Group seed: Regeneration Prison Solutions.

Regeneration Prison Solutions

This American private correctional company operates three facilities in the Midwest (two in Nebraska, and one in Iowa).  Each facility holds roughly six thousand inmates who have been convicted of a variety of violent and nonviolent crimes; Regeneration Prison Solutions has a mix of state and federal contracts, and does not favor one type over the other. Each facility has a special section for particularly dangerous individuals, but the vast majority of its inmates are in the general population.

RPS enjoys a good reputation with both law enforcement and prison reform groups: the company contracts at a reasonable rate and maintains excellent facilities.  Typical complaints about staffing and services are typically absent, and RPS is highly transparent about living conditions at its prisons. There are a number of work and training programs that pay its inmates considerably higher than the norm, and the prices for amenities and in-prison services are not artificially inflated. RPS inmates also have a growing reputation for being more likely to straighten out their lives after they get out of jail; the recidivism rate for that former RPS inmates is considerably lower than the average. So nobody wants to rock that boat.

Which is, of course, the idea.  RPS isn’t actually a correctional company; it’s a minion recruiting company. The reason why nobody notices is because it recruits minions for supervillains, mad scientists, criminal mobs, monster hunters, mercenaries, superscience acronym armies, scruffy revolutionaries, primary color tri-factions, dogged resistance forces, and magical cabalist crusades — and only those groups that do not operate in RPS’s home universe.  The “extra-dimensional only” rule is deliberate, and religiously adhered to: if the new minions go somewhere else, RPS reasons, RPS’s home universe’s law enforcement forces aren’t going to worry too much about how a lot of the company’s former inmates disappear for good a few weeks after they get released from jail.

A couple of things to remember: while RPS gets well-paid to supply recruits, they don’t actually sell them.  There’s some ultra-tech used to do the occasional short-term memory erasure when somebody refuses a job offer, but RPS prefers that its inmates sign up for their new lives willingly enough.  And those inmates generally do, since there’s a lot to be said about being set up in a new universe where you have no criminal record and no outstanding warrants. Couple that with a genuinely useful training program (heavily focused on mechanical and electronic repair), and many inmates find that getting into a RPS facility can set them up for life.

Especially since RPS is remarkably amoral about who they’ll recruit for. They don’t work with flat-out nihilist cultists, but if you’re a criminal mastermind who needs a new set of identically-dressed ground troops for your latest diabolical plot to take over the world, RPS will set you up.  As long as you pay up, too. RPS doesn’t give credit.  Not even to the do-gooder groups that use their services; oh, yes, RPS will recruit for those, too.  The inmates who want to go straight are sometimes even more enthusiastic than the ones who just like the idea of being goons with a laser gun. And everybody’s precious metal bars spend just the same, in the end.