have more than one kind of fury, these measures tend to have a 'mix and match' quality to them, but High Lords and Ladies have access to all six, so a prison for them has to be incredibly complicated, often tailored to the specific individual.
- In the first book of the Coldfire Trilogy, the Hunter is captured and rendered totally helpless by being placed in a simple bonfire. A normal human who can manipulate fae could easily extinguish the flames and escape, but the Deal with the Devil the Hunter made for immortality long ago robbed him of his ability to manipulate anything related to life or light, like fire. All he can do is tap into the weak currents of earth fae to constantly heal himself to avoid being burned to death. Damien wonders what is more painful to the Hunter: being burned alive, or the blow to his pride due to being rendered powerless through such mundane means.
- In Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga novels, very serious but non-capital crimes are punished by a one-way trip to the surface of a prison world, which is much the same as being cast back into the Stone Age, as there is no real civilization or technology. No visitors, and a military blockade ensures no rescuers will get close enough to even see the world.
- In Lawrence Yep's Dragon Series, the protagonists come onto a deserted island sealed by a barrier that prevents the use of any magic within it and stops anyone or anything from leaving. Anything, that is, except earth, to prevent the beach from piling up endlessly. Once Thorn figures this out, they make a raft from ceramic jars and escape. Of course, they only realize afterward that they accidentally helped the island's designated prisoner, The Nameless One, to escape as well.
- The Emperor's Soul: The Rose Empire's special cells for Forgers have walls made of many different types of stone from many different locations. In order to make a soulstamp to Forge a hole through the wall, the Forger would have to identify every type of stone used to make it and address all of them in the soulstamp. And then there's a plate of ralkalest, the unForgeable metal, behind the stones in case the Forger does figure them all out.
- The Gordon R. Dickson short story "Danger — Human!" had the aliens construct an escape-proof cell, consisting of metal physical enclosures, an impenetrable force field, constant armed surveillance, and access only for carefully monitored brief periods to provide food and water, to study a human they'd abducted to try and find out why humans kept conquering the galaxy. Didn't work.
- The first part of Dante's The Divine Comedy was thick with this, not so much due to the fact that Hell was escape-proof, but due to the fact that sinners were punished via creative means that fit the crimes they had committed in life. To give one example, thieves had their very forms stolen from them, and continually shifted from one monstrous form to another.
- Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
- The Indestructible Man, a Past Doctor Adventures novel by Simon Messingham. The eponymous character's Evil Counterpart, Captain Taylor (an Expy of Captain Black) is immersed in a (now-solidified) ball of reinforced liquid concrete, sealed in titanium, and placed in an underwater habitat on the bottom of the ocean constructed for this sole purpose, monitored by sensors, a small team of guards and automated Sentry Guns. For years there's never been a flicker of brainwave activity until the events of the novel. Taylor then casually melts his way out of the concrete, slaughters all the guards and sails off in a submarine that happened to be docked.
- In Harvest of Time by Alistair Reynolds, a Third Doctor and UNIT story, the Master is imprisoned in a windowless cell that is usually submerged in water at the bottom of a disused nuclear power station which is still notably radioactive. The radioactivity doesn't affect Time Lords, but it discourages visitors from hanging about long enough to be hypnotized.
- The Dresden Files:
- In the short story "Love Hurts", the villain lovingly describes the cage for Dresden — or rather, for his best friend, to provoke her into attacking. It's covered in spikes so that he can't fall asleep, inside a half-bowl so he must stand in his own waste, and there's a rack with three needle-nosed spears on it outside so any passing evildoer can participate.
- Demonreach is revealed to be this in Cold Days, with Dresden having unwittingly become the Warden in Turn Coat — he thought that it was just an ordinary, if horrifyingly powerful and creepy, Genius Loci powered by a very strong dark Ley Line. As it turns out, it's the ultimate super-max for dark gods and immortals, with each inmate getting their own Crystal Prison, and it was built in both space and time (and, Bob — who's initially stumped by it and has to have it dumbed down significantly to get it, before dumbing it down further for Harry — implies, several dimensions beyond that), its defenses are so strong that once Harry works them out, he's pretty confident (but not totally certain) that he can take Mab while on the island, with a physical embodiment of it being theoretically capable of imprisoning her. Oh, and if it's ever broken open, it'll trigger 'the Banefire', an explosion that would apparently take out approximately half of the Mid-Western United States. This is justified: it's a prison so hard that six borderline Physical Gods are in minimum security, with seven apparently infinite tunnels full of dark gods and Eldritch Abominations.
- In The Eyes of Kid Midas by Shusterman Neal, Kevin creates a prison for the school bully full of fish. Fish being one of the few things that Kevin knows that the bully is afraid of.
- Fablehaven has several examples of this. One of the most unique examples is Olloch the Glutton — he isn't trapped anywhere, he's just Taken for Granite... until someone feeds him.
