Skyrim Thieves Guild Part 1. The Thieves Guild is not the worst bit of writing in Skyrim. It’s unnecessarily terrible, failing at multiple levels and attempting things that aren’t even needed. Let’s start at the beginning. ![]() It’s not horrible or broken, but for the sake of setting this up I need to plod through these first few quests. Brynjolf walks up to me, a total stranger, and says, “You’ve never worked a day in your life for all that coin you’re carrying around.” This is a really screwy thing to say to an adventurer. It’s also odd because you can’t steal for a living until you join the guild, because you have no way to unload stolen goods. He’s implying you’re a thief, when by definition you can’t be one yet.
It’s also odd to be approached to join the Thieves Guild. I get that the guild has fallen on hard times, but this still feels awkward. Apparently Bethesda thought everyone was too stupid to to untangle the threads of this thuddingly obvious frame- up. When I rob the safe, I find a bill of sale inside. Dun dun dun! Yeah, not exactly a nail- biting moment. At this point I was already feeling a little underwhelmed. Believe it or not, the Internet did not give rise to procrastination. People have struggled with habitual hesitation going back to ancient civilizations. If one misguided lesson could be taken away from The Shawshank Redemption, it's that a prison term is not the end of the world for somebody aspiring to retire rich to. ![]() ![]() Someone is engaged in a plot to reduce the margins on mead production for the local crime- lord?!? It’s not theft. Heck, it’s not even illegal. This might work as some sort of “business tycoon” quest line, but for the Thieves Guild? Next I’m sent to see Maven. The quest line has been building her up, talking about how important she is to the guild and how she has half the city in her grip. Fine, except once this quest is over she never comes up again. I don’t mind if the game puts in interesting “flavor” characters, but Maven is cutthroat in a very bland way, she never seems terribly important, and she’s not at all imposing. Despite her build- up as some kind of crime boss, she comes across as a cranky dimwit. You don’t even meet her in an impressive office or estate. You meet her in an open hallway of the inn. Maven is a jerk to me, and then she sends me to see a guy named Mallus. He sends me to Honningbrew Meadery, which is is a mead distillery in the city of Whiterun. Okay, this is where the quest line starts to come apart. Anyway, the captain of the guard takes one sip, and then instantly arrests the owner of the place, promising that he will spend the rest of his life behind bars. I mean, I thought the point of the Thieves Guild was to act unseen, and to take valuables without hurting people. You can murder a civilian in broad daylight and allow the guard to take you to jail for a modest span of time. It’s a worse offense than murder, even though it might have been an accident or sabotage? And the Honningbrew owner never points the finger at me, the mysterious stranger who he recently allowed into the distillery? He pulled a fresh batch of mead from the vat and never saw fit to taste it himself first? Then the captain of the guard tells Mallus to take over, and Mallus tells me he’s going to start converting the distillery to make mead for Maven. Wha?? Look, if the health inspector shuts down your Mc. Donald’s, the police don’t come in and give the building to Burger King. Who owns this place? What’s happening here? I check the books, and find this place was cutting a deal with the same mystery person who bought Goldenglow. I bring this information back to Mercer Frey, and he’s very concerned. He says they’re obviously facing an organized and well- funded enemy. We just made a fortune. Whatever.) They bought the Goldenglow bee farm, but now they don’t have anywhere else to sell their honey. They spent a fortune, and have nothing. Just wait.) They tried to legitimately compete against deeply entrenched organized crime, and lost everything before they made a single shiny coin. How would making mead accomplish that? If a bunch of people conspire to control all the beer in the city, and then someone else tries to sell beer, the conspirators wouldn’t necessarily turn on each other. Remember that.) Now she’s back and? Or something. Karliah left a clue. Mercer believes that this can only mean one place: The ruin where she killed Gallus, the previous guild leader. Mercer decides to meet me there so that the two of us can kill her. Enjoyed this post? Please share! Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or Pay. Pal. Tagged: skyrim. Prison - Wikipedia. For the god in Iroquois mythology, see Gaol (god). For the Laurel and Hardy short film, see The Hoose- Gow. A prison, correctional facility, detention center. Prisons are most commonly used within a criminal justice system: people charged with crimes may be imprisoned until they are brought to trial; those pleading or being found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment. Besides their use for punishing crimes, jails and prisons are frequently used by authoritarian regimes against perceived opponents. The term prison or penitentiary is often used to describe institutions that incarcerate people for longer periods of time, such as many years, while jail is often used to describe institutions focused on confining people for shorter periods of time (e. Prisons often have facilities that are more designed with long term confinement in mind in comparison to jails. Prisons can be used as a tool of political repression to punish what are deemed political crimes, often without trial or other legal due process; this use is illegal under most forms of international law governing fair administration of justice. In times of war, prisoners of war or detainees may be detained in military prisons or prisoner of war camps, and large groups of civilians might be imprisoned in internment camps. Common slang terms for prison include: . Corresponding with the advent of the state was the development of written language, which enabled the creation of formalized legal codes as official guidelines for society. The best known of these early legal codes is the Code of Hammurabi, written in Babylon around 1. BC. The penalties for violations of the laws in Hammurabi's Code were almost exclusively centered on the concept of lex talionis (. This notion of punishment as vengeance or retaliation can also be found in many other legal codes from early civilizations, including the ancient Sumerian codes, the Indian. Manama Dharma Astra, the Hermes Trismegistus of Egypt, and the Israelite. Mosaic Law. Imprisonment as a penalty was used initially for those who could not afford to pay their fines. Eventually, since impoverished Athenians could not pay their fines, leading to indefinite periods of imprisonment, time limits were set instead. A variety of existing structures were used to house prisoners, such as metal cages, basements of public buildings, and quarries. One of the most notable Roman prisons was the Mamertine Prison, established around 6. B. C. The Mamertine Prison was located within a sewer system beneath ancient Rome and contained a large network of dungeons where prisoners were held in squalid conditions, contaminated with human waste. In