I'm sure we all know the pain of doing a prison wide shakedown and having to wait FOREVER to finish searching the 4,000 places things hide. I most often get upset that if I'm limited in staff or things go awry, I'm under-staffed in that brief moment and someone always gets shanked. I do separate the cell blocks by 15-20 prisoners and can individually search cell blocks rather than a prison wide shakedown, but I'm just not satisfied.

In my larger prisoners I can end up putting too many prisoners at a disservice by removing all of my officers or putting too many people in solitary at once.

This made me think about introducing two types of new shakedowns: Random shakedowns where small #'s of cells are searched at random and K9 shakedowns strictly going based off smell for drugs/poisons, but aren't able to sniff out luxury items or tools.

My logic behind the random shakedown is that you're able to decide how large (what percentage) of cells are randomly searched by picking how many officers you want to free up for the task. The more officers you're willing to free up to search the larger proportion of the prison will be randomly searched for goods. This would ensure that a few officers aren't tied up for EXTENDED periods of time. Additionally, if you're operating a prison with different levels of contraband you'll likely have different levels of free/available police staff to suit the level of contraband influx and can match them. I have prisons with little to no contraband and don't need to send my few officers to search the entire prison.

The idea behind the K9 shakedown was to add some utility to K9 units as they are GREAT for sniffing things out as a more efficient means to locate contraband, but a smaller chance of catching everything. This will modify violence within a prison, but potentially not alter the rate of escape attempts.

TL;DR - Let me pick how many officers will randomly shakedown cells so I don't use my whole staff and let me use K9 units to sniff out drugs.