- Galaxy of Fear: Spore is harmless in the vacuum of space. It needs air to spread and bare skin to infect; being stored in a sealed room in a deep pit on an airless asteroid, with plenty of warnings outside of the door, is ideal. The Ithorians didn't kill it because of their dedication to pacifism. Unfortunately, in the three hundred years since the outbreak was contained, they started letting people mine the asteroids, even that asteroid. Partly this was out of the knowledge that if they said what Spore was, The Empire or others would try to use it, whereas if they just warned people away, it would just make treasure hunters more determined.
- In The Hour of the Dragon, Conan the Barbarian is thrown into a prison with a skeleton and taunted with the fact that only the slaves and their master know of it, and he will die there like the last one.
- Legacy of the Dragokin: Zarracka has a custom-made cell to negate her ice powers. It has successfully held her for ten years, and she never escapes from it. Her jailer, Daniar, was so paranoid about her breaking free while she was gone that she took Zarracka with her to another country, and she escaped from a weaker cell.
- In The Black Prism, the first book of The Light Bringer Trilogy, Gavin Guile creates a blue luxin prison with a hellstone floor. It's designed to hold a Prism, such as his brother. There's more cells beyond the first, each with the same design. Notably enough the difficulty of creating the prison is made explicit and the immense cost of the power nullifying hellstone is pointed out, offering an early hint that the prison's designer wasn't exactly sane.
- Lyonesse: In Suldrun's Garden (the first book), Aillas is lowered into an Oubliette ("a bell-shaped cell fourteen feet in diameter and seventy feet underground") for impregnating King Casmir's daughter and left to die. Aillas finds a dozen skeletons sitting around the oubliette, with a note scrawled on the wall welcoming him to their "council". Just before he figures a way out, he starts to hear them talking to him. Taking months, he constructs a ladder from the bones of the previous occupants, and escapes.
- In Myth-ing Persons, Aahz is imprisoned on Limbo in a special jail cell designed to hold vampire criminals. It's the mouth of an animated dragon's-head statue, which is mobile and aware enough to swallow a would-be escapee who tries to rip out its teeth/bars with vampiric strength, or inhale them if they turn into mist.
- In Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, the extremely powerful shapeshifter Chimera was kept in one. He's bound in shackles that will slice off his limbs and neck if he grows too big, and if he tries to shrink they'll electrocute him.
- The Spider-Man: Sinister Six Trilogy has Electro, who's first seen in a sealed plastic box suspended in water.
- Soon I Will Be Invincible: Deconstructed with Baron Ether, whom Dr. Impossible seeks advice from. His arch-nemesis The Mechanist has trapped him in a house designed specifically to hold him, but it does little to prevent others from breaking in to see him.
- Star Bridge has Vantee, aka "Prison Terminal". It's an inverse prison, in that the prisoners are free to roam the (barren) surface of the world, while the guards are locked inside a fortress with the Tube terminal, the only way on or off the planet. At one point after bragging of Lil's ability to break him free of any prison Wu says that Vantee could perhaps hold him... if they could keep him in custody long enough to get him there.
- Star Shards Chronicles: In Shattered Sky, Dillon Cole has the power to see patterns and create order from chaos. No ordinary prison could hold him — locks would spontaneously unlock themselves in his presence, guards would bow to his whim, and he could easily tap into the resonant frequency of a wall to tear it apart. The millionaire genius Elon Tessic manages to design a specialized prison that won't be affected by his powers. Naturally, Dillon, being a protagonist, manages to escape anyway.
- Digitized personalities run in virtual environments in Takeshi Kovacs are effectively immortal if their environment is not sophisticated enough to include death or the possibility of suicide. Someone running in a simple, low-power simulator could remain there for a very long time indeed, made worse by the fact that simulations run faster than normal time. Few hundred years of boredom sound like fun?
- Tortall Universe: In The Immortals and The Numair Chronicles, there are rooms in the Carthaki university and the palace that completely cancel out magic abilities from the Gift. Particularly unruly students are threatened with a stay in these rooms. In Emperor Mage, Daine is locked in one of those rooms by Emperor Ozorne. It ensures that the Tortallan mages can't find her... but does nothing whatsoever to cancel out her wild magic, allowing her to escape.
- In War of the Dreaming, Azrael de Gray's imprisonment in Dreamland takes the form of a cage made of inward-pointing, sharpened hooks, suspended on a mile-long chain off the rim of a Flat World. Food and water are provided by the cage's momentum swinging him periodically through the rim-waterfall. The Fae invented this type of prison specifically for him.
- The Will of the Empress has Sandry kidnapped by a man who intends to force her into marriage. He locks her in a prison made for tailors, that is, one that will hamstring her thread-based magic. It's described as "unraveling" whenever she tries using it. Fortunately, her link with her foster siblings is made up of all their magics, so she's still able to use it and get them to free her.