many cases, citizens were sentenced to slavery, often in ergastula (a primitive form of prison where unruly slaves were chained to workbenches and performed hard labor). The possession of the right and the capability to imprison citizens, however, granted an air of legitimacy to officials at all levels of government, from kings to regional courts to city councils; and the ability to have someone imprisoned or killed served as a signifier of who in society possessed power or authority over others. Punishment usually consisted of physical forms of punishment, including capital punishment, mutilation, flagellation (whipping), branding, and non- physical punishments, such as public shaming rituals (like the stocks). These houses held mostly petty offenders, vagrants, and the disorderly local poor. In these facilities, inmates were given jobs, and through prison labor they were taught how to work for a living. By the end of the 1. Particularly under the Bloody Code, with few sentencing alternatives, imposition of the death penalty for petty crimes, such as theft, was proving increasingly unpopular with the public; many jurors were refusing to convict defendants of petty crimes when they knew the defendants would be sentenced to death. Rulers began looking for means to punish and control their subjects in a way that did not cause people to associate them with spectacles of tyrannical and sadistic violence. They developed systems of mass incarceration, often with hard labor, as a solution. The first was based in Enlightenment ideas of utilitarianism and rationalism, and suggested that prisons should simply be used as a more effective substitute for public corporal punishments such as whipping, hanging, etc. This theory, referred to as deterrence, claims that the primary purpose of prisons is to be so harsh and terrifying that they deter people from committing crimes out of fear of going to prison. The second theory, which saw prisons as a form of rehabilitation or moral reform, was based on religious ideas that equated crime with sin, and saw prisons as a place to instruct prisoners in Christian morality, obedience and proper behavior. These later reformers believed that prisons could be constructed as humane institutions of moral instruction, and that prisoners' behavior could be . The Transportation Act 1. The substantial expansion of transportation was the first major innovation in eighteenth- century British penal practice. While sentencing to transportation continued, the act instituted a punishment policy of hard labour instead. The suspension of transport also prompted the use of prisons for punishment and the initial start of a prison building program. The gaolers made their money by charging the inmates for food, drink, and other services, and the system was generally corruptible. It was the first facility to make any medical services available to prisoners. With the widely used alternative of penal transportation halted in the 1. Given the undeveloped institutional facilities, old sailing vessels, termed hulks, were the most readily available and expandable choice to be used as places of temporary confinement. The turn of the 1. Prison reform, and by the 1. France also sent criminals to overseas penal colonies, including Louisiana, in the early 1. Katorga prisons were harsh work camps established in the 1. Russia, in remote underpopulated areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East, that had few towns or food sources. Siberia quickly gained its fearful connotation of punishment. In the panopticon model, prisoners were housed in one- person cells arranged in a circular pattern, all facing towards a central observation tower in such a way that the guards could see into all of the cells from the observation tower, while the prisoners were unable to see the guards. He proposed wide- ranging reforms to the system, including the housing of each prisoner in a separate cell; the requirements that staff should be professional and paid by the government, that outside inspection of prisons should be imposed, and that prisoners should be provided with a healthy diet and reasonable living conditions. The prison reform charity, the Howard League for Penal Reform, was established in his honour. This introduced solitary confinement, religious instruction, a labor regime, and proposed two state penitentiaries (one for men and one for women). However, these were never built due to disagreements in the committee and pressures from wars with France, and gaols remained a local responsibility. But other measures passed in the next few years provided magistrates with the powers to implement many of these reforms, and eventually, in 1. Elizabeth Fry documented the conditions that prevailed at Newgate prison, where the ladies' section was overcrowded with women and children, some of whom had not even received a trial. The inmates did their own cooking and washing in the small cells in which they slept on straw. In 1. 81. 6, Fry was able to found a prison school for the children who were imprisoned with their parents. She also began a system of supervision and required the women to sew and to read the Bible. In 1. 81. 7, she helped found the Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate. Development of the modern prison. Bentham's panopticon introduced the principle of observation and control that underpins the design of the modern prison. The notion of prisoners being incarcerated as part of their punishment and not simply as a holding state until trial or hanging, was at the time revolutionary. His views influenced the establishment of the first prisons used as criminal rehabilitation centers. At a time when the implementation of capital punishment for a variety of relatively trivial offences was on the decline, the notion of incarceration as a form of punishment and correction held great appeal to reform- minded thinkers and politicians. In the first half of the 1. By 1. 82. 4, 5. 4 prisons had adopted the disciplinary system advocated by the SIPD. Pentonville prison opened in 1. Besides the economic benefits of providing a free source of hard labor, the proponents of the new penal code also thought that this would deter criminal activity by making a conspicuous public example of consequences of breaking the law. However, what actually ended up happening was frequent spectacles of disorderly conduct by the convict work crews, and the generation of sympathetic feelings from the citizens who witnessed the mistreatment of the convicts. The laws quickly drew criticism from a humanitarian perspective (as cruel, exploitative and degrading) and from a utilitarian perspective (as failing to deter crime and delegitimizing the state in the eyes of the public). Reformers such as Benjamin Rush came up with a solution that would enable the continued used of forced labor, while keeping disorderly conduct and abuse out of the eyes of the public. They suggested that prisoners be sent to secluded . This prison was modeled on what became known as the . The aim of this was rehabilitative: the reformers talked about the penitentiary serving as a model for the family and the school and almost all the states adopted the plan (though Pennsylvania went even further in separating prisoners).
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