The Great Tropical Brainstorm

[Uzumaki]

I often find myself in a situation where I want to bounce some ideas off a wall, or ask a bunch of random people a question, usually pertaining to something I'm writing. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. It would be nice to have a big giant thread that was like a communal brainstorm where people could just throw out ideas or questions and everyone just sort of runs with it. Oh shit, look, I just made one.

The rules:

1) Questions/ideas have to be related in some tangential way to a creative project; this isn't for asking dumb questions just to see how people answer.
2) Anyone is allowed to use any idea posited here for any dumb purpose they can conceive. Posting something here is giving tacit permission to anyone to use your idea in whole or part.
3) No judgements. The idea is to generate lots of ideas, not to evaluate or rank them. A good brainstorm is a safe space where people don't feel like they have to conform or even perform to participate. The ideas don't have to be interesting or good (although obviously those are preferred), they just have to be ideas.

So, to kick things off (hopefully):

I'm currently writing a short story and I'm trying to come up with a good location for a secret prison. Somewhere you're liable to find in the vicinity of a city or its outskirts but which is secluded enough that you could keep people there against their will with an entire elaborate boot-camp set up without people finding out (although said boot camp could be held inside). Also nobody involved is a millionaire, so you can't rent a private island or anything easy like that. It has to be something an average person (with perhaps good B&E skills) could get access to.

This is really starting to sound like I'm a crazy person and want advice on how to start a secret prison. I'm not that, but what reason do you have to believe me?

 

[hellbound]

Warehouses. Often located outside city limits, large indoor spaces, allows vehicles to come and go with hidden contents, and if it has a decent security fence and patrol that seems normal (asset protection). But anything large enough is going to cost a LOT if you're being realistic. Guards, large facility rental, money laundering to hide it (presumably if you can't get an island it's not government), etc. And sniper towers anywhere but an actual prison, a military base, or facility considered vital to national security is going to be questioned if normal people can see it.

Maybe portions could be a functioning warehouse with other portions kept closed and secure for imprisonment purposes? That would allow income and a means of laundering money.

 

[Yaks]

You could go the doomsday preppers route. They tend to buy large plots of land as a group, uninhabited, so there would be no reason for someone to go down the road and see what was going on. They're also great at being self sufficient, some of them, so they could even avoid having the electrical company coming out and snooping around. Some even build large fences around their mini compounds. Most of them aren't millionaires either, they've just been preparing for long periods of time. It wouldn't be hard to create small underground areas to hold prisoners either.

 

[Dark Mirror Hole]

An abandoned abattoir is an especially creepy location. I'm not entirely sure how to exactly turn it into a prison but it is possible.