I was rewatching parts of Andor the other day. (God this show is awesome.) Anyway, I was rewatching the prison episodes and I realize that I don’t quite understand the “prison transfer scam” the Empire is supposed to be running.
Basically, we learn that the Empire discreetly murders an entire floor of prisoners because one prisoner from elsewhere was accidentally transferred there after serving out their full prison sentence. The idea is that, unbeknownst to the inmates, their prison sentences never really end. When a prisoner finishes serving their sentence, that prisoner is simply transferred elsewhere and begins serving a new sentence. Presumably this repeats until the prisoner dies, meaning that nobody ever gets out. But the Empire doesn’t want the general prison population to know about this (fearing the prisoners would lose motivation to work I guess) which is why the Empire decides to murder an entire floor of prisoners to prevent this information from leaking out.
Okay, maybe I’m an idiot, but I don’t really understand how this “prison transfer scheme” is supposed to work in general. So a prisoner finishes their sentence and then, instead of being released, is transferred to a second prison (or maybe a different floor of the same prison). But what prevents the transferred prisoner from telling the inmates in the second prison the truth? Maybe all the inmates in the second prison were also transferred there after serving out a sentence, and thus they all already know about the “transfer scam”? But if that’s the case, how does the Empire induce people in this “second prison” (where everyone knows they have no hope of ever getting out) to continue working? Maybe people in the “second prison” are not forced to work anymore? But if that’s the case, what’s the point of this whole “scam” in the first place? It costs the Empire money to house and feed prisoners, and if a prisoner isn’t working on building a Death Star or whatever the Empire is just wasting money keeping them confined for no reason. The Empire may as well just release the prisoners if they’re no longer working and they already served their sentence.
So can anyone clarify exactly how the Empire’s “prison transfer scam” is supposed to work?